Washington Post reviews OpenOffice
OpenOffice can do just about anything that Microsoft Office can at home, and with no more difficulty. But that’s not enough: OpenOffice, more so than most other programs competing with what comes out of Redmond, has to live in a Microsoft world. It can’t just function on its own, but it also has to read and write Microsoft’s closed, proprietary formats. That’s a challenge OpenOffice can usually meet. Among dozens of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files fed to OpenOffice, most looked the same as they did in Microsoft Office, down to footnotes, custom bullet points, reviewers’ comments and change-tracking marks. A few exhibited only picayune differences, such as lines of text breaking at different points.
They do provide a fair warning that OpenOffice-created documents saved into Microsoft formats are sometimes mangled badly, when the recipient opens them up in Microsoft applications.
One thing that was omitted by the reviewer, but perhaps should be brought up is the lack of international version availability of Microsoft Office. Go ahead and try to buy a Russian edition of Microsoft Office, a product thats freely available in Russia or Ukraine, and that has integrated Russian and Ukrainian spellchecking support. The trick is - you can’t. Microsoft, a symbol of commercial software world, is out there helpless when you get your wallet and are ready to punch in those numbers for the Russian edition. They simply cannot sell you that, I was told, for licensing reasons.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, includes great internationalization support right out of the box. Not as good as AbiWord, which allows downloadable packs of spellcheckers the first time the installer runs, but still pretty good. They even maintain a list of international versions of OpenOffice.