StarOffice 5Sun Microsystems In the multi-billion dollar market for business software and productivity suites, Microsoft's Office and its components have been the dominant products for more than ten years. But Office has never quite lived up to its reputation, especially where cross-platform compatibility is concerned. With an explosion of non-Windows operating systems at hand and millions of people using those systems on a daily basis, the time has come for an office suite that will suit you, no matter what systems you use. With Sun Microsystems' purchase of StarOffice, that suite has truly arrived. StarOffice is now not only available for every significant platform except the Mac, but it's also open sourced and completely free. While most of the time you do get what you pay for, that old adage doesn't hold true for StarOffice - this suite matches Microsoft Office almost feature-to-feature (closer than any other Alternative) and still costs nothing. Even the deluxe boxed version that comes with a manual costs less ($40) than most of the how-to books you'll need to operate Office. Sun StarOffice is also a lot lighter than Microsoft's suite - the entire thing requires less memory and disk space than even one component of Office. While Microsoft Office is a loosely knit group of separate applications that can be purchased individually, StarOffice is a single integrated program with advantages Microsoft is unable to provide. New documents can be created in StarOffice by selecting a menu option; Microsoft Office forces you to wait while a bloated standalone program loads into memory. And you can switch between working on different document types without changing programs. Additionally, StarOffice will open documents created by ANY Microsoft productivity program, from PowerPoint slides to Word documents. There are still some compatibility issues with unusual character file names and a problem with file extensions that can't be changed, but StarOffice is, by far, more Office-compatible than anything else out there today. StarOffice is also years ahead of Microsoft on the Internet integration front. While The Behemoth is spending millions to promote its vision of the Internet as a service with .NET, Sun has made its own vision of that a reality with StarOffice and the StarPortal Web site. While StarOffice is available on CD-ROM, anyone with enough bandwidth can access it over the Internet for the ultimate example of distributed computing - courtesy of Sun Microsystems and its high-end servers. StarOffice, as stated above, almost matches Microsoft Office feature-for-feature. StarOffice Writer replaces Word easily, with support for Word templates and documents. Writer has as many useful functions as Office, including the optional grammar and spell checks, tables and math functions, graphics integration, and a wide variety of print options. Writer also has 21 foreign language dictionaries - just like Word. StarOffice Calc holds its own against Excel, feature by feature. StarOffice Impress is the slideshow presentation software that PowerPoint should have been - and Impress slides can be shown with a separate program, StarOffice Player, so installing the entire suite on a laptop or handheld isn't necessary to take a presentation on the road. Instead of just being a clone of Microsoft's dumbed down PhotoDraw program, StarOffice Draw is a complex tool more like Illustrator or Photoshop. StarOffice replaces Access with Base, a more powerful and flexible database based on Adabas D. E-mail, scheduling, and contacts are handled nicely by StarOffice Scheduler and Mail & Discussion. PLUSES: Cost; features; platform support; Office compatibility; small footprint; available as a Web service even without .NET. MINUSES: A few bugs in opening Office documents; limited documentation even in compete versions. Overall Ranking: (Five out of Five) Note: This review is of StarOffice 5.2, now an outdated release. The most current edition of StarOffice is 6.0. Information about version 6 is available here and it can be ordered here. -Paul R. Buy for all platforms   PUBLISHER: Sun MicroVERSION: 5.2LICENSE: Bundled Commercial LINUX REQUIREMENTS: kernel 2; Pentium+; 64MB RAM; 180MB HD; glibc. UNIX REQUIREMENTS: Solaris 7+; 64MB RAM; 180MB HD WIN REQUIREMENTS: Win 9X, NT, 2K, or XP; 64MB RAM; 110MB HD ALTERNATIVE TO: Access, Excel, Office, Outlook, PhotoDraw, PPoint, Word, Works OUTSIDE REVIEWS: Epinions.com, PC Magazine (v6), ZDNet ADDITIONAL INFO: Official Site, SO Users Portal, Buy StarOffice Books Reviewed by Paul Rickard, April 2001.

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