Sun would like to think it can succeed where others have failedÃ,—in breaking Microsoft’s stranglehold on the office productivity market—by offering a product that’s almost as good as Microsoft Office at a much lower price. Do the sums add up?
StarOffice version 6 is not a direct competitor to Microsoft Office XP, whether it is the Standard or Professional edition. However, StarOffice is a suite of office tools for the user who does not need all the additional bells and whistles of Microsoft’s Office suite.
It could be argued that most users do not need or will never use many of the features in either product, and this makes a compelling case for the considerably less expensive StarOffice. However, Office is the most widely used suite and as a consequence most documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are in Office’s proprietary format. While StarOffice imports most simple files without any problems, as the files become more complex, problems start to creep in.
So in essence, for SOHO use where file importing is not a huge issue StarOffice is a very strong contender. For power users, or indeed organisations with MS Office well and truly entrenched, there are strong reasons not to move to StarOffice.
So where does that leave those wondering if an upgrade from Office 2000 to Office XP is worth the money? We did not find any compelling reason to upgrade from Word 2000; 2002 includes some nice features, but will you use them? Excel and PowerPoint on the other hand have some neat features that may just make the upgrade a far more attractive proposal.
MS Office XP Professional
Microsoft Office XP is available in two versions: Standard and Professional. Standard includes Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint while the Professional version also includes Access. For the purpose of our exercise we will only be reviewing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as these are the only applications that have a direct competitor in StarOffice 6.0. Obviously, companies using or designing desktop database applications based on Access will need to stick with Microsoft for the time being.
Installing the suite proved to be quite painless, less than 10 minutes for the initial installation of the software and then another minute or so when firing up one of the applications for the first time. At this point Office initialises itself and the user must go through Microsoft’s contentious registration procedure. If you do not register the product with Microsoft, it will only run with full functionality 50 times.
A typical installation of the suite consumes around 83MB of disk space, the full installation around 310MB and just installing Word, Excel, and Power Point consumes just 23MB of disk space.
MS Office has been literally stuffed with features for quite some time now, and let’s face it: how many of us actually use more than a small proportion of the feature set in our day-to-day work? So it comes as no great surprise, as you will see, that the added features list is not enormous, although some are actually quite useful.
Word 2002
The new Word interface generally holds no surprises when compared to the old, although the large Task Pane down the right hand side is the immediately obvious exception. The look of the interface has been mildly tweaked with some slight changes to graphics here and there, but in essence the feel remains the same.
Our first test was to import our large Word 2000 test document, which loaded with all its formatting perfectly intact. It then came down to simply playing with the new features. We then sent files back to Word 2000 and again found no nasty surprises, for which we breathed a sigh of relief.
The Task Pane can be configured for a number of functions from simple document management, much like the File menu, to Styles and Formatting and also language translation (from English to Spanish or French and back the other way as well). The feature appears limited from our simple testing, and if you want to translate an entire slab of text, Office subtly suggests translating via the Web.
The Styles and Formatting pane is quite useful, as it displays all the formatting currently in use through the document. Selecting one of the formats from the pane gives a quick tally of how many times the format occurs in the document and the option to modify the style or update it to match a selection. It is particularly useful if you need to track down each instance of a particular type of formatting, for instance italicised text, or apply a simple global change to convert them all from italic to bold.
I have grumbled in the past when I have been unable to select several noncontiguous blocks of text to apply a change. After all, in Excel, holding down the control key allows you to select discontiguous cells; now the same mechanism works in Word.
Smart Tags are in effect action tags that can be attached to words, but at first glance appear to be a solution waiting for a problem. But it has the potential to be very handy. Word 2002 by default has eight types of smart tags such as names, dates and place; all are in English only. You can create your own class of smart tags with ActiveDocs 2002. You can also subscribe to a supplier of the tags, such as legal publisher LexisNexis, which has developed smart tags that link case names to entire case records.
Another feature we use quite often is Track Changes: as versions of a document travel back and forth amongst collaborators, we can see what has been added or deleted. This can at times result in a horrid mess, with the deleted characters and newly added characters appearing in a multi coloured jumble. Thankfully, this has been tidied up in the latest incarnation, with the inserted words highlighted in situ and the deleted characters appearing in a box in the margin.
