Labs

Sun markets its business suite as a "replacement for Microsoft Office", a bit overblown as you don't get as many features. But the 80:20 rule says you'll use 20 per cent of an application's features 80 per cent of the time. On that basis you can't overlook a product that might offer everything you need for a tenth of the price.

Impress, the counterpart of PowerPoint, got a facelift in this version. Sun admits to mimicking PowerPoint features to enhance compatibility and familiarity, and Impress does look similar, but its user interface is clearer. A helpful startup wizard lets you choose from 20-odd content templates, pick from twice as many visual styles, then choose a transition style - the last essential element of a complete presentation - rather than having to set it later. You can even type a few ideas to put on the slides, so you're not starting from pure dummy text.

An obvious alternative is to import a PowerPoint file, and this you can do, with a good level of compatibility. Not only presentations but also

Most everyday features are found in a similar form to PowerPoint. Bullet builds and motion paths are easily accessible from the Custom Animation pane, and there are lots of PowerPoint-equivalent transitions. Charts are a little more primitive and fiddly to customise. Venn diagrams, flowcharts and so on are lacking, so you'd have to spend a lot of extra time creating them using the drawing tools.

Unlike PowerPoint, Impress can save to PDF, but don't expect more than a static image of each slide. You can export a presentation as a Flash movie, which worked well; not all transitions are supported, but most elements came out fine. Impress doesn't have its own free viewer, but you can save in PowerPoint format or in various OpenOffice formats, so you shouldn't have much trouble sharing files.

Impress is in the PowerPoint mould, but it betters it in a few respects. Bear in mind that StarOffice is the commercial version of an open source product, OpenOffice.org, which you can download free. OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 lacks most of StarOffice's templates, clip art and fonts, and is supported only by discussion groups. These limitations are more significant with Impress than other elements of the suite, as ready-made content is an important aid to creating presentations, and Impress gets little attention on the forums. But that's no reason not to try it.