Writer is a full-featured word processor. The powerful Navigator and Stylist tools make changing the formatting throughout a document a simple task.

Calc provides full spreadsheet functionality incl. a huge number of statistical and scientific functions, pivot tables and charts.

Impress is a full-featured presentation tool that allows to create and modify diagrams and pictures right within the application.

Draw is a drawing tool that supports both vector and bitmap images. The powerful Connectors allow to easily complex diagrams and org charts.

With the database, users can easily access and analyze data, create complex reports or do a mail merge based on a customer database. Many open source and commercial database systems are supported.

Open Office is able to read and write Microsoft Office® files. This allows users to open and save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on their preferred platform incl. Windows®, Linux and Solaris.

Open Office introduces the one-click PDF export feature that enables you to easily create PDF files without the need for any additional third party software. This feature makes exchanging documents in a standard "read-only" file format a trivial task. The creation of PDF files normally requires relatively expensive third party add-on tools. With Open Office this feature comes for free.

Open Office now can export presentations and drawings to the Macromedia Flash format (.swf). Thus, it's now possible to view presentations in a simple web browser that has the Flash plug-in installed. Recipients and users of Flash presentations don't have to install a special viewer anymore in order to view a presentation.

Open Office can now be used by handicapped people - for example people with sight problems. Open Office provides a high contrast mode, and together with additional tools (see http://www.sun.com/access/) it's even possible to use special entry devices.

Open Office introduces functionality like bi-directional and vertical writing that is required for many native languages. This allows Open Office to be translated into Japanese, Hebrew and many other languages that have sophisticated text layout requirements. In addition the Open Office project has an increasing number of native-language projects where users can access Open Office information in their native language.

The default file format in Open Office is an open XML file format defined in a 500-page specification document. Every Open Office file is a ZIP archive containing separate XML files for the content, styles, settings and meta data. OASIS is using the Open Office file format as the basis for the creation of a industry wide standard for an open office document file format. For ordinary end users this means that the content of documents can still be accessed and used even if Open Office would go away.

Since the StarOffice 7[tm] Office Suite is based on Open Office both application suites are API and file format compatible.

The new macro recorder records and automates recurring tasks. For more sophisticated programming tasks the Open Office Software Development Kit (SDK) can be used. The SDK provides libraries, tools and documentation for the Java programming language, C++, Basic, OLE and XML. The SDK is a separate download.

The new add-on framework and the new deployment tool (the "pkgchk" utility) allow developers to easily include new components and 3rd party add-ons into an existing Open Office installation.

The new XML file filter tool makes it easy to integrate new import or export file filters that are based on XSL transformations. A popular use case for the XML filter tool is the support for the new Microsoft Office® 2003 XML file formats.

Open Office comes with an ActiveX control that allows users to view Open Office documents within a browser window (Internet Explorer) on the Windows platform. The ActiveX control can also be used within native applications developed in Microsoft® VisualBasic or Borland Delphi.

Open Office allows users to export Open Office documents to popular file formats like DocBook or various small device file formats like AportisDoc. This gives users the possibility to carry their documents with them on their Palm Pilots and Pocket PC PDA's.

Open Office now has support for MySQL databases, i.e. the open source database can be used for mail merge activities and the creation of reports.

Note: This download contains Open Source software. This item is in full compliance with the GPL License agreement and we are authorized to distribute this software and its contents. This download can be freely installed on as many systems as you wish as long as the (GNU) General Public License is followed and agreed upon. This is not a boot limited, OEM, shareware, bootleg or trial version. This software is not made by Microsoft.