Head to Head: Office 2010 vs Open Office 3.1

Other new features include the Paste preview' function and a much more polished version of its Web Apps service, offering users an extensive set of editing features on the road, via their web browser. So if your laptop breaks and you're stuck away from the office, you can use any internet caf to polish up that presentation or amend that spreadsheet. We feel these features are a great pitching point for Microsoft as they mark something of a confident stride towards the cloud, something business users are coming to rely on more and more.

Open Office, however, remains the basic, uncluttered suite of applications that it's always been. That said, this mustn't been seen as huge downside, as most users will be able to achieve what they need to with what's on offer. A noteworthy feature is Open Office's subscription to the International Organisation for Standardisation, which ensures its ability to read and write in other formats. Naturally this includes Microsoft's.

Whilst the omission of certain advanced features sets Open Office a few paces behind it needn't put off small business users, as the suite is readily available and can be installed very quickly on any broadband-enabled workstation. So being out of the office needn't affect your productivity with either offering.

Winner: Microsoft Office 2010 Although some may fail to see past the glamour and glitz, Office 2010 is a solidly built suite offering the modern business everything it needs in terms of functionality. It's a close call though and we fully expect Open Office to make more of a play for this title when future versions arrive with enhanced features.

Performance

We found both suites to be fairly resource friendly, surprisingly though Open Office weighed in with a heavier CPU footprint. For something lighter on features, this wasn't a welcome surprise.

We tested both suites on a machine running Windows 7 x64, with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 and 4GB of RAM.