StarOffice 8: An Affordable, Small-Business Alternative to Microsoft Office A Highly Capable Replacement for Office Michael Hall
At some point on the road to creating productivity suites the idea behind office software went terribly awry. Microsoft Office has evolved into an expensive, bloated software package designed for corporations in need of ratified features, while at the other end of the spectrum you find a few low-end applications suitable only for minor league tasks such as junior high students putting together their history reports.
But what about the rest of us — users who need just enough to do basic business computing, without a ton of fancy bells and whistles? Sun's StarOffice 8 addresses this need by providing a feature-packed yet streamlined, inexpensive office suite that should suit most small businesses nicely.
StarOffice offers a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a drawing package (Draw), a presentation program (Impress), and a database package (Base) similar to Microsoft's Access. For organizations concerned about migrating their complex Office macros and documents over to StarOffice, the suite's enterprise edition includes a tools package that assesses existing Office documents and converts their macros for use with StarOffice.
Installation and Configuration
StarOffice installs from a single CD. It offers either a basic installation tool that quickly installs everything you need to run the entire suite or a custom install that lets you fine-tune the installation to save disk space. The total size of the full program is around 525 megabytes, much of which consists of clip art, sounds, sample documents, and presentation animations.
Configuring StarOffice is simple — the Options menu never goes more than one level deep, and it's arranged logically. Since the database application drives mail merges and other common office tasks, every application includes the same database connection menu in its options, which allows for quick access to preexisting data sources.
Because StarOffice is actually a single application, its memory footprint is somewhat chunky, which is why a "Quickstarter" option lets you load StarOffice into memory at startup, cutting the time it takes to open a document later on by keeping the program resident in the computer's memory even when it's not in use.
You can configure StarOffice to deal with existing Microsoft Office documents in several ways. It can take over as the application that opens Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents by default; alternatively, it can be configured to either convert documents to its native OpenDocument format from Office upon opening them or work with them in StarOffice and then resave them in their native format.
Applications
StarOffice Writer serves as a credible alternative to Word, but it might require a more thorough feature-by-feature look than we're giving it here on the chance that a feature you're used to in Office doesn't turn up in StarOffice's list. One complaint some users have, for instance, is a lack of anything quite like Word's handy style area sidebar. StarOffice offers a floating styles menu, but it's not quite the same thing. StarOffice also skips the grammar checker that Word offers, although Sun does plan to add one in the next release.
As with much of StarOffice, Writer has been designed with people who are used to using Word in mind. Its basic look is similar, and many of the basic toolbar icons, such as opening and saving a document, are virtually identical, and its menus have a largely similar organization.
Writer has most of the features one might expect from a good word processor, including a spellchecker and an auto-correct function that's well-stocked with common typos and misspellings like "teh," "adn," and (our personal and perpetual downfall) "agressive."
You can format documents either on the fly with basic font controls, or you can use an easy but thorough style system to make sure that documents are both uniformly formatted from beginning to end and simple to navigate. Writer's "Navigator" feature offers an at-a-glance overview of document sections in a floating window.
As with Writer and Word, Excel was clearly on Sun's mind when the company designed Calc, the StarOffice spreadsheet. Its look and feel is close to Excel's in terms of icon and menu layout. Perhaps more importantly, you enter formulas in much (if not exactly) the same way, meaning you won't have a significant learning curve with Sun's spreadsheet.
A common complaint with previous versions of Calc was the lack of functionality similar to Excel's "Pivot Tables," which allow for fairly sophisticated data mining. Sun addressed that lack with StarOffice 8, introducing the "Data Pilot," a drag-and-drop tool that provides this functionality.
Another somewhat disappointing omission in previous versions of StarOffice was its handling of databases. StarOffice 8's new Base tool provides an Access-like approach to database design and use. For people that are more comfortable with a drag-and-drop, graphical approach to handling data, Base will fit the bill. For SQL-jockeys who are more comfortable writing sophisticated queries, Base provides a SQL interface as well.
The Base can query a number of data types ranging from ODBC and JDBC to MySQL, Access, dBase, spreadsheets, and assorted address books, including those of Outlook, Thunderbird, and LDAP. This opens possibilities for driving mail merges based on existing address books and databases of all sorts without having to convert data before getting to work on printing letters and envelopes.
For businesses interested in creating their own marketing material, StarOffice provides Draw (a vector graphics program) and Impress (presentation software). Both packages offer plenty of canned graphics and tools for creating presentations and graphics for signage or do-it-yourself stationery. PowerPoint veterans should be comfortable with Impress and will find themselves making attractive presentations in very little time.
