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In MS Word you have the full capability of the computer when it comes to choosing or creating colors. You can select and customize colors for both drawing and text. In Open Office you have a limited palette with no custom color capabilities.

Line highlight
This is a very basic function that I missed right away in Open Office. In MS Word, if you click at the beginning or end of a line, the whole line will highlight, allowing you to cut, delete, modify, past or many other options. With OO, you must click and drag the cursor over the full length of the line in order to highlight it. This is interesting, since if you want to highlight a paragraph, you simply click at the beginning and drag to downward, and the whole paragraph is highlighted.

Fonts Listing
I noticed quickly that the Fonts listing is less clear in its display of the available fonts. They are sketchy and unclear. I also noticed that OO does not keep a list of the fonts you have selected for the current document. Word does this, which is very handy when you need to duplicate different fonts throughout the document. OO instead, defaults the list to the point of the last font used. This is nice, but forces you to have to look for other fonts you may have used.

The format paragraph function seems to be very similar. It's close enough that I would probably not notice the difference for day to day Word Processing.

Standard Menu Bar Tools
I was happy to see that many of the tools I would expect, are still in the tool bar. Things like font color, color highlighting, paragraph indent, bullets Table functions. I have noted the lack of a column icon. It could be that I just haven't found it yet. Most people probably don't use it, but I actually do.

Bold, Italic and Underline are normal. Font selection and size are normal, and the ability to use pre-defined text types [Header, Body Tex etc] are there.

Auto Correction and Auto Insert
OO's think ahead capability is interesting. For some words, it seems to know where I am going with it and tries to fill in the whole word for me. I have seen this in Microsoft products, but they usually depend on words I have typed before, OO seems to have a different criteria.

A number of the key stroke shortcuts that I use in Word also work in Open Office. For example. I often use the ALT-F-S sequence to save my documents as I work. This allows me to save without having to make a brain side shift to the mouse. The shift, arrow functions work too. Allowing highlighting using the keys as well

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