StarOffice 7.0

MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint have become the business-standard and 'everyone' in business knows how to use them.

Unfortunately, despite many features, even too many, these products each work in a different way. If you try to do something similar in any of these products you most often have to trawl through different menus, until you give up or just get used to it.

My employers pay an awful lot of money for M$ Office software, and although very good, is really frequently not up to what i consider a really high enough standard considering the cost and their huge development teams.

Amazingly a product that started as a free download before being bought up by Sun a few years ago (and latest versions still free via www.openoffice.org) is in several ways not only matching but beating Microsoft in producing a comprehensive office suite that works in the SAME WAY across all its various applications.

Which office suite that you choose is a matter of personal preference. In business someone else will choose for you. If you choose yourself, then like me, you can opt for the 'student and teacher edition of Office 2003, but i simply keep coming back to the Staroffice / Openoffice products each time, because they are so much more user-friendy and logical and bug-free. Compatibility with .doc, xls, ppt formats is really excellent; occasional blips but considering they can't see the source-code its incredible how they achieve such compatibility.

The only MS product that beats anything else out there hands-down is Outlook 2003 which i keep on using, it's excellent. Also the kids use Works which is a great no-brainer.

For serious personal or business use Staroffice / Openoffice remain the best integrated office suite and by far the best ROI.

I just took a look at the Openoffice 2.0 / Staroffice 8.0 preview on www.openoffice.org, downloaded it and gave it a whirl...excellent and a long-term winner for sure.

Still like MS but they are in danger of falling behind despte their monopoly.


Interesting Option   July 4, 2004
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

I have Open Office on my Windows and Linux machines.....SuSe 9.1 packages it in a huge compendium of programs. I decided to replace one package with Star Office 7....it is said to be faster in loading, have smoother and better fonts, quicker PdF file building, and of course the handbooks are useful and with the price of computer books I reckoned the price of this software from Amazon made the economics look really good.

The licence is funny....you have to read it before you can click "next", but it says not to use it in a nuclear facility or a nuclear research facility.......whew ! I was so relieved that I could continue to accept the licence.......it was an old reactor anyway and de-commissioning was the right way to go (LOL)

I do like this software.....Impress is neat....but I am a Wordperfect loyalist and would be so pleased if Star Office would read Wordperfect files since there is no good Wordperfect for Linux........every is built around Bloatware Word from The Dark Tower (MS).......

......hey at this price you can buy 11-14 copies for the price of MS Office and you don't need buckets of RAM and Mega-Gigabytes to run this program unlike MS Office which injects cholesterol into the arterial workings of your PC and brings even mighty CPUs to a shuddering halt.

At this price try it...it costs the same as a Que or Sybex manual....and you get free handbooks with this neat piece of software......and if you have a tight budget in your SME....why not write Word files using Star Office instead of using Bloatware ?


No more need for MS Office!   June 27, 2004
 16 out of 17 found this review helpful

I was not sure what to expect, and was stuck with the problem of buying newer versions of MS Office for the family. But once we tried Star Office we found that it has a much more user friendly interface, has excellent multi-language support (great for language studies), does everything that MS Office does. But... it is so much cheaper. There is no need to keep MS Office any more on our PCs - Star Office takes over.


Nine months on and still impressed   June 27, 2004
 11 out of 11 found this review helpful

During the 9 months I have used SO7 I have watched people trying to dealing with Office XP, outputting documents into Acrobat, getting macro Trojans etc., and finding documents that won't open depending on whether they were created in Office XP on Windows XP, Office 2000 on XP, or Office 2000 on Windows 2000. I'm convinced that not only is Office now overbloated, but VBA is a major security headache. As a web applications developer, I would like to make a few points about SO7 versus Open Office and Office.
1. SO7 has a better look and feel than Oo. It's more acceptable to people converting from Office 2000 or even XP. And when dealing with managers, the fact that it is proper boxed software with support, a good paper manual and the name of a reputable company on it, is a major selling point. Put bluntly, bosses like to say that they can buy something cheaper, but saying something is now "free" begs the question why they ever needed to buy something in the first place.
2. The PDF output is very useful indeed, and the drawing module with its ability to output gifs and PDFs easily is particularly useful to web designers and to people who want to send out documents that can't be altered by the recipient. I find I now can't be bothered with Visio because SO7 flowcharting and charting is good enough, and its ability to produce HTML output is often good enough to dummy up web pages quickly. If you are a busy professional in a small group who needs to produce solutions quickly, SO7 may be just what you need.
3. The automation tools using Java are easy to apply. Starting from out of the box, it took me less than a day to create a server side application (using servlets in a Tomcat 4.1 container ) that could load a spreadsheet in Excel format, edit it and then save it as both SO7 compressed format and as a PDF. If you want to do something like design a document conversion tool for your office intranet, or perhaps just automate timesheets with central data collection and reporting, you can build a company wide version with a single central server, even if some of your clients are using Excel and some are using Star Office. And this without having to learn .net or have sheets with embedded macros, using a simple Linux or W2000 workstation box without server licenses.
4. Loads of different I18N options.