Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > September 27, 1999 issue

Office users can navigate by StarOffice—for free

By John Breeden II
GCN Staff

It’s faster than the speeding Lotus Smart-Suite Millennium Edi-tion, easier than Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 and cheaper than just about any Microsoft product.



It’s a bird, it’s a plane. Nope, it’s StarOffice 5.1.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has fired a shot across rival Microsoft Corp.’s bow by making the StarOffice software suite available as a free download.

Sun acquired the office suite when it bought the German company Star Division GmbH [GCN, Sept. 6, Page 61].

Although Sun chairman Scott McNealy has often called Microsoft’s practice of giving away its Web browser monopolistic, I decided to judge StarOffice on its merits. I tested it running under Microsoft Windows 98—one of its many platforms.

This is not just an office suite, it’s almost an alternative operating system with its own browser, file explorer and a taskbar that mimics the standard Windows form. At first I was a bit confused when my desktop PC reconfigured itself, arranging all icons horizontally across the screen instead of in Win98’s vertical layout. But within the new window, I could use the computer as expected.

SmartSuite Millennium has lost ground against competing suites because it looks so different. If Millennium is a trip to Mars, StarOffice is a one-way trip out of the solar system.

StarOffice’s biggest plus is multiplatform compatibility. The suite, originally written for Linux, also runs under Windows, SunSoft Solaris and IBM OS/2. It opens up the possibility that a mixed-hardware office could standardize on it as a desktop environment, making upgrades and technical support infinitely easier. Now if only StarOffice ran under Mac OS.

I tested the main components one would expect to find in an office suite: word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics application.

The word processor is good enough to go head-to-head against market leaders. It’s pretty easy to use, although you have to get used to seeing your writing area at the left side of the screen and formatting options on the right. This is an intuitive way to set up the page, although most users will find it odd.



GCN Popup