Sun StarOffice 5.2 Deluxe

When I first loaded StarOffice its unfamiliar layout, the Beamer feature, and poor reference documentation made me crazy. I actually uninstalled the product for a while. That's all changed. I love the knowledge/document management abilities of beamer, the web-like interface, and built in browser... to name a few features.

StarOffice 5.2 is a very well integrated product. It is not yet ready to challenge the market position of MS Office but Star's developers are on the right track. Version 5.2 is an excellent choice for home use, small business, and students. Particularly students (or their parents) who are concerned about the financial consequences of software piracy that go with "borrowing" a copy of MS Office!


Why pay when they give it way for free?   September 19, 2000
Chris Peters (Austin, Texas)
14 out of 16 found this review helpful

Am I missing something? Sun, the publisher of this product, offers StarOffice 5.2 as a free download on their web site - no gimmicks, no catches. The only hitch is the 102MB file size, quite big for modem users. Just leave your computer on overnight and download it.

Amazon will probably pull this review, but why not inform their customers? We're mostly repeat buyers here, and some people need to own the CD anyway. Show your support - Take the $ you just saved and buy something else on Amazon.


Why is anyone still using Microsoft Office?   February 5, 2002
Gabrielle Jacobs (Minneapolis, MN)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful

I think it's amazing that the whole world hasn't adopted StarOffice yet. IT'S A FREE OFFICE SUITE THAT HANDLES MS OFFICE FORMATS. Cripes. Does anyone think MS Office doesn't have enough money yet? ;>

Nothing for Mac users yet, but it runs on Windows and Linux and Solaris, and that covers a lot of people.

I've used it for about 6 months and I have no idea why anyone would still be flinging their money at MS Office. StarOffice isn't perfect, but neither, by a long shot, is MS Office. (I think the last time Word was a good product was 1995, on a Mac.) StarOffice is kind of like a proxy to MS Office--it reads and writes all the Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. files that everyone sends you, and you can send anyone a StarOffice file in the MS Office file of their choice. But, of course, you don't have to actually have or PAY for MS Office. And you get a couple nice little drawing/picture editing programs that can do pretty decent stuff. (Not a substitute for PhotoShop, but PhotoShop is $700.) I was messing around with old college files in Corel and WordStar, and StarOffice even opened those.

You're probably going to need a book to use it fully. It's not hard to get started and do basic stuff, there's lots of wizards and everything, but every time you right-click there's 10 more features that you'll be able to use a lot easier if you've got a book. I strongly recommend "StarOffice Companion" by Floyd Jones. Every time I look in the index or the contents, I find the thing I'm looking for, and the instructions tell me exactly how to do it, and it works. It's kind of amazing. ;> Oh, and it tells you right at the front how to turn off the Microsoft-like Helpful Tips and autoformatting and stuff.


It's a MUST for multiple platform users   August 5, 2000
Mr RM PAOLILLO (Barletta, Bari Italy)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

I usually do not like writing reviews for products because some of them have good and bad qualities at the same time but on this occasion it is worth spending a couple of minutes to talk about my impressions since the price is nothing compared with what you get. I tried SO both on Windows and Linux OS and the result is: "simply the best Office Suite ever". I use it for my maths and statistics notes, the result is a better productivity using STAR MATH. Not to mention the Spreadsheets and a much more integrated and intuitive database. Of course the price is accessible for everyone, I would pay even more for a product like this. I have to admit that Microsoft Office is more stable on a Windows Platform but I still prefer StarOffice. The only drawback I found is that SO uses a lot of resources and I suggest 128 MB of RAM. OFFICE 2000 has the same problem as far as I am concerned.


Good, but try the free download version first   April 9, 2001
R. Current (Tucson, AZ)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

There isn't much in here that isn't in the download version, fonts and clipart I guess... I have both, got the full version as a gift, and didn't notice much diffrence.