David Johnston of RealTechNews writes:

OpenOffice Premium is a modified version of the popular, Open Source OpenOffice.org software suite. The original OpenOffice suite aims to compete with Microsoft Office, and I believe it does a pretty good job for most home users and students. Premium aims to give OpenOffice a further edge in its competition with MS Office by adding additional fonts, clip art, and document templates to the standard program. The changes are by no means revolutionary, but they do help the OpenOffice suite to appear more polished. I found the most useful addition to be the extra fonts which add some spice to the font selection. The additional document templates are a nice idea, but I found them not to be very useful and still not as numerous as those available in Office 2003 (or easily available on Microsoft’s Web site via links from within the Office 2003 software). They also didn’t strike me as being as professional-looking as Microsoft’s template offerings. I was pleasantly surprised by the good selection of clip art, which I felt was much better than Microsoft’s. OpenOffice Premium includes many more modern clip art pictures and images that could actually be useful to someone, such as a collection of country flags. This may be more important to other people, but I don’t think I’ve actually used clip art in a document since Office 97 was the latest and greatest.

Overall, I was slightly underwhelmed by the added features in OpenOffice Premium. That doesn’t mean it’s not good software. I was just not impressed by the additions, though they did nothing to detract from the great program which was already there. If you like to play with different fonts or are a clip art junkie, OpenOffice Premium might be right for you. You also can’t go wrong for the price: OpenOffice Premium is still free just like regular OpenOffice. Also, if you’re a student or home user who’d rather not pay a couple hundred dollars just to write letters or papers, it would be well worth your time to download OpenOffice (Premium) before putting down the money for one of its more expensive competitors.

Thanks to ArsTechnica for the heads-up on OpenOffice Premium.

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