Version 8 of the MS Office wannabe, “Star Office” has now been released as a public beta.
Version 8 of MS Office wannabe, Star Office has now been released as a public beta. If you’d like to try it out, start at this Sun website.
Naturally Star Office support Microsoft Office document formats as well as the XML based WordML and SpreadsheetML formats and password protected Word and Excel docs.
One of the highlights of Star Office is the native support for saving to PDF format with hyperlinks and table of contents – something that Office users have to pay extra for.
If you’re into creating forms then Star Office v8 supports the W3C standard XForms.
Looking through the ‘whats new’ document will give MS Office users a sense of deja vu – for example StarOffice Writer now has nested tables, a Format Paintbrush, hidden text attribute, word count in selections, which Word users have enjoyed for years.
That’s not to say that Star Office is bad – we’d love to see a healthy and competitive Office suite market – but Star Office won’t be any serious competitor to Microsoft. However if your needs and budget are modest then it is worth keeping in mind that you don’t have to fork out many dollars when a decent word processor, spreadsheet, presenter and database is available for free.
Star Office is a cross-platform product with versions for Solaris, Linux and Windows – but not strangely Mac.
