Summary: With two major office suites available for OS/2, why should you pick this one? We give our final thoughts on Star Office.

How do we dislike thee? Let us count the ways. Star Office is very very slick in its design and its functionality, but boy do we wish it wouldn't impose its own desktop environment on us. We can understand that Star Division was not only looking to be radical and innovative, it was also looking to provide a consistent and identical experience across all of the platforms it supports. But we also think they could have done the same without simply trying to create an mini operating system in the process.

Among our other gripes with Star Office is its painfully slow File Open and Save As dialogs, which are very graphical, but do not update as fast as the standard OS/2 ones do. Quite often we would click on what we thought was the file we wanted, only to discover that at that very second Star Office had decided to list a few more folders and we clicked on the wrong thing.

And then of course there's the issue of stability. Many times during our testing, the product closed with an abrupt, but at least polite error message (it also saved the files we were working on too, so they weren't disasters). And about as often we also discovered that Star Office had stopped responding to the keyboard. Mouse operations worked fine, the keyboard worked fine outside of Star Office, but within the application we couldn't type a thing. All of these problems required a restart of the program.

On the sunny side, Star Office is at least very efficient in design and coding. It's big, but there's a lot of code reuse going on. The second desktop notwithstanding, Star Office's user interface is extremely well designed. We really liked the way you could dock toolbars and palettes where you wanted them. The components themselves are also very powerful and seriously comparable to Microsoft Office and SmartSuite (except where noted, such as with the database).

There's a lot we didn't say about Star Office in this review that we would have liked to, but the simple reason for that is we'd still be typing it all up by the time 6.0 becomes available. There's much to be found in this suite.

Lastly, the price can't be beat at all. You have to admit it, Star Division has got its competitors nailed there. Go to their web site and you can download the full personal edition of the suite if you're prepared to give them a little information about yourself and wait through a 70 megabyte transfer.

As much as we hate to say it, we think Star Office has an edge over SmartSuite. If you're contemplating which suite to go with for now and the future, Star Office is the one we recommend the highest. It's the one we think has the best future.

Star Office 5.0 by Star Division MSRP: Free for personal use