Head to Head: Microsoft Office 2010 vs Open Office 3.3

As with the changes to the suite as a whole, the new features in Writer were all relatively minor: nice to have, certainly but nothing ground breaking.

Writer is a perfectly capable word processor. With it, you can type a document, spell-check it, create forms and tables, and add relatively fancy formatting. Writer even has some impressively advanced features, such as a clickable document navigation window, allowing you to click from one section of your document to the next.

As with the changes to the suite as a whole, the new features in Writer were all relatively minor: nice to have, certainly but nothing ground breaking. We prefer Microsoft's tabbed interface, but having said that Writer will do everything that most users want it to, it's easy to use and it's free!

Winner: OpenOffice Writer Writer isn't quite as good as Word, but it's not bad and, again, it is free. If you miss Word 2003, don't like Microsoft's new Ribbon interface or you just don't want to pay 70 for Microsoft Word, then download it now.