There's an old adage that runs along the lines of never judging a book by its cover. Usually, it refers to something that looks an awful lot better than it actually is. In this case, quite the contrary. For OOoFf contains some outstanding software, sloppily lumped together in a package that does it no justice whatsoever.

OOoFf stands for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox, the name of the two programs in the box. Both of these are useful, valid and capable alternatives to Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer respectively. They are genuinely viable tools for any home or business, and can save users up to three figures on Microsoft's Office application.

Yet, when stacked on a shelf next to Office, OOoFf just looks like an amateur piece of software attempting to cash in on Microsoft's success. When the box copy reads 'Tow CDs full of software', you know it's not a good start. Neither is the name: who on earth is going to walk into their software retailer's premises hunting for Office, and think that OOoFf is of any relevance to them whatsoever?

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It gets worse. When you open the box, you get two CDs and a small slip of an instruction book. Put the first CD into your drive and off it whirs, leaving you expecting the Autorun to launch the installation routine. It doesn't. Instead, it fires up a 'Readme' file in HTML format, in which, if you look far enough down, you can find a link to install the software.

But the problems continue. If you click to install OpenOffice, up pops a zip extraction utility, rather than the installation routine. The novice user will no doubt click to extract the files to the default location, and will get an error message for their trouble - the default location being a folder on the CD. So to get it loaded, you actually need to extract it to a folder you pick manually, navigate into that folder and double click on the executable. It's a shambolic start. Firefox's installation is, fortunately, the cause of no such trouble, and it's up and running in no time.

There's another conundrum to consider though. OpenOffice and Firefox are both free-to-download applications that have been developed by the open source community. Thus, anyone with a half-decent broadband connection can simply download them both for free anyway. And seeing as publisher Questar has done exactly that, it's hard to recommend otherwise. Also, the box contains OpenOffice version 1.1.3 when the Web site at the time of writing offers 1.1.4, although the supplied version of Mozilla Firefox is the most current release.

There is, of course, always an argument that even if you can download software it's worth buying the boxed version for some kind of fallback, and in fairness to Questar, that argument does hold some merit. As well as holding installations for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems, the box includes a second CD that contains a useful manual. It's 'printable', according to the box.

All that out of the way, we should turn to the software, which is outstanding. While OpenOffice isn't quite the equal of Microsoft's product, it runs it very close, and ironically falls down mainly when it tries too hard to follow the Microsoft route. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package - there's no equivalent for Access here - and the quality of all three is, overall, extremely high.

Firefox, meanwhile, is quickly taking market share away from Internet Explorer in the Web browsing market, and it's not hard to see why. A far leaner beast than Microsoft's application, Firefox supports innovations such as tabbed browsing (so you can have lots of Web pages open within one window), better overall security and intuitive customisation options. It's an outstanding piece of software.

So where does all that leave OOoFf? Believe it or not, it's a recommended buy. If you're averse to big downloads and want some excellent alternatives to your Microsoft products, this is fabulous software, albeit in ugly clothes.

This is a terrible job of turning OpenOffice and Firefox into off-the-shelf, easy-to-install products. Yet the quality of the software is so good, it actually barely matters.