UnoOffice

A word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation designer, built into UnoDOS. They read and write the real Office file formats, old and new, so a document written here opens on a PC.

UnoOffice is three apps - UnoWord, UnoCalc and UnoShow - sharing one look and one set of habits. If you have used a mid-1990s office suite you already know where everything is: a menu bar, docked toolbars you can drag off into floating palettes, a status bar along the bottom, and the same Ctrl+N/O/S shortcuts throughout.

Open any of them from the Start menu or its desktop icon. Each is a .UNO file in the APPS folder, loaded the first time you open it.

UnoWord

A word processor with real page layout: it paginates, shows a ruler with indent markers, and tracks where you are (Page 1 Sec 1, Ln 1 Col 30) in the status bar. Text can be bold, italic or underlined, in a choice of faces and sizes, and paragraphs can be left, centred, right or justified.

UnoCalc

A spreadsheet with a real calculation engine, not a grid of text. Type numbers into cells, type a formula beginning with =, and the result appears in the cell while the formula stays attached to it. Three sheets come with a new workbook, and the status bar keeps a running Sum of the selection.

Move around with the arrow keys, a page at a time with PgUp/PgDn, to the start of the row with Home and to the far corners with Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End. Enter commits a cell and steps down, Tab commits and steps right; either way what you were typing is kept, so arrowing out of a half-typed cell stores it rather than throwing it away.

UnoShow

A presentation designer: slides with title and body placeholders, an outline to structure them, speaker notes, and a full-screen slide show driven from the keyboard.

Real file formats

The suite reads and writes the real Office formats themselves, through UnoDOS's own unodoc library. Nothing is converted to a private format on the way in or out, so a file written on the machine opens on a PC and a file from a PC opens here.

You do not choose a format when you start a document, only when you save it: type the extension you want in the Save dialog, or leave the name bare and let the Files of type menu supply one. Opening works the other way round - the file is identified by its contents rather than its name, so a .xlsx that somebody renamed .xls still opens correctly.

Save and open through the suite's file dialog onto any writable volume, exactly as the Editor and Files do. In the Open dialog you can either click a file in the list or type its name in the File name box.