Included Software:  

StarOffice truly is a comprehensive productivity suite ready to stand in for Microsoft Office. Given the fact that it costs a fraction as much as Microsoft’s contender, we’re confident budget-minded users will find a lot to love. StarOffice includes the programs Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (graphics), Base (database) and has a variety of extensions and add-ons available. Compared to many other would be Microsoft Office-killers, Sun’s StarOffice manages to add a sleek and professional appearance to their software that makes it as aesthetically fitting to the office as it is useful.

Users with international connections to Asia will be pleased to note that a full version of StarOffice is available with support for Asian languages.

Word Processing and Spreadsheet Features:  

Sun acknowledged the omnipresence of Microsoft Office during the development of StarOffice and made certain that their software would be compatible with the productivity behemoth. StarOffice is equipped to open and edit both Office 2007 Word documents as well as Office 2007 Excel spreadsheets. This ensures that communicating with colleagues, clients and contacts will never be hindered by file format incompatibility. It does warrant mentioned that while the majority of DOCX files we opened with StarOffice looked perfect, we did experience occasional font and table oddities.

As for the word processor itself, StarOffice 9 Writer, we were impressed with the approachability and familiarity of the program. You won’t see any earth shattering innovations included on Writer, but it does exactly what a word processor should—allow you to write and format easily and quickly. Writer will be familiar to users with Microsoft Word experience. We appreciate the fact that Writer’s toolbars are fully customizable for fine tuning the UI according to individual needs. Writer doesn’t have a grammar check, and while not a critical feature, it would have been useful all the same.

StarOffice 9 Calc provides the spreadsheet functionality necessary for heavy duty data analysis and presentation. After a few minutes of familiarizing ourselves with Calc, we had no difficulty using functions or tools for graphic enhancement. StarOffice 9 Calc even allows you to import macros from Excel which can save hours of time if you decide to migrate to StarOffice.