I will own up straight away, I am a Microsoft Office and Word user. I use it every day and I am still finding new alleyways. Writing was always a pleasure but with Word that pleasure is intensified.

So it was with considerable trepidation that I installed the integrated system, Star Office. Would it damage things? No. Would the word processor Writer be pathetic at the side of Word? It isn’t. Would it take staff and students a long time to learn? No.

Star Office, now owned by Sun Microsystems, has been around some time and has been developed to a point where it is beginning to challenge Microsoft Office. It runs on a number of operating systems - Solaris, Linux and Windows.

Writer

The word processor is the heart of Office suites. Writer is arguably the most sophisticated of the modules in the Star Office suite, with similar capabilities to Word.

Most of the main things are there: outlining, frames, columns, image import plus integrated graphics and charting. There is a spell-checker, Thesaurus and auto-correction. It is easy to add footnotes, endnotes and cross-references. The important thing is to be compatible with Word. All the Word documents that I tried to open did so with ease, except the ones that contained a number of features. File sizes in Star Office are much smaller than in Word.

Writer does everything you’d expect it to and a little bit more (I was also told that it did not have a word count - it does under file

properties

statistics). Some things are even a little better. The “word completion” feature is great. What I do miss are the extras. You can’t summarise, for instance. Online collaboration is limited. But these are carping criticisms.

Calc

Calc, the spreadsheet program lacks the sophistication of Excel. There are 360 financial and statistical functions written in. It is easy to do charts. Outline a range of cells and you can chart its contents with a few mouse clicks. Once you’ve prepared your worksheet and analysed your data, it’s easy to present it as either graphs or charts. The presentation is enhanced by the style dialogue box, which enables quick switching between a range of 19 predefined colour schemes. You can have multiple sheets in the same document and several documents open at once, which means complex models can be set up and maintained using the application.

Impress

This is the version of PowerPoint and it does not stand comparison. The basics are there: drawing, outline, slides, notes and handout views. This is probably the weakest part of the package.

Draw

Draw is superb and will stand comparison with anything in this range. It has both vector and bitmap images. You can do some very sophisticated things: rotating and resizing 3D creations for example. It is also possible to change the lighting to produce multiple effects.

Everything can be exported to the other Star Office modules. You also get a copy of the ADABAS database. This seems rather an add-on and does not install with the rest of the suite.

Being blunt, Star Office is not quite as good as Microsoft Office. But then look at the price! You also need to look at the restrictions that Microsoft imposes regarding licencing.

I would recommend it for light users of Word and Excel, Writer and Calc will do most things. Draw is superb, better than anything in Microsoft Office.

Star Office 6.0 from Learning PathwaysAnnual cost for unlimited use is pound;50 per primary school; pound;50 per special school; and pound;150 per secondary schoolPackage includes a licence for staff and student use at home, free hotline support and free upgradeswww.learnpath.comTel: 0800 768 6025