I Can't Believe it's Free!
Written: May 30 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Stable, saves in many popular formats including MS Office, tons of features, free
Cons: not intuitive, help files inadequate
The Bottom Line: It's as powerful as MS Office, it's stable, it's portable, it's FREE. Get it
|
|
|
| evajung's Full Review: Sun StarOffice 5.2 Full Version for PC, Unix |
Star Office 5.2 is a complete office suite offered by Sun. The amazing part is that it's a fully functioning program, and available for download completely free of charge. There are no nag screens; and, if you choose the option upon downloading the program, Sun doesn't even contact you. You'll get no spam for installing this free program.
First, we have the download itself. It's HUGE: 80 Mb. On a cable modem it took me 9 minutes to download, so at 28.8 expect at least 4 hours on a good connection.
I find that the benefits of getting it far outweigh the time of downloading it. MS Office has nothing on Star when it comes to price. Obviously there is no comparison between free and $200-600.
Star Office 5.2 includes comparable versions of all Microsoft Office programs and includes:
1. Star Office Desktop, which is your basic control center for the suite;
2. Writer, it's word processing function;
3. Calc, a fully featured spreadsheet program;
4. Impress, a Powerpoint clone for presentations;
5. Draw, a graphic editing program for creating callouts and the like;
6. Schedule, a calendar program with most of the features of Outlook;
7. Base, a database program;
8. Mail, an Email client;
9. Discussion, for NTTP access;
10. Basic, for creating and editing macros;
11. Chart, for..umm...charts;
12. Image for editing graphics and photos;
13. and Math; for entering and calculating formulas.
Upon installing the suite (which is absolutely simple enough for a monkey to do it) and opening it; you are presented with an explorer type of interface showing the contents of your desktop and having its own "start" button and task bar. The start button accesses commands for new files by type (eg. spreadsheet, text); and the explorer bar on the left gives the same functions as well as mail and news, My Documents, Bookmarks, and Explorer.
Star Office also is fully integratable with the Web and can be used as a browser and Fax client. Also available are HTML editing capabilities and templates for all programs.
My favorite thing about Star (since I need to format MS Office documents for college) is that it will save any of your work in formats ranging from its own extension to Microsoft Office extensions and Unix extensions. It also opens most file types and suports opening and editing of Databases in several formats including SQL and FoxPro. So if I need to create a Powerpoint presentation I create it in Impress and save it as MS Powerpoint.
Email through IMAP or SMTP is simple, unless you need to use Password Authentication Protocol as it is apparently not supported. The database is difficult as well and is far from self explanatory.
The help files are obviously designed for users with extensive knowledge of all MS Office programs and approaches nothing from a beginner's angle. I can rarely find any "help" in its help agent.
The good news for these seeming discrepancies is that many good step by step guidebooks are available for Star Office users and are readily available both at online retailers and traditional booksellers. I'd like to list titles right now but IE just crashed and I have to close it...hehe.
I will list some ASAP.
Altogether Star is just as good as Office any time.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
evajung
|
|
Member: Eva Jung
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Reviews written: 28
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
Country girl and green lady who loves trees and adores children
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.