Summary: Is it an operating system? Is it a desktop replacement? Is it a word processor that got hopelessly carried away? No, it's Star Office 5.0, the free (for personal use) office suite from Star Division. It's the Application that earns the capital 'A'. But just why would you want it?

The price of Star Office 5.0 dropped to a couple of hours on the internet last autumn if you wanted it only for personal use. Hundreds of thousands of OS/2, Linux, Mac and Windows users have paid up in modem hours already to use what they might have thought was a Microsoft Office killer. Well the price is right: free... as long as you have the time to download its 70 megabyte installation file (which is not available broken up into smaller chunks). But closer examination reveals that Star Office can look like a dog to more than just your phone line.

We've broken up the review of Star Office differently than we have in the past. Instead of reviewing its individual components (word processor, spreadsheet etc.) we've taken a more horizontal approach; focusing on aspects we only loosely talked about before, such as its Internet capabilities, user interface and integration, how it compares to Lotus Smartsuite for Warp 4, followed by our conclusions as to its value and worth for the tasks it was designed for.

What Is In Star Office 5?

Everything up to and including the kitchen sink(.GIF, 32K) can be found in Star Office 5, which we imagine could earn a legend not unlike that of large cities: You can visit it for the day, but you'll never discover all of it if you stayed for a year. Star Division has tried very hard to think and take care of almost everything you could want for office duties, and to that they've probably succeeded better than anyone else has. But that should send up a few warning flags with the savvy and battle hardened users out there: trying to do everything means that it'll often do too much, and do it badly.

Being a document oriented application, it's main components such as Star Writer and Star Calc are de-emphasized in favor of what they actually edit. So to give you an idea of its scope, here's what it handles:

• Text documents
• Web pages
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations
• Drawings
• Databases
• Schedules
• Charts and graphs
• Images

I could probably list another page worth, but these are the main types that Star Office is best at handling. In the main three categories -- text documents, spreadsheets and drawings or presentations, Star Office is remarkably competent. It honestly and easily delivers first class power and features that'll have you productive in no time. Databases are a somewhat questionable, for while Star Office can connect to tables on remote ODBC servers, it's own engine isn't terribly impressive. We found it impossible to create a query that links two or more tables, for example.

Installation and Documentation

Installation is great, documentation is awful -- at least the online help is. While help files are all you get in the free personal version, Star Office does offer a deluxe, purchasable version that comes on CD and includes printed manuals. In addition to what the boxed version comes with, Star Division also self-publishes a number of additional guides that can be bought separately.

We found that the online help for the suite is grossly incomplete. There are detailed instructions for dealing with the Star Office Desktop (more on that later), but detailed manuals for the individual components were not to be found. Star Office does have a "tooltip" system that can display extended help for each button you hover your mouse over, or you can use a help agent window that annoyingly hovers over your work.

OS/2 Integration

Help is not available in .INF format and this is only the beginning of a depressing trend towards Star Office's OS/2 apathy. There's almost no Workplace Shell integration whatsoever, no support for Rexx, it doesn't even use OS/2's look and feel! Star Office will override practically all of your window controls. It has it's own system for that, which can be set to mimic the Windows, Macintosh, or Unix appearances, plus a laughable recreation of the OS/2 look and feel. If you've installed Object Desktop or Smart Windows or any other utility that changes the appearance of, or enhances the functionality of OS/2's window controls, they won't have any effect within Star Office's own desktop and sub-windows. As you'll see in the screenshots, only the Star Office main window title-bar will betray any evidence of running on a customized OS/2 machine.

Foreign Document Support

Star Office can read and write to a considerable variety of document formats, including those of Microsoft Office. Star Writer can read and write to Word 97 documents (but with trouble handling those that used Word's "Fast Save" feature), Star Calc can handle Excel 97 files and Star Impress can read PowerPoint 97 presentations (although not save to them).

Conspicuously absent from its array of import filters is support for DeScribe and Lotus Smartsuite for Warp 4 formats. We found that Star Office could not read Lotus Word Pro or Organizer files, and actually dealt with the problem by launching Word Pro or Organizer itself - since both were installed on our test systems. This was the one exception to our "no WPS integration" rule, of course: it could launch files according to their WPS associations.

Performance

Our recommendation is not to try Star Office on anything with less than 32 megs of RAM. While it's very efficient for what does, making copious use af shared code, it's still crammed with a lot of features anyway. It's also impossible to load only the word processor, or only the spreadsheet. You have to load that and the Star Office desktop too.

Performance also lagged severely when using either its e-mail or Newsreader features. Both had a tendency to lock up the suite and make it spin its wheels frantically.

Next: The Star Office User Interface...