StarOffice 7
 A presentation in StarOffice Impress. |
The StarOffice 7 suite consists of a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), presentation program (Impress), a graphics program (Draw), and a database component that is accessible from the other applications. The tightly integrated suite unfortunately does not include a mail program so you will have to provide your own.
With the exception of importing Microsoft Office-formatted documents, StarOffice (SO) is quite fast. And while a large Word document took 54 seconds to import, substantially longer than MS Word performing the same file load at just eight seconds, an identical document in SO's native format loaded in a spritely seven seconds.
The look and feel of the various applications are the same, different logical functions notwithstanding, and for the most part are similar to the comparable Microsoft application. Where SO is however smarter is that any of the applications can load any of the compatible files, for example you can attempt to load a spreadsheet from within Writer and without flinching Writer will become Calc.
Each of the applications feature a menu bar and two rows of button bars across the top and a button bar down the left-hand side, each of the button bars are user configurable. They also feature Stylist and Navigator windows that can be turned on or off from the button bar, which we chose to retain as they are very helpful when navigating the open file or manipulating styles.
In the past, Writer's thesaurus has copped some criticism as being too limited. We found the Thesaurus to be quite good and while it may list fewer synonyms than some others, the meaning of each word is very clear. The spellcheck was also very good although when set to "English Australian" it still retained a few Americanisms.
Exporting directly to PDF is pretty neat and while our 76-page test document took 24 seconds to convert, the resulting PDF file was excellent with a near perfect conversion from the original.
Compatibility with Word 2000 is a considerable improvement over version 6. We still see the occasional graphic lost when the formatting is very tight and inadvertently Writer overlays one image on top of another. There are also some very minor problems with line spacing that sometimes resulted in the contents and page number to go out of sync when compared to the original. But to be blunt these problems were minor and we managed to resolve them in a 76-page document in a couple of minutes.
Creating our test document was a doddle: the functionality is so similar to Word that staff would need no additional training. Indeed some items are more logically located, Headers and Footers for example sit under the Insert menu, because of course you would want to insert them, while in Word they reside under the View menu.
Calc has a very similar look and feel to Excel; the obvious difference is the additional buttons bar down the left side of the sheet. Importing XLS files is in general quite good with the exception of the charts. We found that importing charts with diagonal X-axis labels SO tended to convert the labels to a standard horizontal format, this resulted in many of X-axis item labels to be dropped off entirely, and a messy presentation to boot.
When loading PowerPoint presentations into Impress some of the animations do not work properly--some of the animation paths would erase sections of graphics for example, some animations that should have been automatic required a mouse click to start and finally the font sizes a little off so format can be slightly affected. But on the whole MS Office compatibility is surprisingly good.
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| Product | StarOffice 7 |
| Price | Single user $190, 25 users $3168, 150 users $15,851 |
| Vendor | Sun Microsystems |
| Phone | 03 9869 6200 |
| Web | www.sun.com.au |
| Interoperability |  ½ |
| Runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. | |
| Futureproofing |  ½ |
| File support limited to Microsoft Office, some generic standards, and “Star suite” file types. | |
| ROI |  |
| Powerful and highly integrated office suite at a very reasonable price. But is the extra support and addition of database functionality worth the cost over free OpenOffice? | |
| Service |  ½ |
| Extended business hours support with four-hour telephone response for critical problems and next day for lesser problems. Premium support option available. | |
| Rating |  ½ |
Database access http://dba.openoffice.org/