Microsoft Office 2010 takes on all comers

Microsoft Office 2010 takes on all comers: OpenOffice.org 3.3.0
OpenOffice.org has long been a commonly suggested replacement for Microsoft Office. It offers several common office-suite features at a much lower price — free — than Microsoft Office itself, although many of those individual features don’t have the level of polish or advancement found in commercial office-suite products. That said, for people who don’t need the absolute latest and greatest functionality in every category, OpenOffice.org is a solid piece of software. (In the interest of full disclosure, again, I admit I have been frustrated by its limitations, but I can recognize that for many other people it will more than do the job.)

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Don’t be thrown off if you come to OpenOffice.org from the Microsoft Office side. The program’s UI is very vintage 2003 — dockable toolbars instead of the newer ribbon/tab metaphors that are now all the rage. That said, future versions of OpenOffice.org may sport a more modern look, although this is still very much under wraps — nothing more than mock-up designs of such a UI have surfaced yet.
Office suites file format compatibility and other features
Office Open XML    Office legacy format    ODF     Spelling and grammar checking    PDF export     HTML export    VBA macro support
Microsoft Office 2010    Native format    Excellent    Good    Excellent     Good     Very good     Native
OpenOffice 3.3.0    Good    Excellent    Native format    Fair     Excellent     Good     Limited
LibreOffice 3.3.1    Good    Excellent    Native format    Fair     Excellent     Good     Limited
IBM Lotus Symphony 3.0    Good    Excellent    Native format    Fair     Excellent     Poor (conversion by plug-in only)     Limited
SoftMaker Office 2010    Excellent    Excellent    Excellent    Good     Very good     Good     VBA-like scripting language
Corel WordPerfect Office X5    Fair (.docx only)    Good    Fair (.dot only)    Good     Very good     Excellent     None
Google Docs    Very good    Excellent    Excellent    Fair     Excellent     Excellent     None