You are my Sun-shine, my only Sun-shine............. .. (Sun StarOffice 5.2)

Member Name: Madasawomble

Product:	Sun StarOffice 5.2
Date:	16/08/00 (323 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free and good

Disadvantages: Have you been listening?

Before we begin, I really do have nothing significant against Microsoft. To get 90% market share in the home sector, they must have done something right - no business plan on its own can achieve that, no matter how aggressive. I wouldn't touch Office 2000 with a very long barge pole, as I know exactly how I wish to format my documents, exactly where I want my menus, and don't want a smug, free-ranging paper-clip telling me otherwise. But I am quite happy to use my student-licence copy of Office 97.

Or I was.

Star Office 5.2 is free. In the proper, no-money sense of the word. You don't even have to register it, as you did with previous versions. It is also the first version to be released since the title was purchased by Sun (now they *do* hate Microsoft - don't mention Java, folks. Don't you just love corporate vendettas?). So, what can you expect to get for free? If Sun are to believed, tons.

Star office is a little bit of a shock when you first start it, in that it takes over your interface, replaces the Start Menu and Taskbar with its own versions, and will not let you back to the desktop unless you shut it down completely. I would now imagine that some people are going - "oh no, I can't let it do that!" but really, don't worry. You can still get at all your other programs, and it really is a better way of working when you realise what Star Office tries to do.

So what does Star Office try to do, I hear you cry. Well, when it says that it is an integrated office suite, it means it. Hands up all those who have loaded up Word/WordPro/WordPerfect to write a document, then opened Excel/etc to produce a chart to embed, meaning you have two memory-intensive programs running at once? So, going to Star Office and clicking on <File>, <New>, and then <Spreadsheet>, or <Document> or <Database> would be a bit of a surprise then?

In Star Office, everything is done within the prog
ram. It is equally adept at word processing as spreadsheets - you click on the relevant file on the taskbar, and the interface seamlessly changes to the relevant set of commands. There is no need to have cross-application compatibility - there is only one application to handle everything. And it does it rather well.

Certainly, I can only see very high end users needing more word-processing facilities than StarWrite offers. All the basic functions are there, and everything you could (IMHO) need in day-to-day usage is too, and easily accessible. The spreadsheet seem escapable enough - I found creating charts easier than in Excel. The provision of a formula editor is very useful (as I'm a maths student). These are the three main parts I use - I've skimmed over the presentation software, and it doesn't look too bad, but if you've got serious databasing to perform, maybe investigate this carefully - the database looks absolutely fearsome on the ease-of-use front. I couldn't get it to work easily, and I've recently seen commentary in national Computing Magazines that yes, they were confused as well.

This leads us to a sticking point. The help file is actually of little or no use whatsoever. I'm sure all the pertinent facts are in there, its just I haven't got the patience to find them. I could make no useful interrogation of the help file, which essentially means that you're on your own. This is fine for someone who has been playing with software for a while, and isn't afraid to have a go, but if its your first office suite, then that might be a consideration. Personally, I wold say go for it, as most things are pretty easy to grasp, and you'll be no better off with a more expensive package as these are just damned complicated and have a tendency to do things you don't want them to.

Which leads me nicely to the main reason I like Star Office. It doesn't patronise me. It doesn't presume it k
nows what I want to do, or how I want to format my documents. Or at least it hasn't, yet. Which means I've been able to spend time working, rather than fighting with a word processor to make it do what I want, before giving up and going to my illegible handwriting.

I like Star Office a lot. NOT because its from somebody different, and NOT to strike a blow at corporate monopolies (as if they'd care). I like it because I can use it, it does what I want, and it does it with the minimum of fuss.

Summary: