office suites

I'm not sure if the average person uses even 20% of the capabilities of MS Office. Most people make extensive use of Word and Outlook, good use of Excel, fair use of PowerPoint, and almost no use of Access. STAROFFICE IS A GREAT ALTERNATIVE THAT WILL SAVE YOU HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS!

Before purchasing, please note that Sun offers this product for download under the name "openoffice".

Benefits of StarOffice:
* Great compatibility with MS Office apps, particularly Word; you'll be hard-pressed to find a Word file that doesn't open accurately (preserved formatting) in Star. In fact, compatibility is *far* better than WordPerfect presently offers--and I'm a WP user from back when it was one of the original "killer applications"
* StarOffice Draw (for creating graphics) blows Word's drawing tools out of the water. This has always been a weakness of Word. Draw is comparable, if not better than, drawing tools in WordPerfect.
* StarOffice Adabas (database application) is included (getting MS Access requires buying MS Office Pro) and is easier to use than MS Access. Adabas integrates with other StarOffice apps so, for instance, users can easily create mail merge documents.

Drawbacks:
* MAJOR: No MS Outlook: This really may be the most important part of MS Office. Detractors can complain all they want, but there is just no PIM available that is near its equal. (The opensource community is working on this, however.)
* MEDIUM: I have yet to see a presentation package as good as PowerPoint (which is by no means perfect). I do hear that Apple's got a good new one, but most of us use PC.
* MINOR: No pivot tables in Excel: If you don't know what a pivot table is, then you don't need to worry that it's not available.
* MINOR: Interface to MS Office apps is more refined than StarOffice's.
* MINOR: MS Access is a better database application, but Adabas is easier to use.

For home or small- to medium- business use, this is a no-brainer. Frankly, with Microsoft's new licensing policies, which will penalize people for not upgrading by requiring them to pay full price for new versions if they skip a version, I expect some large corporations to eventually make the switch.

IMPORTANT NOTES:
* Again, you can download this for free, as OpenOffice v1.1
* It is disappointing that OpenOffice v1.1 became StarOffice v7, when OpenOffice v1.0 was StarOffice v6. There wasn't enough improvement to justify a new version
* THERE IS NO UPGRADE PRICING AVAILABLE FOR USERS OF V6

Currently I am using the Star Office 7 Beta - Have found it to be exceptional, I have no negative comments at all.

We moved our whole company to Star Office 6 last year, 90 % of our users are low end computer knowledge, but everyone made the transition - with no retraining and minimal support questions (compared to the questions we had when going from Office 98 to Office 2000)- improved network performance do to XML - and 90 to 95 percent of the old office files came over without a problem (those that we did have problems with were because of special MS fonts)

To give you and example of size differences one file under MS Excel was 18 Meg once converted to XML format in Star Office was 2.89 Meg. and when you are sending it on a network that is a BIG difference in performance. (the user did the conversion with no help - and everything worked - the 28 worksheets in the workbook, the linked fields, all calculations everything worked!)

I am going to wait for the upgrade option but the Star Office package is Great!!! We are going to upgrade though. (I provide technical support and software integration)

StarOffice 7's usability has been imroved significantly over the prior versions.
As before, it runs on multiple platforms (which is essential for me).
No more crashes (the application can run for several weeks without restart
on my Solaris box).
User interface is improved as well: faster and more intuitive.
StarOffice has comes with same functionality as MS office (at a fraction of the cost)
and there are no problems with MS office interoperability!!