Suites for the Sweet: StarOffice 5.2

By: Michael Hall
Tuesday, May 16, 2000 11:20:32 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/1844/1/

The First in Our Series of Reviews

Editor's Note: With this review we begin a five-part series on the major office suites in the Linux world: StarOffice, KOffice, WordPerfect Office 9, Applixware Office for Linux, and the GNOME Office Suite. All five are in varying stages of completion: StarOffice, Applixware, and WordPerfect are all fairly mature products with proven track records, while KOffice and GNOME Office Suite are both in relatively early stages of development.

How did we evaluate these packages? On two levels. First, we looked at the individual packages and how well they worked: most people will use their word processor and spreadsheet the most, so we spent the majority of our time focusing on those packages.

The second level is really what distinguishes office suites: how well the components worked together. Anyone could put together a set of applications and call them a suite; the real key is making these disparate applications work together.

All in all, we were pleasantly surprised with how well all five office suites worked--even the two GNOME/KDE suites that are coming late to the party. Linux office suites are now in a mature state, one where Linux applications do not need to take a back seat to their Windows and Macintosh equivalents.

Sun's StarOffice (recently purchased from Germany's StarDivision) is an office suite with a long and respectable history in the Linux community. Version 5.2 builds on StarOffice's solid reputation with enhanced import filters, some minor cosmetic changes, and an overall sense of being slightly more nimble than 5.1. The list of new or changed features in 5.2 numbers over 200 items and can be found on Sun's Web site.

The StarOffice slogan is "Do Everything in One Place," and the number of features packed into this suite indicate StarOffice's engineers expect the user to do just that. The suite comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation package (Impress), a database (Base), and a vector graphics program (Draw), plus a scheduler, mail agent, net news reader, address book, Palm Pilot interface, and integrated Web browser. On top of all that, StarOffice also comes as an integrated desktop environment. It's conceivable that a user could start a session of StarOffice at the beginning of the day and never once leave the package while accomplishing most of the tasks the average office user might face.

Getting StarOffice 5.2

StarOffice is available as either a free download or a $39.95 media kit, available from the Sun Web site. The download weighs in at almost 80 MB, but is available as split files. Purchasing the media kit nets a CD-ROM and some documentation. Unlike past licensing arrangements, StarOffice is now available for no charge to any person or organization if only the downloaded version is sought.

One of the early complaints about StarOffice 5 and 5.1 was the difficulty in registering a copy of the product with StarDivision: failure to do so correctly kept customers from using the product. The registration process has since been streamlined and is relatively simple. Sun recommends users register their copy regardless of whether they purchase the media kit or download the product, but registration is not required to use it, as was the case previously.

Once downloaded, installation is a simple and streamlined process. Users may choose between a "network" installation (a little misleadingly titled, since this is also the necessary method to support multiple users on a single machine) and the basic installation, which creates a single directory in which StarOffice resides.

Installation options are simple and straightforward, and serve to intimate the high feature count of this product. Users can select between numerous languages (which can coexist in a single installation) and a few add-ons that enhance the spreadsheet. In addition, the installation allows for integration with the KDE desktop environment and use of Palm Pilot integration features (which must be selected at install time).

Over the course of several installations on several machines, we had no problems of any sort with installation. The process is fast and painless.

First Impressions
Upon starting StarOffice, we were greeted with the StarDesktop: StarOffice's user interface. Unlike other office suites, which tend to operate as individual units within the user's desktop environment, the StarDesktop serves as the environment in which everything in StarOffice takes place.

Users have the option to allow StarOffice to take over their entire desktop, at which point it provides a taskbar that integrates any other programs the user may be running. We experienced some stability problems while using this option and also couldn't discover the exact combination of window-manager settings that would allow for smooth integration (or suppression, for that matter) of our existing window manager. We chose to use StarOffice as a window within our existing desktop, which made for a slightly cluttered feeling as it brings along its own taskbar, file browser, and other desktop features.

StarOffice's internal environment is easy enough to use, and reasonably intuitive. It allows for some basic "skins" in the form of Windows 95/98, Macintosh, and UNIX (Motif window manager, or mwm) lookalike window frames. Its basic icon scheme is all Windows, though. Users coming from a Windows environment will have little trouble adapting to the StarOffice.

