The Lab now has a site license for StarOffice version 7 for both Linux and Windows systems. StarOffice is a suite of applications which replicates many of the features of Microsoft Office.

According to Lab users and outside reviews, the new version is greatly improved over the previous StarOffice 6.0. StarOffice is based on open source software and packaged by Sun Microsystems. The new version is now available at no charge from the Lab’s software download page.

John Staples, who represents the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division on the Lab’s Computing and Communications Services Advisory Committee, has been a StarOffice user for several years and offered an assessment of the new version. Here are his main points:

• Version 7.0 starts much faster, and the Windows version has a fast start option.
• It generates high-quality PDF files.
• It can be installed over StarOffice 6.0 as an upgrade, and all configuration files are correctly updated
• The fonts are significantly improved and the substitutions for familiar Windows fonts are generally good.
• Impress, the PowerPoint clone, is particularly good, and the bullets are now reproduced correctly.
• The equations package works well with Word files -- if the equations in Word are described correctly.
• The charts in the Excel clone look a little primitive initially, but the flexibility is there to produce some very good looking charts with a little work.

Although Staples noted that Version 7.0 did hang on a particularly complex file, overall the latest version is “a significant improvement over StarOffice 6.0.”

Read a previous article about StarOffice. Read a review of Version 7.0.