Looking at the individual OOo applications, Writer is a full-featured word processor with everything from tables, columns, and footnotes to a math equation editor and index and table of contents generator. Once we used the Tools/Configure dialog to redefine a couple of keystrokes for our Microsoft Word habits (F12 for Save As, Ctrl-Y Redo to match Ctrl-Z Undo), we were writing and editing at top speed, although we missed the ability to double-click in the margin to select a paragraph.
OOo's thesaurus (an open-source substitute for the commercial one in StarOffice 6.0) is the lamest we've seen, lumping together dozens of often-inappropriate choices for different meanings of the selected word. But its on-the-fly spell checking and automatic correction of typos or expansion of abbreviations are terrific. In fact, not only can Writer automatically convert straight to curly quotation marks, but it can hasten slow typists by learning the words you use and popping up suggestions to finish a word (say, OpenOffice.org) as you start typing it (Ope); you can press Enter to accept the suggestion or ignore it and keep typing normally.
The Calc spreadsheet supports up to 256 worksheets per file, with all the fancy functions and auto-sum or -format shortcuts you'd expect, conditional formatting, and even goal-seeking and DataPilot (akin to Excel's pivot tables) functions for power users.
Like the other applications, it's graced with a pop-up "stylist" menu to speed formatting jobs by applying and editing styles and a pop-up "navigator" for quickly jumping to different elements of a document (such as text frames and graphics in a Writer file, or range names and notes in a worksheet). These tools seem friendlier and helpfuller than their ancestors in StarOffice 5.2, though fans of that leviathan can still devote half their screen to a "gallery" or Windows Explorer-like thumbnail catalog of clip-art images, sound effects, or other importable objects.
The presentation program, Impress, is a worthy PowerPoint alternative, with a full array of transition effects (organized on classy diagram menus) and speaker-notes, handout, and HTML export options. Once you learn to head for the top right instead of lower left for the icons that switch among slide-editing and -sorting, outline, handout, and notes views, you'll feel right at home, although we didn't find Impress as intuitive as PowerPoint for switching to and editing the slide master or common background. But while weaker on hand-holding for beginners (a general OpenOffice.org shortcoming, despite a handful of "AutoPilot" wizards that get you started with document templates), Impress lets advanced users tailor transitions and multimedia effects to their hearts' content.
Impress overlaps with the suite's Draw module, which supplies a good basic toolkit of vector graphics functions including both 2D lines, boxes, and ellipses and 3D cubes, spheres, cones, and doughnuts (okay, toruses). You won't find prefab org-chart symbols, but there's a variety of lines and arrows to connect objects, as well as support for text frames and animation objects.
