David le Page
Product: StarOffice suite Requirements: Any robust PC running Windows 95/98/NT, Linux, OS/2 Price: Free for personal and commercial use
You can now download Microsoft Word – in fact the whole of Microsoft Office – free of charge from the Internet. Well, that might be exaggerating a bit.
Okay, you can download a suite of programs, StarOffice, that does most of what MS Office does, free of charge. If you’re a corporate IT manager, you can save the hundreds of thousands of rands you pay to Microsoft in licence fees.
All this is thanks to the fact that among the many who hate Microsoft are some pretty powerful companies. One of them is Sun Microsystems.
Sun’s business is largely in servers. StarOffice has a unique quality: it can be installed to run off a server rather than being installed on every PC in a network. Thus it is in Sun’s interests to promote an office suite which works off servers. Plus, it always feels good to stick it to Microsoft.
StarOffice until recently belonged to a German company called Star Division. Now Star Division and StarOffice belong to Sun.
StarOffice is available for no fewer than five operating systems: Windows 95/98/NT, Linux, Solaris X86, SPARC and OS/2. Unfortunately for Mac users hoping to escape MS Office for the Mac, this is the one operating system that seems to have been ignored so far by the developers.
Linux, by the way, is a completely free operating system. So if you want to pay absolutely nothing for your software and still be able to say “Yah!” to Bill Gates, the Linux/StarOffice combination may well be the way to go.
Though it is quite sufficiently well featured for the most demanding corporate environment, it is perhaps in the small office, home office environment that this combination will first find converts – Microsoft is breathing increasingly heavily down the necks of illegal users.
How easy is it to run a home office or network using only free software? Linux is not easier to use than Windows, but it is more reliable – no system crashes every five minutes (this is an exaggeration). If you know nothing about computers, you will have to pay someone to set up your small Linux network. But you’ll probably save on the service calls.
StarOffice has been influenced by Linux in other ways. The StarOffice source code (the human-readable instructions that are the original form of any program) has been released by Sun under its community source licence. That means that if you’re a programmer and you want to change something about StarOffice yourself, you can do so. Such changes may then be included by Sun in its next release of StarOffice.
StarOffice’s crucial power, though, is in its ability to handle MS Office documents. It does not do so perfectly, but probably well enough for 95% of cases. For me it seamlessly opened MS Word and Excel documents, and saved as happily in those formats.
This kind of interchangeability is essential in a country as MS Word-centric as South Africa. The other powerful word processor available for Linux – WordPerfect 8.0 – is no good at opening Microsoft documents.
The suite incorporates a browser, e-mail, a presentation designer (Powerpoint clone), graphics design, Web publishing, scheduling, database and management applications. The graphics software is capable of importing Adobe Photoshop, EPS and AutoCAD documents, while some rate the presentation designer, StarImpress, better than PowerPoint.
StarOffice is a fairly resource-intensive application. Running in Red Hat Linux on a Pentium 166 with 32 megabytes, it was necessary to swap from KDE to a less hungry windows manager for it to run at a reasonable speed. Nonetheless, at 75 megabytes, compared to the 300 megabytes of MS Office, it remains comparatively lean.
Perhaps this is due to the application integration. The various components overlap, rather than running as separate programs. As you switch from word processing to spreadsheet or e-mail, only the application menus and toolbars change. Drag-and-drop is well supported between the applications. A Windows 95-style taskbar offers you quick access to all your other applications, and a system tray shows which are currently open.
For the Linux user, StarOffice represents a considerable step forward in evolving the operating system from being an obscure environment for which one must range far and wide to find applications fitting one’s needs.
For the Windows user it resembles a fantastic opportunity to capture a range of functionality for which one previously had to pay a great deal.
In years to come, the purchase of StarOffice may well be seen as a landmark in Microsoft’s fortunes. MS Office has long been their guaranteed cash cow. Their response to the StarOffice challenge will be crucial to their long-term fortunes.