These filters aren't perfect, however. While considerable time and effort has been put into making Visual Basic macros work identically in OpenOffice.org as they do in Office, there isn't 100% compatibility yet; the DOCX importers do a decent job of importing, but font and layout problems aren't unheard of.

Integration issues

More importantly, since Office's and OpenOffice.org's feature sets aren't identical, there are problems when OpenOffice.org tries to open a file that has Office-only functions.

In particular, while OpenOffice.org does have some collaboration functions – Calc now has sharing features that enable others to work on a workbook while you're working on it – none of the OpenOffice.org programs support the commenting and change-tracking of Office.

So when you open an Office 2008 file in OpenOffice.org that contains changes, the comments, changes and original work all end up visible in the document. For more basic, day-to-day work, however, the compatibility is impressive and usually 100%.

Indeed, Visual Basic macros may have stopped working in Office 2008, thanks to Microsoft's decision not to port Visual Basic over to Intel on the Mac, but OpenOffice.org carries most macros forward pretty seamlessly and there are some big corporate players such as Novell working on improving compatibility even further – shame Microsoft can't do the same for its own software.

Software improvements

There are other areas where OpenOffice.org exceeds MS Office. Excel may have lost its 'solver' in Office 2008, but OpenOffice.org now has a solver component that can calculate optimisation problems where the best value of a particular spreadsheet cell has to be calculated based on constraints in other cells.

OpenOffice.org also, of course, includes both a graphics package and a database package, neither of which are available in Office for Mac, and do a pretty good job.

Like most open source projects, OpenOffice.org updates frequently and often, so version 3.0 isn't as laden with new features as a commercial 3.0 would be. The list of new features is reasonable though, particularly if you add in some of the functions available from previous .x upgrades since 2.0, such as support for PDF/A and a new charting component.

In Calc, it's now possible to draw error bars based on ranges provided in spreadsheet cells. Impress supports native table editing, rather than embedded Calc objects, and the crop function in Impress and Draw works like other programs'.

Budget option

For anyone who can't afford MS Office or has an MS grudge, OpenOffice.org is fantastic. It's free, does the majority of things that MS Office can do as well as a multitude of things it can't, and is reasonably compatible with it as well.

It's still a little raw and some of its functions are unintuitive or hard to find, but for anyone needing a proper office package, OpenOffice.org is more than up to the job.