Google Pack now includes StarOffice as a free download

Posted on August 15, 2007 at 10:12 am

According to a press release from Google and Sun almost two years ago, a concerted effort was going to be made to make Open Office more widely available to the public. Now, suddenly and without much fan-fare, you will find that the Google Pack page includes the once $70 version of StarOffice for free. StarOffice uses the same code base as OpenOffice, but StarOffice has added a number of features, including a spell-checker, thesaurus, Windows fonts, and clipart.

StarOffice sports a Writer, which replaces Word, Impress, which replaces PowerPoint, Calc, which replaces Excel, Base, which replaces Access, and Draw, which replaces Visio. The cool thing about using a program like StarOffice is the fact that it’s free and you can download a plug-in for Microsoft Office that will allow you to easily convert between the two formats. So if you use StarOffice as your main productivity suite, but your clients or others use MS Office, that’s not a problem because you can import and export documents between both programs.

Also, StarOffice has some pretty advanced features that make it a viable alternative to the massive Office 2007, including the ability to add digital signatures to documents, the ability to create files in XML format, create your own databases and display them in a document or spreadsheet, mail merge, XP and VISTA compatible desktop themes, and the ability to export to PDF. Here’s a competitive view between MS Office and StarOffice.

Of course, MS Office only runs on Windows, but StarOffice runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. MAC OSX is also supported, but through OpenOffice, not StarOffice. And you can install StarOffice on as many computers as you like without having to worry about licensing costs, etc.

In previous years, these open source apps were so far behind MS Office that no one took them seriously, but now that thousands of people develop and refine them over years, it has become a good alternative for those sick of a slow Windows Vista, unchangeable Office Ribbon toolbar, or other annoying Microsoft problems and issues.

An example of the Writer software

Best of all, now that Google is involved with the whole project, you can be assured that there will be continual support, invest, and refinements. Before when the program was written and managed by random developers around the world, it was hard to find support, get updates, etc. With Google and Sun, you’ll get a quality product for no cost. Enjoy!

Source: http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/013417.html