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 - the Font and Size boxes on the Formatting toolbar - and paragraphs can be left, centred, right or justified.

The caret moves the way it does in any word processor. Left and Right move a character at a time, or a word at a time with Ctrl held; Up and Down move a line and keep the column you started from; Home and End go to the ends of the line, or of the whole document with Ctrl; PgUp and PgDn move a screen at a time; and Delete removes the character after the caret. The page scrolls to keep the caret in view. To select, hold Shift while you move the caret, drag across the text with the mouse, click at one end and Shift+click at the other, or press Ctrl+A for the whole document; typing then replaces the selection.

Formatting works before you type as well as after. Choose Bold (Ctrl+B), Italic (Ctrl+I), Underline (Ctrl+U), a font or a size with nothing selected, and it applies to the text you type next; the toolbar shows the choice waiting. Moving the caret somewhere else drops it. With text selected, the same controls change the selection.

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. Hold Shift with any of them, or Shift+click a cell, to select a range; the status bar sums it. 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.

Accented text comes through intact. Western European characters - accented letters, the euro sign, curly quotes and dashes - display correctly in a document you open, and are saved back as themselves, in all three apps and in both the old and the new formats. A character outside that set (Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese and so on) cannot be stored by these formats as UnoOffice writes them, and becomes ?.

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.

UnoOffice on Windows, macOS and Linux

The same three apps also exist as ordinary programs for other operating systems, built from the same code. UnoOffice 0.3.0 has an installer for Windows, a disk image for macOS, and packages for Linux, and each one registers the apps for the Office file types, so a document can be opened in them from the file manager's Open with menu. The builds are not code-signed, so Windows and macOS warn before the first run.