Star Office 7

Sun's Star Office is the latest release of what many see as the most serious contender to Microsoft in the office software market. It's possibly more familiar to many as Open Office, which is included with many Linux distributions. Sun's version builds on Open Office with the addition of the Adabas database, to give a suite that includes a presentation package, word processor, and a drawing program - in short, all the things that people are likely to need, and at a price that's considerably lower than the Microsoft equivalent.

Installation is straightforward and, for those who want to give it a test drive, there?s a 90-day evaluation - albeit without the database - that you can download from the website. An up-to-date Java virtual machine will be installed if you don't have one already. You can optionally choose to associate Microsoft Office files with Star Office during installation if you like and, when all's finished, you'll find the Star Office Quick Launcher nestling in your system tray. From here you can create a new text document, spreadsheet, drawing or presentation, or launch into the extensive list of templates. Many of those, like meeting agendas and minutes, are created as forms that are easy to fill in and add extra entries to. You can knock up a sheet of business cards or address labels, in no time at all, though they're not quite as slick as, say, some of the wizards in Microsoft Publisher.

For many people, the bread and butter of a suite like this is the word processor, and Writer is certainly a good program with some points that we liked very much, especially the pdf support. A single click of a button will turn any document into a pdf file. That alone will be worth the price for many people. The floating style palette is useful too, although we'd like it to include more than just the defined styles, like the palette found in Word:X for the Mac.

Other features may be more annoying to some - for example, there's a word completion feature that?s turned on by default, and can either save a lot of typing or just bug you to hell. There are only a couple of views of your work, too: page layout and online layout. That means that, with Writer, what you see is what you get, but some of us oldies prefer a blank screen to type on.

A handy tool, which shines when you can see the page layout, is Direct Cursor. When this is turned on, you can just click anywhere on a page and type. So if you're creating a poster or a memo, you don't have to enter loads of blank lines, or create text boxes; the program sorts out all the spacing for you automatically.

In terms of customisation, you can alter the menus and keystrokes for most functions, though not perhaps with the same ease as in Microsoft Office. Assigning commands to keys isn't quite as flexible either - there's a list of shortcut keys and you can add commands from the menus to those. So, for instance, to put the document statistics on Ctrl & W, you can't pick the command, then click in a box and type Ctrl & W. You have to scroll through the list of keystrokes to find it, highlight the command, and then click a button labelled Modify. Perhaps some of the loss of Windows-like slickness in areas like this is the price to pay for a program that is available for more than one platform.

The presentation part of the suite, like Writer, provides a wide range of templates so that you can create a slideshow very easily, with a range of transitions - though it doesn't feel as slick as some other software, such as Apple's Keynote. Nevertheless, it's simple enough to use, and support for popular standards is present here too, with the useful ability to export your presentation as either a pdf file or in Macromedia Flash format. There's also a useful 'rehearse timings' function that runs through your presentation with a timer on the screen, so you can work out how long it's going to take.

The drawing program is rather basic. If you want to create plans, or things like CD labels, it's useful - you can precisely specify the size of boxes to put on the page, and add lines, fills and all the basic things you would expect. It?s not in the same league as a full-blown package such as Coreldraw, and seems to be like a container for the drawing tools that are found in the other parts of the package, really. You might use it if you're planning a new kitchen, but for the most part we don't think it will get a lot of use.

Calc, the spreadsheet, has everything you'd expect to find, including data filters, graphs and even an equation editor if you want to include mathematical formulas. You can, of course, drop formulas into word processor documents, too. There's goal seeking, a graph wizard, data validation and an impressively wide range of functions that should be enough to suit most people. As is the case with most of this suite, everything you need is likely to be here - unless you're a diehard user of some obscure Excel plug-ins - but it's not quite as slick as the Microsoft alternative. That said, since most people don't use some of the more exotic features, they will probably find all they need in this spreadsheet.

Those who are hoping that the database, Adabas, will be well integrated into the rest of the applications are in for a shock; it's installed separately after the rest of the Star Office components, lurks in its own folders on your system and doesn't get a mention in any of the quick-start menu options that appear in the system tray. Adabas is an SQL database that runs as a server in the background. You can, in fact, click on the Data Sources button and create a database from within the other applications, but it?s not the most straightforward approach. Even on our test machine, a 2.4GHz P4, some of the database functions resulted in a 'not responding' message for 20 seconds or so while the hard disk thrashed around.

The manner in which databases are handled - as data sources that you define and then query - reminded us of the way they're dealt with in Dreamweaver, when you set up web pages that use PHP or ASP scripting. That's not necessarily a wrong way to deal with them, but it does mean that users of Access or Filemaker may find that it is nowhere near as friendly as what they?re used to. It is, frankly, the most intimidating part of Star Office. On a more positive note, you can have multiple data sources, including automatic conversion of your Windows address book, making it quickly and easily available for mail merges and similar functions.

Compatibility-wise, Star Office uses XML-based file formats by default, which is intended to be the way of the future, and will certainly make it easier to read files when Star Office is long gone, as anyone with a load of old Wordperfect files may appreciate. We had no problems with opening files from older versions of Word and Excel, though the list of supported files types doesn't include Word for Mac (or Wordperfect), and some of our older Powerpoint files were just too old to do anything with.

You can save in the latest Microsoft Office formats - in fact, Writer documents can be saved as Word 6 or anything above, or as rtf, so you shouldn?t have problems sharing documents with anyone except the most technologically retrograde. That said, there are some features that aren't fully supported, so documents packed full of Wordart or with revisions aren't completely transferable. In fact, even using rtf, revisions saved in Word didn't appear in Writer, which could be a problem for some.

All in all, then, Star Office 7 is a capable package. We have some reservations about the friendliness of the database and support of revisions in rtf files, but for small businesses and home users who want competent software that will share information with Microsoft Office users, there?s little doubt that £52.99 is amazing value for money. While you may miss some of the slickness found in the Microsoft alternatives, if you can see past that, you'll find a powerful suite that's a genuine alternative. And there's not a dancing paperclip in sight.

Contact: Sun Microsystems
www.sun.com/staroffice

System requirements:

• Windows 98 or later: 64MB memory: 250MB of free hard disk space
• Linux 2.2.13: 128MB memory, 300MB disk space
• Solaris 8 or higher: 128MB memory, 300MB disk space