OpenOffice has been an open-source project for nearly six years now, and the project has grown and matured considerably during that time. Originally based on the code from StarOffice, a creaky cross-platform suite available for OS/2, Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, and Linux from a company called Star Division, the program received a tremendous amount of support from the OSS community. While progress was slow—Sun, who had purchased Star Division in 1999, opened the source in mid-2000, yet it did not get to version 1.0 until two years later—it continued to improve. Version 2.0, which was released late last year, received favorable reviews.

Now, a group of OpenOffice enthusiasts have released OpenOffice Premium, a new bundle that includes the OpenOffice suite and a grab-bag of extras, such as clip art, document templates, and fonts. The idea is to provide a package that is similar to a new installation of commercial office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel Perfect Office, both of which come with a plethora of clip art and other goodies.

The choice of the word "Premium" for this bundle is somewhat misleading, as the package is available as a free download. Like many SourceForge web pages, the download page is more confusing than it could be, but I quickly found an international version of the bundle that came in at 243 MB. The full install is 441 MB, which is about twice the size of my install of Microsoft Office XP. This rough doubling of system requirements carries over to RAM usage as well: with the same document open, OpenOffice Writer used up 50 MB of memory, compared to 22 for Word.

OpenOffice 2.0 is much improved over 1.1, but there are still some rough edges. The included clip art contains "more than 2,800 objects" according to the ReadMe file, although many of the vector images are rather simplistic. The clip art browser opens as a handy tab at the top of the document with the click of a button. In an interesting but relatively harmless bug, if you subsequently open a new OpenOffice program—even something totally unrelated such as the Calc spreadsheet—the clip art browser will still be visible. You can drag and drop images from the browser directly into your document, however, another bug prevents image resizing until the image has been moved.

The new document templates are useful, and save considerable amounts of time when creating new fax covers, invoices, and other business documents. Some of the templates are plain, others rather garish, and there are some spelling errors in a few of them, so it pays to be careful when using a new one. Interestingly, templates that contain macros prompt a security warning, addressing a specific criticism that Microsoft had of the office suite.





Of the five applications included in the OO.o suite, the Writer word processor is probably the most polished. It bears more than a striking resemblance to Word (I lined up the toolbars for each and they were a nearly perfect match) and opens most Word documents without issues. Calc, the spreadsheet, is much weaker. It lacks many of Excel's features and did a poor job of importing my existing documents, changing colors, losing font information, and in many cases even losing the information in the graph's X axis. The vector drawing program, Draw, is a bit like Corel Draw without the features, and doesn't come close to something like Illustrator. The presentation program, Impress, has the basic features of PowerPoint and imports most existing presentations without any major issues. The database, Base, is the newest and also the weakest of the bunch. In testing I experienced very poor performance and inexplicable errors.

Many people will look at criticisms of the OpenOffice suite and try to deflect them with the comment that OO.o is free and to assemble a competing set of commercial programs could cost hundreds of dollars. This is a valid point, although for many people the extra features and lack of document conversion issues are worth the cost of proprietary software. For users with basic needs, however, the "Premium" version of OpenOffice is an inexpensive way to get through their work. I have already seen OpenOffice start to appear in price-sensitive environments, such as library workstations. For OO.o to gain traction in the business world, however, it will have to deliver more than it has already.