Product Reviews

StarOffice is a full-scale office suite that's been around on corporate platforms like Windows, Linux and Solaris for several years. It's a low-cost office suite designed to rival Microsoft Office, and it's based around the open source OpenOffice project.

StarOffice is a buffed-up commercial version with additional proprietary components that's released periodically by Sun at, presumably, stable milestones in OpenOffice's development - hence why you pay for this version. You're also getting additional fonts, templates, import filters and other bits and pieces needed to make sure that StarOffice can be used smoothly alongside (or instead of) Microsoft Office.

Of course, another alternative is NeoOffice, another OpenOffice offshoot designed specifically for the Mac. The issue here is that, as the NeoOffice website explains, there are only two members of the development team and bugs are to be expected.

In StarOffice, word processing is carried out by StarWriter, which can open and save Office 2007 and 2008 files directly. The working environment is not quite the same, though. The titchy icons on the toolbar look old-fashioned and you don't get Word 2008's fancy object galleries. You don't even get the multi-section formatting palette that's so useful in Word, though it is possible to tear off and 'float' toolbars individually. You can create custom text and heading styles, insert graphics, create multicolumn layouts and do everything else necessary for polished-looking printouts.

StarWriter is also pretty hot on tables of contents, indexing, cross-references and footnotes, so it's good for academic and technical authors. There's even mobile phone-style predictive text input ('typing ahead'), though this is a bit distracting if you're a confident typer in the first place.

Those who prefer to brainstorm and prioritise ideas before they start the actual work of

ADVERTISEMENT

writing might miss Word's excellent outlining mode, but StarWriter's Navigator window lists all your document headings and allows you to move them up and down the hierarchy, so it's the next best thing.

It's a similar story in StarCalc. It's fair to say that the interface hasn't yet caught up with the latest thinking in Mac application design, but it did open an Excel list easily, retaining the AutoFormat menus and even freezing the title row into the bargain (so that it remains visible as you scroll down through the worksheet). And, like Excel, StarCalc handles multiple worksheets within the same workbook. It didn't know quite what to make of a fancy 3D chart embedded in an Excel 2008 worksheet, though, and its own charts do look pretty basic.

In fact graphical finesse isn't one of StarOffice's strong points. This is even more apparent in the StarDraw application, which has a decent enough set of shape and vector drawing tools but doesn't anti-alias vector shapes on-screen. This, and the comic book-style clip-art, which belongs to another era, gives it a dated feel.

Things aren't much better in StarImpress, the presentations application. Again, it can do pretty much everything PowerPoint can, but in a very clunky, cheesy kind of way. Microsoft has thankfully improved its template content over the years, but StarOffice still seems to be stuck in a timewarp. You'd better hope that your bosses and clients are easily impressed; either that or you need to be prepared to ignore the templates and build a modern presentation design from scratch.

StarOffice Base is much more interesting, though. Here at last is something that Office doesn't have - a proper database application. Excel's lists don't count because they're simple flat-file tables with very limited formatting controls. Base, though, is a full-on relational tool which supports multiple tables, forms, queries and reports. Like Access on the PC, this is a developer tool as much as an end-user tool. Relational databases are powerful but tricky. It's impressive, though, to get one as powerful as this in a low-cost office suite.

But it doesn't get round StarOffice's basic problem. Yes, it's a worthy rival to Office, offering similar functionality at a fraction of the price, but it really does look and feel like a cheap alternative, the sort of thing you might pick up on the budget shelves at a computer store. Our beta was pretty unstable, however, so we look forward to the finished version.