Rating: 
Summary: Great product at a Great Price!! (ignore the bogus reviews!)
Review: Microsoft can try all they'd like by posting false comments here, but Sun's StarOffice beats MS Office, hands down. For the price, I was expecting a half-baked office suite. Instead I found all the power of the OpenOffice.org product with added features and, most of all, great SUPPORT. I have removed MS Office from all our computers at work and home and will never look back. We can easily share files between platforms and have no problem opening MS Office documents. True... StarOffice 6 was a disappointment - but 7.0 is suprisingly quick, stable, and chock full of new features that we count on - like being able to create PDF files! This is way cool. I'm never gonna buy MS Office again - it's way too expensive.
Rating: 
Summary: All the features most users need. Mostly compatible w/Office
Review: I'm not sure if the average person uses even 20% of the capabilities of MS Office. Most people make extensive use of Word and Outlook, good use of Excel, fair use of PowerPoint, and almost no use of Access. STAROFFICE IS A GREAT ALTERNATIVE THAT WILL SAVE YOU HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS! Before purchasing, please note that Sun offers this product for download under the name "openoffice". Benefits of StarOffice:
* Great compatibility with MS Office apps, particularly Word; you'll be hard-pressed to find a Word file that doesn't open accurately (preserved formatting) in Star. In fact, compatibility is *far* better than WordPerfect presently offers--and I'm a WP user from back when it was one of the original "killer applications"
* StarOffice Draw (for creating graphics) blows Word's drawing tools out of the water. This has always been a weakness of Word. Draw is comparable, if not better than, drawing tools in WordPerfect.
* StarOffice Adabas (database application) is included (getting MS Access requires buying MS Office Pro) and is easier to use than MS Access. Adabas integrates with other StarOffice apps so, for instance, users can easily create mail merge documents. Drawbacks:
* MAJOR: No MS Outlook: This really may be the most important part of MS Office. Detractors can complain all they want, but there is just no PIM available that is near its equal. (The opensource community is working on this, however.)
* MEDIUM: I have yet to see a presentation package as good as PowerPoint (which is by no means perfect). I do hear that Apple's got a good new one, but most of us use PC.
* MINOR: No pivot tables in Excel: If you don't know what a pivot table is, then you don't need to worry that it's not available.
* MINOR: Interface to MS Office apps is more refined than StarOffice's.
* MINOR: MS Access is a better database application, but Adabas is easier to use. For home or small- to medium- business use, this is a no-brainer. Frankly, with Microsoft's new licensing policies, which will penalize people for not upgrading by requiring them to pay full price for new versions if they skip a version, I expect some large corporations to eventually make the switch. IMPORTANT NOTES:
* Again, you can download this for free, as OpenOffice v1.1
* It is disappointing that OpenOffice v1.1 became StarOffice v7, when OpenOffice v1.0 was StarOffice v6. There wasn't enough improvement to justify a new version
* THERE IS NO UPGRADE PRICING AVAILABLE FOR USERS OF V6
Rating:
Summary: What a great deal! (Students/Educators: plz read!)
Review: Much better value than other bloated productivity suites by by the leading monopolies. True, it doesn't convert everything perfectly, but such is life -- in most cases all you need is a few minutes to adjust the settings to however you see fit. Bravo to Amazon.com for a great deal on this software! (For individual students and educators with broadband: Browse Sun's website for StarOffice 7.)
Rating:
Summary: Faster and Cleaner, this is the new star of office suites
Review: I have been using MS and Star Office for many years. Since StarOffice 6.0 the usability and feature list bar was raised to that of MS Office at a 1/4 the cost. With StarOffice 7, that bar has been raised above MS easily. At the same low cost, this product is feature rich and easy to use. I especially like their spreadsheet. Very clean and easy to use. I prefer it over Excel now. I am Jazzed and feel it is at a level to recommend as a replacement to the buggy and overpriced MS Office. MS Office is Ok but SUN has proven that you shouldn't have to pay what MS charges to get a productivity suite that you can run a company on. Real smart move to add PDF exporting too. That has come in real handy. SUN is on the right track!
Rating:
Summary: It is really a very good office software.
Review: There has been a lot misinformation in some of the reviews.
Let me point them out for users who are really considering this good alternative to M$ Office. 1) Open Office 1.1 and Staroffice 7.0 are one and the same. You can download Open Office for free and you get only email support. Staroffice is the same software in a packaged version with more options like Adabas database etc. You pay for packaging, phone support and email support. So if you don't want to pay $70, just go to http://www.openoffice.org and download the same software for free with just email support and no database and other features.
For all those who thought Open Office was better than Staroffice, sorry folks, Staroffice and Open Office are one and the same with additional features in Staroffice !! 2) Since when has Java been the reason for Virus? This is total nonsense. There has been no Java based virus at all. The virus is because of security holes in M$. Java is everywhere - this website, your cellphones or in the American Express Blue card. So Java is good not bad.