The Core Applications

StarOffice Writer fared well in our series on Linux word processors, taking top honors as a high-end product.

Writer deals well with most word processing tasks of even high complexity and offers a wide variety of features. Most formatting commands are easy enough to get at from the intuitively structured menus, and there's a convenient style application tool (The Stylist) that allows for easy use of styles.

Star Writer also provides a fairly solid set of import filters for common word processors, including (naturally enough) Microsoft Word for Windows. It didn't handle our WordPerfect 9 files, however, and there were a few minor issues with importing some of the more complex elements of other documents. In general, though, our test documents were imported cleanly and well.

The online documentation for Star Writer is a little on the skimpy side. Fortunately, the publishing market has stepped in and offered a number of third-party manuals, because the online help varies from "somewhat useful" to "irritatingly vague."

Overall, documentation issues aside, StarOffice Writer is an excellent word processor. It provides, as word processors do for most, an excellent anchor to the suite and reason enough to use the entire package.

The Core Applications: StarOffice Calc (Spreadsheet)
StarOffice Calc is the StarOffice spreadsheet. As with StarOffice Writer, it's a solid and reliable element of the package that provides most of the features users will expect of a spreadsheet, including filtering and goal-seeking.

Calc's interface will be nothing new to experienced users of common office spreadsheets, but, as with StarOffice Writer, it suffers from a deficiency in documentation. Fortunately, most users will find it easy to format cells in Calc and to access the features it provides.

Calc also handled import of data with little trouble. We didn't have truly complex spreadsheets from "alien" products to throw at it, so we can't speak for how it might handle a truly large and complex document, but we saw no reason, during our testing, to suspect it would have any problems with most files.

Calc is a good spreadsheet and a nice companion to the rest of StarOffice. Most users who value the spreadsheet as a component of their office suite will find it a valuable and useful tool.

The Core Applications: Graphic Work with StarOffice Impress and StarOffice Draw
Impress and Draw form a useful team for creating presentations with StarOffice. Impress is the actual presentation tool, and Draw is a vector graphics tool that forms a natural complement to Impress.

Impress provides an easy "wizard"-style interface for the initial creation of a presentation. Among the options are several media types (paper, screen, slide), an impressive number of attractive enough templates and the standard bevy of wipes, fades and the rest for transitions.

Using Impress was easy, and a handy floating menu allowed for easy and quick insertion of slides.

We also found StarOffice Draw easy to understand and use. A number of useful tools were available, including access to basic 3-D primitives and the easy means to adjust their apparent "light source" and texture.

Not meant to provide bitmap editing--which you should leave to programs like the GIMP--Draw provides a great way to manipulate the generous amount of clip-art available with StarOffice, for integration with any of the other elements from the suite.

Overall, we found both elements of StarOffice featureful and smooth. Users making the transition from Microsoft Office will have no problem with either, and will find StarDraw a welcome addition to their toolkit.

The Core Applications: StarOffice Base (database)
StarOffice Base provides the suite with a general-purpose relational database with enough graphical interface elements to keep it relatively simple. Base can deal with dBase, DB2, ODBC, JDBC, and Adabas databases. The online documentation promotes the use of the Adabas database engine heavily.

Base allows users to set up tables with a reasonable number of field types, queries, forms (for online data entry), and reports. A user experienced with the use of Microsoft's Access will feel largely at home with Base once the interface differences are worked out.

Tables are easy to create and design. Base's queries are set up in such a way that users familiar with SQL can construct SQL queries if they prefer that to the "Excel filters on steroids" approach to query construction provided by default. Establishing relationships wasn't so easy to figure out, though we did with a little elbow grease.

In all, StarOffice Base struck us as more of a front-end tool for existing databases than an actual development platform for them. This isn't a complaint about Base, since we doubt any serious database designers care to use a tool like this to work and suspect StarOffice's designers know this. As a front-end, Base is solid enough and will allow most office users to extract information from an existing database and put it to use throughout StarOffice.

StarOffice and the Internet: Mail, News, and Web

StarOffice also includes a mail client, news reader, and integrated web browser. In some ways, we found this portion of the suite the hardest sell: we're quite comfortable with our choices in these areas and question the value of loading a program with the bulk of StarOffice to read mail or news.

