Title: Members' Experiences

Like many developers fed up with Microsoft's dominance of the software business, I am always on the look out for alternatives to the 'standard' Microsoft products. This instinct has led me to explore Netscape and Opera web browsers, Borland C++ Builder, Linux and, the subject of this piece, Sun's Star Office, an alternative to Microsoft Office. For those of you wondering what a review of some Office software is doing in C Vu, just think of how much time you spend using your word processor, spreadsheet and the rest during your average working week. For me these products are, for better or worse, an integral part of the way I work.

Star Office is free, provided you are prepared to download the sizable (80 MB plus) archive that holds the current version 5.2 from www.sun.com/products/staroffice/get.html. If you would rather have a CD, then this can be arranged for a small fee or check out magazine cover disks, which feature it frequently. Non-Windows users are not left out, as there are also versions for both Linux and Solaris. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Sun releasing a free Office clone is another shot in the Microsoft-Sun wars that have also brought us J++, .Net, C# and One. A free Office clone is always going to be a loss maker, so you can certainly take it that there is some other agenda at work here.

Installation is a relatively painless experience, although it does require a separate Java installation process. I have never quite worked out whether this is because Star Office is written in Java, or just because it makes use of it in subsidiary areas. If the former, this could explain the large memory footprint and less than stellar speed performance of the program (sorry Java fans). It is even worse than Microsoft Office in these respects, which is saying something.

When you first run Star Office you realise just how ambitious its scope is. It contains not only the expected word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation programs, but also a web browser, explorer replacement, FTP client and image editor. These are all integrated into a single environment unlike MS Office. The integrated approach is not to everyone's taste, and could well be a factor in the aforementioned memory footprint issue, but is something that does appeal to me. There is not time to review all the program elements here, suffice to say that if you can afford a specialist program for each area, I think you will rapidly abandon the Star Office offering. I will concentrate on the word processor, Star Writer, which is likely to be the most used of all the elements.

Star Writer behaves in many respects just like Word and initial impressions are favourable. Like all the Star Office elements, it is able to load and save in the equivalent MS file format, however I found that it often had trouble getting the layout and font settings of .doc files correct. There are a large number of more general bugs. For example, when you paste items from a web browser into Star Writer, it leaves unsightly yellow boxes at the insertion point. When you save and reload a document you will often find it has been repaginated without your asking. To be fair I have found problems of similar annoyance levels in Word, but they occur less frequently.

The most serious problem with Star Office is its tendency to hang. This can happen whenever you try and do anything at all out of the ordinary with it, but one example is that more often than not, my Windows 98 installation of Star Office hangs whenever I try to exit from the program. Furthermore, the unhandled exception dialog will not go away - clicking the Close button just brings up another identical dialog. The Linux version does seem a little better, although I admit I have not tested it as thoroughly, and because of the scarcity of Linux Office software it is generally a more serious contender.

Star Office could have been a stunning achievement, but unfortunately it is marred by a number of problems, most seriously an extreme lack of stability with some system configurations. In the end, I returned to using Microsoft Office, having attained a new level of respect for its developers. For all its flaws, it is still better. Remarkably though, Star Office is superior to the MS product at loading any slightly corrupt MS Office files (e.g. ones that Word has chewed during a crash), so I keep it installed for this reason.