A suite that has been around for twenty years, at no charge

Apache OpenOffice is one of the fixtures of office software. Its line goes back more than twenty years, to the point where the whole shape of six pieces was already settled: text, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, database and formula. It later became a well-known open source project under the Apache Software Foundation, published under the Apache 2.0 licence, free for anyone to use, with no licence fee and no half of the functions kept back for people who pay. As of September 2026 the counter on the official page stands above 330 million downloads, and the current release, 4.1.16, arrived in November 2025.

Six components, and the working day is covered

Writer takes the text. Styles, tables of contents, comments and mail merge are all in place, and a long document with heavy formatting still holds together. Calc is the spreadsheet, and its functions, pivot summaries and charts are enough for everyday counting and reporting. Impress builds presentations, and the templates that come with it get a set of slides out quickly. Beside those three sit Draw for vector work, Base for databases and Math for formulas, and the pieces talk to each other: a table can go into a document and stay linked to its source, and a presentation can carry a calculated result inside it. Install the one package and the chain of daily work no longer has to be patched together from three separate tools that each do one thing.

The open document format underneath it

The format it pushes, ODF, is an international standard, and any software that supports it can open the files this suite writes. That matters less on the day of writing than on the day, several years later, when the document still has to be read: nothing is held hostage to the private layout of one maker. Reading and writing the ordinary office formats keeps improving as well, so passing files to a colleague is good enough in practice. Languages are the other old strength. The interface and the spelling dictionaries cover more than a hundred of them around the world, and Chinese users are not left on the outside of that.

Several systems, room to extend, built by a community

Official packages exist for Windows, macOS and Linux, the demands on hardware are modest, and an old computer still runs it without complaint. That is not a small thing in a school or a small office: the machines were bought years ago and are not going to be replaced, and opening a spreadsheet, finishing a set of slides or writing a notice does not need the newest hardware to be possible. Extension and template libraries add functions and material for whoever wants them, brought in on demand rather than carried by default. As a community project its development, its translation and its documentation are all done by volunteers around the world, and when something goes wrong the help files and the forum threads are thick on the ground. The rhythm of releases is slow, and that is the trade: what comes back instead is stability, an open format and no licensing weight at all.

Who should keep it on the list

If the work is mostly the old trio of documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and paying for it is not on the table, this classic set still earns its place on a freshly set up machine. It asks for no account, no subscription and no key, and the files it writes are readable by anything that honours the same open standard, which means the decision can be reversed later without losing the archive. What it does not offer is a fast stream of new features, and anyone who needs the newest layout tricks of commercial suites will feel that. For the rest, the six pieces have been sitting there for two decades, and they still open.