The interfaces are the same rather cluttered collection of menus and multiple toolbars as OpenOffice 3.3 (which look somewhat dated but take up a little less space on screen than the expanded ribbon in Office 2013 programs), plus the 'new' sidebar. You may see the OpenOffice interface as more cluttered than Office 2013 or prefer that it puts more on display They have broadly similar features to the Office equivalents of a few years back, with some decent business tools: macros and pivot tables in Calc, tables, DTP tools and comments in Writer, and master pages and presentation tools in Impress.īut you don't get clever features like suggestions of the best chart for presenting data, as with Excel, or the ability to search and place images from the web straight into a presentation, as with PowerPoint. OpenOffice 4.0 has five main programs Writer, the Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation software, Base and Draw, plus Math, a formula editor. And if you want to use Base database software on Windows, you'll need to install Java yourself again, something we'd expect the installer to do.

You can choose which programs to install (though there are few other options), which makes this like most other modern software packages.īut it's disappointing to see it flagged as insecure by Microsoft's SmartScreen and Apple's Gatekeeper because it's not properly signed when security is so important that's something no professional software should do.

OpenOffice 4.0 has a single installer that adds most of the Windows components you need and walks you through making it the default software for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Installing OpenOffice used to require the painstaking gathering of installer files, dictionaries, help content and add-ons by hand.

OpenOffice 4 has a single installer, although it doesn't install Java correctly on Windows and will show up as not coming from a known developer

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