InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Are you a potential Linux desktop user, but you're afraid of the added system- administration chores and worried that you can't find an Office suite that will allow you to exchange files with Microsoft Office?

StarOffice 5.1 from Star Division Corp. can solve two of these problems. It acts almost like a clone of the Microsoft suite, and it runs on Windows, Linux, and Sun Solaris systems for less than $175 per copy. (Sorry, but it can't solve the Linux system-administration issues.)

StarOffice's feature set looks a lot like those included with Microsoft Office 2000 Standard Edition. It includes StarWriter for document editing, StarCalc for creating spreadsheets, StarImpress for creating presentations, StarDraw and StarImage for creating vector and bit-mapped graphics, StarSchedule for managing calendars and to-do lists, StarMail for handling E-mail, StarBase for creat-ing interfaces to databases, StarDiscussion for reading Internet news, and StarMath for creating complex formulas.

StarOffice's feature set is so similar to Microsoft Office 2000's that I wondered who was copying whom. In the end, you won't care; all that matters is that StarOffice provides a worthy, cross-platform alternative to the Microsoft product for less than half the price.

All StarOffice applications run within a single desktop, called StarDesktop. StarDesktop provides the environment from which all StarOffice applications are executed and can act as a replacement for the operating system's user interface. On my Windows 98 test system, I configured it to operate as a replacement GUI for the Windows desktop interface.

Lists And Menus
This integrated desktop includes a Start menu containing the list of all StarOffice tools as well as the complete set of Windows menus already configured for my system. It has a task bar containing all the running applications and a system tray containing the date and all the icons for the background programs. The background of the StarOffice desktop contains links to tasks you'll perform with StarOffice; you can also add links to this desktop and change the background and icon spacing. All these features are similar to those found in Windows.