Rating: 
Summary: Horrendous hype, not even close to MS office
Review: The product itself deserves 2-3 stars easily, but I make it 1 to compensate overrating by other users which is totally off the scale.This product is incredibly buggy, it died 2 times during the installation and more times as I ran it. You may not believe me, ok, go to the Sun's Web site, find a forum which is sort of hidden on the back, but I found it so you can find it too, read what REAL users write about this product and I just confirm it - with my Windows 2000 it crashes like MS Office never ever crashed in its life. It has different features for different OSes, for example the top to bottom text works in Linux but not in Windows, something works in Windows but not in Linux, small things but still, here goes your "works on anything." Spell checker/thesaurus is weak compared to what I have in MS Office, especially for French and Spanish. When I use the my French or Spanish Thesauri in MS office, it overwhelms me with an avalanche of different twists and meanings of words, StarOffice scraps only a few for the same word. There is no grammar modules whatsoever and they are very helpful when you write in a foreign language. It claims it have a database. Yes, but that's not an OFFICE GRADE database, it has NO FRONT END like Access or FoxPro, it's just a database *engine*, it's ADABAS, it's DBMS, no forms, nothing else! And not a very good one. There are free engines like PostGRE or even MySQL, once you know the subject. Yes, you can get the data in StarCalc from any DBMS that supports ODBC or JDBC (all major players do that), but it's simply nothing compared to Access, FoxPro or even ill fated Paradox (be peace upon it). Spreadsheet. Here's a task for you: go build me a simple chart of X vs Y both axes scaled in StarOffice 6 as I do it in Excel. Huh? Can't do it in Star Office? Exactly. 2 minutes work in Excel using its "Time-scale" X axis type, can't do it in StarOffice. Performance is downright horrible: try to load real officespace battlefield spreadsheet: hundreds rows, formulas, complicated calculations, charts... You'll be waiting MINUTES for anything to happen, anything that Excel does instantaneously on the same computer, and I am talking pretty decent box with P4/2GHz,1G RAM! 5 star reviewers obviuosly never did any real work with this package, they just installed, opened a couple small files it and call it experience. General feel is like, when you climb out of your MS Office 2000 pro into StarOffice 6 - like getting out of your Cadillac onto your kids' pogo stick for a joyride. I bought it for a few forkstations to rather read and correct documents. It gives you 5 licenses per box which makes it over 10 times cheaper than MS Office.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing product
Review: I have a choice: Download OpenOffice at OpenOffice.org for the open source, freeware version. Or purchase StarOffice, the supported Sun Microsystems, Inc. version. As a user of StarOffice since 1997 (before Sun acquired it), I'm still going to pay for it. The product deserves my $$. It is an exceptionally robust and well-crafted office suite. It does everything I would otherwise use Microsoft's Office bundle, IBM's LotusSuite or Corel's WordPerfect Office for. (And I'm not a casual user. I know how to push the limits of these office suites for my tasks. StarOffice succeeds as much as M$ Office does.) I love the cross-platform functionality. I'm endeared to the filters which work well on my non-StarOffice doc types. The new XML file format creates *small* files sizes -- and I can export to Microsoft formats if needed. My only complaint: The lack of a database (db) program, like Adabas, which came with StarOffice 5.2. The db roadmap for StarOffice seems cloudy. This leads me to wonder what Sun thinks about consumer users who need such functionality. (I'd hate to use a Microsoft product instead. Hint!)
Rating:
Summary: StarOffice is...functional
Review: I am impressed with the feature functionality packed into StarOffice at an extremely affordable price. I use it in RedHat Linux 7.3 with no problems. I deal with a lot of existing Microsoft Office documents for both reading and writing. I have no problem opening and saving these documents with the StarOffice. Sun has done a good job and I hope that they keep improving this product.
Rating:
Summary: I KNOW this product
Review: I've been using StarOffice since version 5.2 - for 3 years. I've been using beta versions of StarOffice 6 for ages - it's fantastic. StarOffice is based on the free (yes...FREE) openoffice.org suite (which you can download at www.openoffice.org). It adds a few great programs - like the fantastic ADABAS database program and a proprietary spellcheck utility. It has more programs than MS Office - a database program, a drawing program, and an HTML editor more akin, in some ways, to Visual Studio than Front Page. It runs on virtually all platforms - Windows, Linux (not just Lindows, nor Mandrake-Linux, as one sadly misinformed reviewer wrote), MacOS X, Sun Solaris, even FreeBSD and some other Unixes. StarOffice, which is written in Sun's own Java, which often means it's slow to launch. But after launch, it's a gorgeous, intuitive product. It's faster, smarter, and less expensive than MS Word. It would make a fantastic corporate solution. It's only drawback is in its .doc compatibility - it's at about 99% faithful. It still gets choked up on tables and funky margins. Though there are other cross-platform alternatives, like Abiword (abisource.com), none come so close as an office suite to MS Office as a replacement. This product could - no, SHOULD - be on your desktop.
