Sun Star Office 7

Highly Commended - Personal Computer World

Star Office 7 is a commercial product from Sun Microsystems. It is based on Open Office 1.1 which is open source, and available as a free download or for a nominal media cost on CD.

Star Office 7 is available for Windows, Solaris and Linux - Open Office adds Mac OSX. There are several other differences, but the bottom line is that this retail product comes in a box with a manual, a collection of clipart and other resources, and has technical support from Sun.

A full install needs 250MB of disk space and gives you Writer and Calc for word processing and spreadsheet duties; Impress for presentations; and a graphics application, Draw. You install the Adabas database manager separately: it is not a full version and is limited to three concurrent users and 100MB of data.

Throughout the suite, there are Autopilots (like wizards) for creating letters, reports, faxes and so on, and there's a degree of flexibility here, in that you can start, say, Writer, then choose to run a presentation Autopilot.

Similarly, you can be using the spreadsheet, and go to the File menu to open a graphic in a new Draw window. Unlike Microsoft Office, there aren't separate executables for the main components: each uses the same basic shell and you don't get an application name in the title bar, just your file name followed by Star Office. Since the Windows Taskbar icons are rather hard to distinguish, this can be disconcerting.

The Writer interface isn't too different from the Microsoft standard. At the left of the top toolbar is a space for the current file path or URL. This doubles as a dropdown history of recently opened files, and again shows all Star Office files, not just those of the module you are using.

Neat navigation
To the right of this are the standard file, clipboard and undo/redo buttons - we liked the way the Save button greyed out when no changes had been made since the last save.

The last four buttons turn other palettes on and off. The Navigator is similiar to Microsoft's Document Map, in that it lists the headings and subheadings in your document so you can click on one and go to that section in the document window. However, you can also navigate by graphics, notes, hyperlinks, tables and other entities.

The Style List offers an expanded version of the Styles dropdown; the Hyperlink dialogue lets you add links to other files or URLs; and the Gallery gives access to the clipart collection. All four are non-modal, so that you can continue to edit the document with them open.

The top toolbar is common to all modules: the one below changes to suit the task in hand. Start writing a letter and you'll have a Word-style formatting toolbar: insert a table, and you'll get a set of tools for formatting the table.

There's also a set of drawing tools, a table creator and tools for inserting OLE objects, such as charts or equations. This highlights Star Office's flexibility: you can create a chart from the content of a word-processed table just as easily as you can in a spreadsheet.

All the toolbars are customisable. You can create your own and access the options for any member of the suite from any other member - another example of the product's integration.

Though Writer won't check your grammar, it does come with 20 spelling languages and will check spelling as you type. As well as Autocorrect, there's an Autocomplete feature, which takes a guess at the words you are typing.

There is a suite-wide macro language: any VBA macros that are imported via a Microsoft Office document have their code preserved, but disabled, so you can rewrite them in the native Star Office Basic. Finally, Writer supports Unicode fonts.

Calc offers 256 sheets in a workbook, each containing 256 rows and 32,000 rows, and you can populate these with around 350 functions and 80 chart variations.

All the comforts we have become accustomed to are here - you can edit cells directly, or in the formula bar; you can collapse and expand rows and columns; add notes to cells which are then flagged with a red triangle; and fill ranges with series automatically.

Tables can be smartened up with a theme - very much like Excel's Autoformat - and you can use heading names in formulae.

The database facilities are the weakest aspect of the suite. As mentioned, Adabas is a limited version and its documentation is minimal.

However, you can open several types of data source from within documents and spreadsheets, and have the tables, queries and forms slotted in to a panel above the workspace. There's a sample bibliography to demonstrate this, but it gets rather more useful when you run the Address Data Source Autopilot.

Point this at your Outlook Address book, and it will be added to the available data sources, so you can consult your contacts list from within Star Office. We found we had to do a little manual tinkering with the settings here, as the postal addresses didn't appear when using the default settings.

Easy presentations
Creating a presentation in Impress is painless, as there is ample Autopilot guidance for choosing a subject, applying a visual theme and creating transition effects.

Having done this, you can switch between slide design, thumbnail sorter, handout, notes and outliner view. In slide design view you can navigate between slides, by using the recorder-style arrows or titled tabs, or by opening the Navigator.

There's plenty of creative scope here, with 3D shading effects, animations and sounds, and the opportunity to export a presentation as a Macromedia Flash file, so you can put it all into a web page.

Although Draw won't cause widespread panic at Adobe or Corel, it is great fun to use. It is a subset of Impress, with just the graphics tools, but there are some extra features, such as perspective and mesh warping.

We particularly liked the 3D features. As well as creating 'primitives', such as cones, cubes and spheres, you can also manipulate 2D objects in three dimensions.

Draw has basic bitmap editing tools: although there are no retouching brushes, you can crop photos; change the colour, brightness, contrast and transparency; and apply a small set of effect filters such as sharpening, noise reduction and solarising.

Star Office is Microsoft-compatible, though it admits to limitations with some graphic and OLE objects. We had no trouble with opening and saving Word, Powerpoint and Excel files.

The native Star Office file format, however, is XML. Not only does this offer the benefits mentioned in the Office 2003 review, but since the files are stored in a compressed format they are much smaller.

Unlike Microsoft Office, you can export any document, spreadsheet, presentation or drawing to a pdf file. Finally, just to show that we read those End User Licence Agreements, note that the 'software is not designed, licensed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility'.

For those on a budget, Sun Star Office 7 is a good product and wins a Highly Commended award.

Contact: Sun Microsystems
www.sun.com/staroffice

System requirements:

Windows 98, NT SP6 or late,
Pentium or compatible
64MB Ram
250MB disk space

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