Computerworld - Sun Microsystems' recently released StarOffice 6.0, priced at $75.95, aims to be a mainstream, low-cost alternative to Microsoft's Office XP. But is it a suitable replacement? I came away with mixed feelings.
While StarOffice Writer could open and edit Word documents, there were some inconsistencies and differences in the formatting and viewing options and in auxiliary functions like spell-checking. Some tools, like word count, are missing entirely.
It's much the same with the StarOffice Calc spreadsheet and Impress presentation programs. They opened Excel and PowerPoint files, but not perfectly. With spreadsheets, test charts created in Excel were smaller and oriented differently in StarOffice. For PowerPoint files, not all transitions between slides survived the conversion. And if you're looking for what to do with your old Outlook e-mail and contact files, you need a third-party product like Ximian's Evolution.
Overall, StarOffice 6.0 is neither worse nor better than Office XP, but it is different. And that's likely to be its biggest obstacle to becoming a serious alternative to Office. As with many things, it's not the initial price tag that matters most, but the costs of retraining and continuing support.
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