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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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This is great!
This is a great program. It has saved time, money, and is so easy to use. You get an entire office suite.
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Great Value
Very pleased...If you are looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office you have found it.
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Better than Microsoft.
Better than Microsoft to use and understand. Got one for my wife to. Took office Microsoft Office.
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Finally, A Viable Alternative To MS Office.
I've used both Microsoft Office and StarOffice for a number of years, with the handling of Microsoft Office files critical to me. The current version of StarOffice, version 8, has finally evolved from earlier revisions into a program that can easily replace Microsoft Office. There are still some differences (a web page on the OpenOffice web site lists these in detail). And there are also some remaining minor issues, most quickly and easily resolved.
Regardless, StarOffice is a robust, reliable, and featured ladened set of applications (word Processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and draw). Most of these (excluding draw and database) can open/save Microsoft Office files effortlessly. If one doesn't have MS Office installed, one can even setup StarOffice to automatically handle MS Office files (when double-clicked in a folder, for example). As such, Microsoft Office did not get installed when I recently upgraded to a new computer. I'm now using StarOffice exclusively.
NOTES TO OTHER REVIEWERS:
To Eli (reviewer elsewhere here), complaining about ###### in Excel cells, your data was not lost. These symbols ("##") appear whenever text or numbers flow beyond the width of a column (because of differences between the default fonts used by the two programs, for example). To resolve the issue, change the font to a smaller one (select all & change), lower the font size (also select all & change), or increase the column width. Your data would have appeared intact.
To Julio, complaining about poor service, there is a massive amount of support data (FAQ's, tutorials, demos, videos, and so on) on the StarOffice and OpenOffice web sites. You questions would have to be truly exotic not to be covered at least somewhere in all that. However, if that were the case, join the OpenOffice forum and ask there. Many answering questions in that forum are directly involved in the OpenOffice/StarOffice project.
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Best Supported MS Office Alternative!
I have found that Sun's StarOffice is the best professionally supported replacement to Microsoft Office (those who don't mind going with community support can try the equally excellent open source derivative OpenOffice.org). I was also grateful enough for the fact that Sun gave me a free license to the software for being a college student (student discounts can't get any better haha).
Sun StarOffice includes the following main applications:
Writer- As the name implies, this is the StarOffice equivalent to Microsoft Word. In my experience, it has been compatible with most Word documents, both in opening them and saving into the format. I had no problems reading and creating documents for my online science course last semester and didn't find myself missing any of Microsoft's Word's features (admittedly, Microsoft Word has more extensive clip-art images than StarOffice, but then again, Google images quickly solves that problem if you should need your fix of cheesy clipart images).
Impress- This is the slideshow/presentation software equivalent of MS Powerpoint. Again, I had no significant issues I can recall when creating and reading documents in both the open format and the proprietary Microsoft one when exchanging documents with classmates and my professor through my e-learning class.
Calc - This is the spreadsheet software included with the package, obviously the equivalent of MS Excel. I don't really use the features of this application as extensively as the former two and usually find my needs met by a smaller/lighter spreadsheet application like Gnumeric. Still, it's there for you. And yet again, compatibility.
Base- This program is supposed to be the equivalent to MS Access. I don't use this program at all, though in terms of compatibility I think it works with most common database formats but requires Microsoft's ADO interface (?) in order to read MS Access files.
Then of course there's Draw, used for (guess?) vector drawing and whatnot as well as the Writer/Web html editor implemented in Writer.
For its price (both the one listed here on Amazon and the price I got it for) you can't go wrong. It has the most features regular users (people at home, students, some small businesses) will ever need and use and is often not just an equivalent, but better replacement for Microsoft Office in terms of price and functionality.
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