Whether on Windows, Mac, or Linux, the Writer’s Tools extension adds a useful new menu to the popular, open source office suite OpenOffice.org that bakes convenient tools like Google Translate, an online dictionary lookup tool, email backup, remote backup to an FTP server and more directly into the OpenOffice.org free software suite.

If you’re using OpenOffice.org as your main word processor, the Writer’s Tools extension is a must-have. Writer’s Tools is free, works wherever OpenOffice.org does.

Another valuable to is OxygenOffice, also for Windows/Mac/Linux. It adds clip art, advanced PDF functions, and in-editor Wikipedia searching to OpenOffice.org. Along with adding roughly 3,400 clip art files and templates, OxygenOffice’s extensions also add support for Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications in the Calc spreadsheet program and conversion tools for the Office Open XML format used in Office 2007. Combined with the Writer’s Tools package, this gives OpenOffice.org a number of exclusive features.