Rating:
Summary: Why do people buy MS Office?
Review: StarOffice is a fantastic product. It does everything you can ask for in an office product and more...its open standards (XML) and
has alot of very good functionality that MS doesnt have (eg, drawing tool - you have to buy antoher tool from MS for this. Why does anyone pay for MS Office now this product is on the market.
Rating:
Summary: The best office suite choice hands down.
Review: Recommending StarOffice over Microsoft Office is like recommending a big glass of lemonade on a hot day over mowing the lawn in a fur coat. It's better, for just about every reason there is. Here are a few of my favorites. Price. It's about 1/8th the price of MS Office, and has a huge plus--the drawing program, which is a great program for anyone who's not at the Illustrator level yet. Opens everything. Opens all your Microsoft files. And that's not just for working with Microsoft users, it's for opening the .doc files that idiots paste all over the Internet. (PDF. Get to know it.) Plus opens WordPerfect, amazingly enough. Runs on the Lindows operating system from Mandrake. Ease of use of Windows combined with stability and non-monopolistic characteristics of Linux. Add StarOffice to a Lindows machine, and you've got huge capabilities for cheap. Dead-easy mail merge, and you can set it up just with a text file of all your friends or customers or whatever, no need to mess around with (oorgh) databases. Just get StarOffice. It's good stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Great Alternative
Review: I currently run SO 6.0 on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. The product looks and acts the same across all platforms. I have had NO problems with it as far as performance or reliability. I have even been able to retrieve data from MySql, PostgresSQL, and Oracle DB's using standard JDBC drivers, to populate MS Excel spreadsheets within my organization. It is really nice to have an Office Suite that is portable, secure, reliable and VIRUS FREE!
Rating: 
Summary: What it comes down to
Review: In my humble opinion it comes down to a rather basic choice. We got two fully functional office suites, both rather similar in terms of user interface, and both fully capable of working with standard (*.doc, etc.) files. If money is no issue for you, you may as well choose Microsoft Office. Nothing is more compatible than the original. If you have a hard time understanding
- why you should pay several hundred percent more than for a comparable office suite
- why you should be locked up in tough licensing terms where you cannot install the software on all of your computers at home legally
- why you should be required to call the vendor to re-activate a software you already own anytime you make significant hardware upgrade
- why you should be forced to upgrade every two years or so to remain compatible
- why the software costs money even if used for educational purposes (schools and universities) IF all of this seems a little odd to you, and you don't have money to burn, THEN Sun StarOffice is the logical choice for you.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Value in a Very Capable Product
Review: With a 5 computer household, we've used StarOffice 5.2 for Windows for years as a matter of financial necessity (although I use MS Office 2000 at work). I eagerly signed up for the StarOffice 6.0 Beta program to see if Sun's new version had equalled Microsoft's ubiquitous (but now stagnant) competitor. In short, for all but the most jaded power user, StarOffice 6.0 is the way to go. I have extensively translated documents with modest formatting (fonts, indents, borders, headers, bullet lists) between StarOffice and MS Office with no significant "gotchas". I did my (long form) USA income taxes in the spreadsheet without problems. I generated diagrams for my web site. The most important news is that I found nothing to report. It just works. I was able to use the StarOffice tools immediately; though not identical to MS Office, they are close enough that I suffer no disorientation between the two. The interface changes I have noticed have all been improvements, in my opinion. For example, to set margins use "Format->Page" (in MS Office, this is oddly placed under "File->Page Setup" as if margins are somehow unique to printing or file manipulation). I've used both the Windows (under 98) and Linux (under Mandrake 8.1) versions, and can recommend both with real enthusiasm (an unusual situation for this 25 year computer veteran). Give Star Office a try. You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: StarPffoce 6/0
Review: StarOffice 6.0 is a great product and a genuine contender for Microsoft Office. I would recommend this to any client who has average to above average requirements and wishes to be independent of Microsoft with overall reduced costs and dependency. The product is full featured much improved over previous versions. StarOffice has come of age.
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