Photos: Native Aqua OpenOffice on Mac

The Aqua version of OpenOffice is around 130MB

The installation process is pretty straight forward for an alpha release with no hic-ups.

The wizard installation is straight forward and users of OpenOffice will see it is exactly the same as Windows and Linux versions of the office suite

The first thing users will see when installing the Aqua version of OpenOffice is that the Dock doesn't load X11.

Once installed the Aqua native version of OpenOffice loaded faster than other versions of OpenOffice tested on the same Mac.

The Writer interface. The simple word processor is easy on the eye worked well for an Alpha Release.

Calc is the OpenOffice equivalent of Microsoft's Excel. The basic functionality of spreadsheets worked fine during our tests but you might be wary of complex spreadsheets written in Excel from the finance department.

The OpenOffice wizard for Presentation has similar functionality to PowerPoint and Apple's Keynote.

As the name suggests, OpenOffice's Database is a database. The functionality is basic but will do most of your office database needs, though you don't want this to be a proper server-side SQL database replacement.

Draw is the basic illustration tool included in OpenOffice. We found we could create some basic publishing documents just fine in the Alpha. Printing was another story -- but this is just a preview release.

The Web wizard is a neat little feature for budding Web designers or developers. The use is pretty straight forward and flexible. As OpenOffice documents can be exported to XHTML documents converting documents to the Web is much easier than Microsoft's Office suite