Taken on their own merits, though, we were reasonably satisfied with the functionality to be found in each. The mail client and newsreader offered rules for disposing of mail, which is a useful bonus in today's spam-clogged and troll-infested Internet. The mail client, though not enticing enough to get us to drop our existing one, can be used to easily send attached documents without leaving the StarOffice environment, which is how we believe most will tend to use it.

The Web browser was also serviceable. During installation, StarOffice asks for the location of a Java runtime environment for use with the browser, which supports Java and Javascript. It took a little tweaking to get fonts to display very well, but the browser handled most browser functions with little trouble. We suspect most will tend to use the browser as a previewer for documents created with the HTML and frameset editors provided with StarOffice than as a primary browser.

The Windows version of StarOffice integrates the Internet Explorer engine as its browser when that's available. We hope Sun will see the possibilities in integrating a completed Mozilla engine with their Linux offering.

Finally, there is the aforementioned frameset and HTML editors, which did a good job of producing basic documents. If a GUI HTML editor is desired, StarOffice's provides some strong formatting features, and its frameset editor allows users to master creation of a frameset with little difficulty. More sophisticated websmiths may not have use of such a tool, but the corporate user looking to put a page or two up on the company intranet probably will.

A Few Extras: Palm Pilot Integration, Calendar, and Address Book
StarOffice also comes with a few added touches that round out its very thorough list of features. The address book (which is actually a front end for a Base database) and calendar provided solid tools for most needs. The calendar, in particular, was fairly strong: it offered a variety of views, a filterable to-do list, and a simple interface.

Both the address book and the calendar integrate with the 3Com Palm Pilot. It's a good idea to use an external program to back things up before working with the Palm integration. We had some trouble with duplicated records, and it took a little tinkering with the table that formed the foundation of the address book database to fix things. Still, Palm Pilot support is something still under some development in the Linux world, and we were glad to see StarOffice including it. It adds a sense of thoroughness to an already complete product.

Tying it All Together: StarOffice Basic and Interoperation

The "added value" proposition of office suites tends to be how well the individual components hang together and work with each other. StarOffice brings some powerful (if underdocumented) resources to bear on this area.

OLE support in StarOffice is generally solid. It was a simple matter to create and embed a simple spreadsheet, for instance, in a text document and operate on that spreadsheet when needed. The documentation indicates this object linking is something users may import from Microsoft Office documents as well.

The other piece of glue in the StarOffice package is StarOffice Basic: StarOffice's equivalent to Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications. Through StarOffice Basic, the suite is able to import VBA scripts (fortunately for the security-conscious it doesn't automatically execute them) and provide scripting for StarOffice components themselves.

This feature shows a lot of promise, but it is woefully underdocumented. We hope to see more on this, either in the form of user community-based Web sites or more thorough documentation on the part of Sun, since it represents a level of parity with Microsoft Office that will prove alluring to corporate IT decision-makers.

Conclusions
Taken as a collection, StarOffice provides a thorough and complete suite. Hints from Sun indicate that it will gain prominence in the coming months as its new owners prepare for yet another assault on Microsoft's dominance of the corporate desktop.

StarOffice 5.2 suffered from some stability issues while we evaluated it, but users should be aware that it is still a beta release: Sun doesn't recommend it for day-to-day work, and neither do we. On the other hand, the featureset is complete, and we believe the newest release will live up to its predecessors' reputation for reliability and stability once out of beta.

If we have any complaints about StarOffice, it's that there's no way to extract individual components from the whole for use outside the somewhat strange and Windows-like StarDesktop. StarOffice takes a while to start, and tends to be memory-hungry. Users who already have an established desktop environment tipping their base system requirements to the high end may find it frustrating to have to deal with a desktop environment within a desktop environment.

On the other hand, for a company preparing for the transition to a Linux desktop, or a company dealing with the sorts of issues having a more heterogeneous environment in place entails, StarOffice's insistence on owning the desktop begins to make more sense. Having the techs using the same software as the suits, who in turn are using the same software as the clerical pool, makes for a smoother environment for all. There's no need to deploy a single operating system to continue to get work done if everybody's working with the same software. Sun clearly has a stake in corporate IT decision-makers picking up on this wisdom, and it will be interesting to see their ongoing efforts in this area.

For most users, StarOffice will provide everything they could need and a few extras that show the software is designed with some care and a sense of quality. We recommend it on its own merits as well as for its unbeatable price: free.