A mobile office without a laptop? No problem – a new generation of web applications converts your browser into a word processor or spreadsheet.

If OpenOffice is too fat and feature-rich for your taste, try one of the office alternatives. We found much to like and much to wish for when we put six office suites to the test.

What happens when you feed an ODT document created with OpenOffice to a word processor like AbiWord, KWord, or Writely? Read on to find out.

With a little help from the ODF plugin, Microsoft Office can open up documents saved in the free Open Document format. A short test reveals just how well it works.

Using drawing tools to manually create graphs and diagrams can be a slow and convoluted process. The Graphviz toolbox offers a faster way. Based on a short text with the information for the graph, Graphviz quickly generates a neat drawing.

Linux has had the ability to display PDF documents for many years, but it lacked an editing tool until now: enter Cabaret Stage.

If you need to lay out a text document, you can opt for a WYSIWYG application, like OpenOffice, or a genuine layout system such as TeX. TeXmacs combines the advantages of both approaches: premium document quality and intuitive controls.

More is not always better, especially at the command line. Lean text editors such as nano, JOE, and ee fit Linux novices and experts alike.