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It's hard not to feel a little smug. We're looking at a crisp, colorful Adobe Acrobat PDF document, created from one of the PowerPoint templates on the Microsoft Office Template Gallery site. But we didn't use the $399 Office to open and edit the template, nor to create the PDF (despite PDF's popularity, neither today's Office XP nor tomorrow's Office 2003 can save or export Acrobat files). We used the latest release of the Microsoft-file-compatible, cross-platform, open-source OpenOffice.org suite. We paid $0.

As we wrote in our May 2002 review of version 1.0, OpenOffice.org is the most formidable challenge to Microsoft's desktop-productivity headlock, even more than Corel's excellent WordPerfect Office: a word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing quartet that offers impressive (if imperfect) loading, saving, and sharing of files with colleagues using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; a tolerably short transition or learning curve for Office converts; and availability of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS versions, all free to distribute and free for programmers to poke around with the source code, as long as they pass along any improvements to the global OpenOffice.org community.

And the first batch of said improvements is on display now in OpenOffice.org 1.1 (technically between beta and final status as version 1.1 Release Candidate 2). They range from the abovementioned PDF export to quicker loading, a macro recorder, and assorted Office compatibility enhancements, and they make OpenOffice.org an even higher-priority download (62MB) for anyone considering or budgeting a Microsoft Office upgrade.

The Missing PIM

As in version 1.0, the inclusion of a 2D/3D drawing program (which overlaps Impress, the OpenOffice.org presentation package) is a plus — with its flexible shapes, lines, and arrows, it's even an alternative to Microsoft Visio for business graphics such as org charts, though the supplied Gallery or clip-art library lacks flow-chart symbols.

On the other hand, OpenOffice.org still has no e-mail/calendar/contacts module, so businesses that take the plunge will still need to deploy Microsoft Outlook, Novell GroupWise, or another component. (The OpenOffice.org project recently acquired a sibling, OpenGroupware.org, but the latter's target is the Exchange server, not Outlook client. It'd be swell if Novell, which today acquired the Linux developer Ximian, would release an open-source Windows version of the latter's Outlook imitator, Evolution, but we suspect we'll have to wait for Mitchell Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation to ship its much-anticipated "Chandler," currently in a mostly vaporous release 0.1.)

Aside from that giant gap, however, switching from Office to OOo (the chic geek abbreviation) may take everyday users only a few hours, give or take a couple of days to learn slightly different keystrokes or relocated toolbar icons. You can either use familiar Open and Save As dialog boxes to edit and resave Brand M documents, or take advantage of one of the suite's AutoPilot wizards — most help you create new documents from various templates, but another provides a handy batch converter for Microsoft Office documents with log file or status report after the conversion's done.

We were mystified by one PowerPoint file that crashed OOo every time we tried to load it, but otherwise batted at least .900 in loading documents and templates as long as we steered clear of Office files with embedded macros. Word letter templates with "Click here and type name" obliged us to press the Delete key instead of simply typing over the shaded field; no big deal. Excel charts looked fine. A Word 2002 file we use to test would-be challengers' compatibility arrived complete with styles, footnotes, tables, footnotes within tables, columns, text wrap around images, you name it. OOo even read a two-column RTF file created with Atlantis Ocean Mind which Word renders as one column.

Instead of rabidly guarded, regularly changed proprietary formats, OpenOffice.org saves documents in an XML format that's not only easily portable but helps save disk space. A 312K Word document with lots of graphics and headlines shrank to 260K as an OpenOffice.org word processing file, while a simple Excel worksheet shrank from 53K to 22K on disk and a Word phone list dwindled from 485K to just 36K.