Word has always handled graphics reasonably well via the Draw button bar and in XP not a great deal has changed, although there are two extra buttons to play with. There is now a Vertical Text Box function, and you can insert diagrams such as organisational charts, Venn diagrams, and pyramid diagrams, among others.
Word 2002 is a solid word processor with a few nice features that make upgrading attractive to some, but not overly compelling to others.
Excel 2002
For those familiar with previous versions of Excel, the interface holds few surprises. We found importing relatively complex Excel 2000 worksheets was trouble free.
Many of Excel 2000’s shortcomings have been addressed in this latest version.
For example, if like me you need to search for an item amongst multiple sheets, and have forgotten in which sheet the relevant item resides, the past you had to search each sheet individually. Now it’s a simple matter of selecting to search over the entire workbook, rather than individual sheets.
Inputting complex formulas can sometimes result in logic errors, rather than simple odd numbers of brackets. It can be a real pain trying to work out where your formula went wrong, but with the Evaluate Formula option you can step through the formula and find out at which step it goes astray. In a similar vein, the Watch Window allows you to select various results cells and keep an eye on their contents as you change values elsewhere in the sheet.
The AutoSum button on the tool bar has now developed multiple personalities, and in addition to the sum it also can calculate average, count, max and min through a drop-down menu. Web integration is certainly improved: creating Web Queries is very simple. If you need to keep your online Web-based price list up to date, for instance, Excel has an Auto Republish option that automatically updates the Web page each time you save the relevant sheet.
We have heard rumours that some have found Excel 2002 to be unstable but during our testing under Windows XP and Windows 2000 we did not experience a single glitch.
We found Excel to be more robust and feature-rich than StarOffice Calc and to be blunt, most of the time Excel was easier to use, and that’s discounting any previous familiarity with the product.
PowerPoint 2002
Our PowerPoint 2000 presentation imported and executed without a hitch under PowerPoint 2002. The interface itself is consistent with the previous version although there are slight changes.
Of course the all-pervasive Task Pane is present in PowerPoint 2002, and to be honest we actually found it more useful than the Word and Excel renditions. We particularly liked the quick and easy access to design templates, colour schemes, transitions, and animations through the Task Pane.
There is a good collection of slide transitions; around 17 more than the previous version. There are also many more preset animations than the previous version and they are much more flexible. The range includes custom motion paths that can simply be a scribble across the screen for the object to follow.
On a large display, the text rendering of the 2000 version was at times quite coarse and unprofessional looking. The 2002 version now includes anti-aliased text, which looks a good deal more refined. The application can be set up for dual display, where the presenter has one view of the presentation, say with speaker notes attached, and the audience has the normal slide view.
Other small additions that nevertheless are a very welcome addition include the ability to select multiple objects at once with a simple control-click, or the inclusion of grid lines and snap to grid to simplify object alignment. While on the subject of objects, how about the ability to rotate an object by simply clicking on it and grabbing the rotation handle?
Overall PowerPoint 2002 will appeal to the power presenter who needs the additional features that PowerPoint boasts above StarÃ,ÂÂOffice Impress.
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It's a pitty that OpenOffice.org (see: http://www.openoffice.org) wasn't also reviewed along side Office and Star Office. Given that Star Office is based on OpenOffice.org, I wouldn't expect them to be very different - OpenOffice lacks some templates and doesn't have an (obvious) database - but otherwize they are supposed to be very similar products. Oh, and OpenOffice.org is free.
My experiences with OpenOffice.org (coming from an Office background) is that some of the features are implemented differently to MS Office, which can be frustrating, but once mastered are far more reliable than Office. For example, complex number in Office is a black art that always seems to require one last check before printing. OpenOffice.org, on the other hand, isn't as easy to set up number, but once set up it's rock solid. The same goes for page numbering, which involves using page styles. At first it's a little different to work, but once set up the numbering just works.
OpenOffice.org and Star Office have on other advantage over Office. They are platform neutral and support a range of platforms. While the list is currently short, it's rapidly expanding giving me more choice over what Operating System I need to use. The savings from using OpenOffice (or Star Office) compared to Office may not be great, but being able to use Linux instead of Windows really starts to add up.