Fee VS. Free Software

Office Suites

StarOffice vs. Office XP

Choose StarOffice if you need a solid word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation package but not a calendar/e-mail app, and you can deal with some file-format hassles.

Choose Office XP if you can't risk suffering file-format glitches, need high-quality graphics, want an integrated e-mail and information manager app, or are willing to pay to get the best overall product.

Among office suites, Microsoft Office rules the roost--but Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 6.0 could be a fox in the henhouse. This upcoming upgrade to the free suite packs Writer (a word processor), Calc (a spreadsheet program), Impress (presentation software), and Draw (for basic graphics creation) into a 95MB download. (At press time, Sun said version 6.0 would be available by the end of June; until then, version 5.2 is available at the company's site.)

I tested a beta version of StarOffice 6.0 against Office XP Professional to see whether the free application can replace everyone's (well, almost everyone's) favorite office suite. (The full version of Office XP Pro costs $579; upgrade versions of the standard suite cost $239.) Although StarOffice doesn't handle Office files perfectly, it's a legitimate alternative if you have basic needs and XP gives you sticker shock. But Office's superior ease of use and graphics tools, plus its inclusion of Outlook, make it the better suite overall.

StarOffice does include most of Office's core features, such as a spelling checker, auto-sum and graphing compatibilities in the spreadsheet, and wizards for assembling slide shows. It actually outperforms Office XP in integration: You can hop between Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress documents via a menu of all open files.

But in a world dominated by Office users, you have to be able to play nicely with Microsoft's file formats. And here, the StarOffice 6.0 beta offered mixed results. I could open and read Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with most of their formatting and functions intact, but I did lose Word macros. StarOffice can also export to Office formats; the conversion works well enough for casual use, but some elements--such as columns--got jumbled. And that could be a big problem if you're sending a document to an important client.

Office XP outshines StarOffice in rendering graphics. StarOffice's Draw creates rather flat-looking images, and Calc provides only 2D charts instead of the much more attractive 3D bar charts that are available in Excel. And StarOffice's online help needs, well, help: Its advice was often incomplete or lacked context. By contrast, Office XP leads you through functions step-by-step, and its Task Panes simplify common tasks. And if StarOffice had Office's Document Recovery feature I wouldn't have had to rewrite most of this review after the app crashed.

StarOffice also fails to offer an e-mail or a calendar application to compete with Office's Outlook--a major omission in a day when most folks consider e-mail as important as a word processor. Outlook handles all the necessary e-mail tasks (filtering e-mail or sending messages to multiple addresses, for example), and it has well-integrated calendar and PIM functions. And even though Office's collaborative tools (such as its SharePoint Team Services intranet server) are imperfect, at least they're there--StarOffice has few features for workgroups that need to share files and information. -- Michael Gowan