StarOffice's Plan to Rival Microsoft Falls Flat on Compatibility, Ease
This Walt guy usually slams Microsoft...
ptech.wsj.com
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
I am writing this column using a new office productivity software suite for Windows that aims to bring real competition to a market dominated by Microsoft Office. It's called StarOffice 6.0 and it comes from Microsoft's bitter rival, Sun Microsystems.
Like Microsoft Office, StarOffice includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program and database. Unlike Microsoft Office, it lacks an e-mail and personal organizer module, such as Outlook.
StarOffice itself isn't new. It was introduced years ago by a German developer and acquired by Sun in 1999. The first versions widely circulated in the U.S. were free, but the program was dense, complex and almost unusable. For one thing, it seized your whole PC desktop.
The new version, 6.0, is intended to fix much of that. It no longer imposes its own desktop, has a somewhat streamlined interface, and does a better job at reading and writing documents in Microsoft's Office document formats -- an essential requirement because most people use those formats.
StarOffice has one big advantage over Microsoft Office right out of the box -- it's much cheaper. The price is just $76, compared with $579 for Microsoft's "professional" version that includes a database, or $479 for the standard version. What's more, a free version of StarOffice 6.0 is available at a Web site called www.openoffice.org, though it doesn't come with some fonts and filters, and lacks Sun support and manuals.
Also, for consumers and small businesses, Sun's licensing policies for StarOffice are much saner than Microsoft's. You can install the office suite on five PCs, versus just two for Microsoft Office. And there's no annoying, intrusive "activation" process.
But how good is StarOffice? I tested it on two main points: compatibility with Microsoft Office files and ease of use.
StarOffice 6.0 is fair. It's usable, but it's definitely inferior to Microsoft Office. It's harder to use, less intuitive and sometimes unable to render properly certain documents in Microsoft's formats.
tried a wide variety of Microsoft Office documents in StarOffice -- word-processor files of various sizes, spreadsheets and presentations. On basic, simple documents, StarOffice did fine. But when I tried complex documents, things went downhill. Word files with a lot of embedded graphics or revision comments were mangled. Some spreadsheets opened with errors because StarOffice didn't understand certain functions or formulas.
As for ease of use, the StarOffice interface is OK. There are customizable toolbars at both the top and side of the screen, and floating windows to help you navigate a long document or apply formatting styles. There's even a nice feature Word lacks that allows the program to automatically complete words you've used before.
But StarOffice is riddled with extra steps, complex techno-babble and odd behavior. When you first fire up the word processor, you're asked to select an "address data source," which means an address book the program can use to insert addresses -- hardly a daily function. And the choices include "LDAP," a techie term referring to network or online address databases.
Options screens include mind-boggling choices like "memory per object" and "Use OpenGL." My favorite: "size optimization for XML format (no pretty printing)." In my copy, the default settings were set to use centimeters and German, instead of inches and English.
Many things are unnecessarily complicated. For instance, in Microsoft Word, if you want to insert page numbers in a document, you just go to the "insert" menu, select "page numbers," choose where you want them on the page and how you want them aligned, and you're done. In StarOffice, you have to know a page number is a "field" and then, when you find the proper command in the insert menu under "fields," the program just inserts the phrase "page numbers" wherever your cursor is, unless you manually created a header or footer.
Some features worked erratically. Entire toolbars sometimes disappeared for reasons I couldn't deduce. The spell-checker sometimes didn't work.
I'd recommend StarOffice 6.0 only for light-duty work, and then only for people on a tight budget, or who just can't abide Microsoft's licensing and activation policies.
If Microsoft had more competition, consumers would benefit. But competitors have to do great products aimed at average users. StarOffice 6.0 has a long way to go. |