Java is used for the database part. 3) Yes, there are issues when you open a file created with M$ Office, only if you have used proprietary M$ fonts. To the 95% of the user(maybe more) this is really not an issue. I've opened a lot of files which were created by M$ office and they opened fine under Staroffice. 4) There is a spellchecker and a Thesaurus included as opposed to one reviewer who claimed it's not there.
Now for the real review.
1) It's much less expensive. 2) M$ has no backward compatibility. Try opening a Office 95 or 98 document with Office 2000 with or without M$'s own fonts and see what happens. Forced upgrade anybody?
Staroffice is backward compatible(you can open Staroffice 5.2 or 6.0 files on 7.0), opens all versions of M$ docs and runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris. Check http://www.openoffice.org for other supported OS's. 3)You can save files in the M$ format or staroffice format and still be able to open it !! 4) Export it to pdf format directly. M$ cannot do this. 5) If you use non-M$ font data is not lost. 6) The file size is much smaller(in some or most cases) in Staroffice(Openoffice for all you folks who downloaded it for free). There are some drawbacks in both M$ Office and Staroffice. But the deciding factor is ultimately $$$. The only feature that is absent is an email client. But how many of you actually use Outlook with the Office software? I realy hope this review helps the interested user.
Rating: 
Summary: Careful when reading the reviews on this product....
Review: Disclaimer: I don't own this product. I gave it an average rating because of this. Having read all of the reviews on this product, I've noticed that on the negative reviews there are consistencies in grammar that are hard to explain if they were written by different people. Check for yourself against this phrase: "...Java which is slow and buggy..." Leads me to believe that MS employees are posting reviews of a competitors product.
Rating:
Summary: So much +/- Half truths about this offering here!
Review: Ok. Bottom line. I came here to save money on Buying StarOffice7 after running the Beta. I cannot believe the half-truths in this thread. Please allow me to kill a few. 1) It needs Java. BS. It asks if you have Java installed which is only required on a few advanced features (mostly database). 2) Same a OpenOffice. BS. It is built ON OpenOffice which Sun supports. I have both options on my laptop (plus MS Word). StarOffice has things they license that is not in OpenOffice.
A (much) better spell checker (even that is not as good as MS Word), Thesarus, and a SQL database (like a real SQL not a user friendly Access database). 3) No Outlook. MS Office is not Outlook. Outlook is Outlook Eveolution = open source Outlook. That aside, some heads up points.
Must purchase for each platform (Windows/Linux). Good news is I can buy one of each for multiple computers I use. Slow startup compared to MS Office. Excellent File compatablity, and the comment about much smaller native file sizes is true. Gets very slow on REALLY HUGE (20MB+ documents). Get your feet wet with OpenOffice (free). Move to StarOffice for saving $$ on licencing for many people who are power users and need the extra/better tool add-ins. OpenOffice has no phone support. Active end-user community via email. Some decent 3rd party training starting to show up. Keep legal on some MS Office seats to test complex documents against X-Office (star/open). I'll go away now and give my $ to Amazon. Best price out there.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a lot like Microsoft Office was in 1994
Review: StarOffice 7 is a good basic package that has some neat twists to it. The files products are actually XML and the sxw file format is a an archive file that's compatible with the ZIP utilities. On the whole, it works well. There can be some oddities though when you save files as Microsoft Office documents. I've had a number of people find the files get ... a bit rearranged when opened in different versions of Office. The interface is a bit nicer than with OpenOffice, but OpenOffice 1.1 seems more stable on my various Linux systems. (...)
Rating: 
Summary: No functionality
Review: To sum this up in two words, 'no functionality'... If want your data to be converted over incorrectly,
datalost, and java script errors this is for you. I will always use MS Office to prepare my information,
this was a disaster.
Rating:
Summary: Need to correct something
Review: I have not purchased StarOffice 7 because I am quite happy with StarOffice 6, and you can't buy an cheaper upgrade, you have to buy a whole new version. StarOffice 6 is a wonderful alternative to the MS Office, matching its (exceeding it in some cases) feature set for a fraction of the cost. To correct a point that Rachel mentioned about losing spreadsheet data. If you see ### in your columns, you need to re-size the columns. They're showing up as ### because the columns are too narrow. Anyhow, using StarOffice 6, the only problems I have had with MS Office documents are when there are extensive scripts in spreadsheets, or fancy formatting in text documents. Even then, they open with some easy-to-fix formatting glitches. Not wide-scale information loss. Most MS to StarOffice conversions are a breeze. If you routinely share MS-Office-generated documents, StarOffice may not be your best bet. But for most businesses, nearly all home and student users, StarOffice is a superb alternative.
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