Sun Microsystems Star Office 6

In many ways Star Office is the unknown integrated suite. Starting life with the German company Star Division, it was bought by Sun Microsystems a few years ago and since then it's been available as a free download from Sun's website, and in versions for Windows, Linux, Sparc and Solaris.

Version, 6 - tested here in beta - while not bristling with new features, has several key changes to the way it works and appears. These make it an increasingly useful and practical alternative to the Microsoft solution.

The biggest improvement is the removal of the integrated Star Office desktop. This was mainly a hangover from earlier versions, when the program was designed to create a complete working environment, divorced from the underlying operating system. It now works like Microsoft Office, Lotus Smartsuite or Corel's Wordperfect, rather than Works, with each module running directly from your operating system desktop.

The Star Office Gallery is a new suite-wide visual catalogue of art clips, any of which you can pull straight into a document. There are nearly 1,800 different clips provided, split into themes and including bitmap pictures, sounds and animations, as well as vector art. You can create your own themes and select clips to show in them, but you can't drag objects from existing documents to add to themes. It's an import-only device.

Star Office now supports Unicode and hence Asian languages, 128bit encryption of files and the ability to send Star Office documents as email, through links with your native email client.

Writer

The core of all integrated suites is the word processor and Star Office Writer is arguably the most sophisticated of the modules in the suite, with similar capabilities to its main rivals.

All the heavyweight facilities you would expect in an office word processor are in place, with outlining, frames, columns, image import plus integrated graphics and charting. Writing aids include a spell checker, thesaurus and auto-correction. You can add footnotes, endnotes and cross references and the program will handle tables of contents and bibliographies.

The Undo/Redo function, which already ran to many steps, now sports a list box so you can perform multiple actions in one go. The Paste Special function has been extended in a similar way, so you can select whether to retain the formatting of the pasted material or adopt that of the section into which it's being pasted.

The Star Office applets for drawing and charting and the clipart gallery provide plenty of scope for desktop publishing and the support of independent frames also helps.

For all its desire for independence from Microsoft, Sun acknowledges the importance of maintaining compatibility with the integrated suite market leader and offers good file exchange with Microsoft Office. Star Office Writer supports the latest Word formats for import and export and succeeded in loading the files we tried, which included graphics and tables, without problems.

New fonts with the same metrics as Truetype Arial and Times New Roman are supplied to help maintain the formatting of files moved between Windows and the other supported operating systems.

Writer's default file format - as with the whole suite - is now XML, which increases its compatibility across platforms. We tried shrinking a couple of sample files and the file sizes were reduced by over a half.

Calc

This is a flexible and fairly sophisticated spreadsheet, but without some of the more powerful functions that attract people to Excel, 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro. For example, although it's possible to transpose columns and rows in a selected area of a Calc worksheet, the function is rough and ready compared with Excel's Pivot Table reports and the tools for deep analysis that go with them.

Sun has added 105 new, mainly financial and statistical functions to Calc, bringing the total to 360, but makes little mention of them in the beta notes. They cover tasks as diverse as amortisation, Bessel functions and complex numbers. There are also specialist commands for number-base conversion between decimal, binary, hex and octal.

Once you've prepared your worksheet and analysed your data, it's easy to present it as good looking graphs and charts. Outline a range of cells and you can chart its contents with a few mouse clicks. Calc's attention to presentation is enhanced by its Style dialogue box, which enables quick switching between a range of 19 predefined colour schemes.

You can have multiple sheets in the same document and several documents open at once, which means complex models can be set up and maintained using the application.

Impress

This is the presentation graphics module and, while it's suitable for many day-to-day slide shows and internal presentations, it has nowhere near the sophistication of Powerpoint or Freelance Graphics. The core features are in place, with drawing, outline, slides, notes and handout views, and there are plenty of ways you can add objects to your slides.

There are a few useful dummy slide sets for typical presentations, based on sales spiels, company news and typical corporate tasks. There should be more of these, though, as well as modern designs using toning colour schemes, to provide more variety. The style function of the Star Office Calc isn't carried through to Impress.

There's no facility for things such as optional slides, either, which are normally hidden but can be revealed during a presentation to answer specific questions from an audience. This version of Impress looks like Powerpoint or Freelance did two versions ago.

Draw

Draw is the best drawing application in any integrated suite. It handles both vector and bitmap images and the things it can do with them put a lot of dedicated graphics programs, certainly the budget ones, to shame.

Starting with the standard line and shape tools, the program offers a wide range, including segments of circles and flattened ellipses. You can create open and closed objects from scratch with the Curve tool and with a couple of clicks turn them into lathed or rotated 3D objects. You can rotate and resize your 3D creations and change the effective lighting and the surface material to produce all kinds of highlights.

When it comes to bitmaps, Star Office Draw can import a wide range of file formats, make changes to brightness, contrast, gamma and solarisation. It offers a dozen filters, such as Aging, Emboss and Pixelisation, which are simple but well executed. You can then, of course, export your images to the other Star Office modules.

Prices: Free download from www.sun.com. Boxed release version pricing TBA, but expect it to be around £50.

Contact: Sun Microsystems 0800 731 0658 www.sun.co.uk