InformationWeek

August 9, 1999

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Star Of The Office Desktop

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StarDraw lets you create complex vector-oriented drawings filled with text, lines, curves, and 2-D and 3-D shapes. StarImage lets you create and edit bit-mapped images and animated GIFs, storing them in standardized image file formats. StarDraw drawings are stored in their own format, but can also be exported to common imaging formats (BMP, JPEG, GIF, and TIF). Overall, StarOffice's tools for creating drawings are much easier to use than Microsoft's Photo Editor or the Image Composer tools in Office and FrontPage.

Like Office applications, the features of StarDraw and StarImage are available from within StarWriter, StarCalc, and StarImpress, so you can create and edit images and drawings as you edit your documents.

What Database?
Office 2000 Pro includes Access 2000, a database engine and database client development tool I believe is without peer for ease of use and flexibility. StarOffice includes StarBase, which supports creating small-scale databases; interaction with database tables in other formats; and the creation of queries, reports, and forms.

StarBase forms and reports, however, are actually just created using StarWriter, StarCalc, or StarImpress. Each of those tools supports creating fields and interacting with database tables, as well as creating VBA-like macro programs to perform complex activities. However, the development environment, programming capabilities, and overall StarBase experience is not worth considering for creation of serious client applications.

One of StarBase's best uses is for storing small databases of information, such as an address book. In fact, the address book in the StarMail E-mail client is stored in a StarBase database. It's also best suited for creating queries from your company databases to provide data to StarWriter's mail-merge features and to StarCalc. Beyond these limited activities, avoid StarBase for any serious database activity.

StarOffice's macro capabilities, which you can use in any of the tools, are not as well-rounded as those you'll find in Office. All StarOffice macros are created with StarBasic, similar to VBA in both form and function. Additionally, StarOffice now has an API through which you can manipulate StarOffice from external applications.

Although StarBasic's language is similar to VBA, StarBasic's development environment is harder to use. Missing are features like Microsoft's productive IntelliSense feature, which helps ensure proper syntax for object and subroutine references, the ability to interactively execute other commands and view expressions while a macro is executing.

StarOffice also doesn't provide a way to easily access methods and properties for objects outside of the StarOffice environment. For example, with any Office program, you can create and reference Active Data Objects for interacting with remote databases. StarBasic provides a way to access OLE objects, but it doesn't make the process nearly as easy as VBA.

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