Summary: Comparisons are drawn between Star Office and SmartSuite 1.1 for Warp 4.

Put SmartSuite and Star Office side by side and your first glance will tell you they're worlds apart from each other. One is a collection of independent programs with features for helping them work together, the other is a single cohesive "environment" that emphasizes the document over the program. For a moment it's hard to decide which is the most monolithic. Is it the old one with the legacy, or the new one with its "do everything in one program" attitude?

But the devil is in the details, because both suites still stare a great deal between them. The key differences seem to be in philosophy, or how to get things done.

Data Sharing and Integration

What makes it clear that Star Office is far superior to SmartSuite for data sharing is seen in one drag-n-drop. Open Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Word Pro, create a simple table in 1-2-3, highlight it and try to drag-n-drop it to Word Pro - you'll fail because it won't let you do that. Now open Star Office and create a spreadsheet document and a text document, create a simple table in the spreadsheet document, highlight it and try to drag-n-drop it into the text document - success, the table gets inserted into the text.

Now it isn't all that bad in SmartSuite, you can copy the table to the clipboard and paste it into Word Pro instead of using drag-n-drop, but the difference is that the first and most obvious technique we tried failed in SmartSuite and succeeded in Star Office. OS/2 uses a drag-n-drop user interface, the maneuver seems natural.

But it doesn't end there either. When linking data that appears in more than one document, we found it was easier to keep the links "live" in Star Office than it was for links in SmartSuite. When you change the figures in the spreadsheet document you want the figures in the table you dropped into the text document to change instantly as well. To do this, SmartSuite uses an awkward system of DDE links(.GIF, 17K) that you must manage yourself, and which may or may not get re-established properly when you re-open the document. For example, we created a chart in 1-2-3 and pasted it into a Word Pro document, but when we changed the data for the table in 1-2-3, the changes did not automatically show up in Word Pro. These problems are not evident in Star Office.

Word Processing

A strength that Star Office exhibits over Lotus Word Pro are desktop publishing and layout features. Star Office has a "direct cursor" (also known as "Shadow Cursor" in Corel Wordperfect) that gives you the power to start typing anywhere on the page as soon as you create a new document. This "direct cursor" is simply a normal flashing cursor that follows the mouse around the screen. It jumps by tab breaks and lines instead of pixels, but it means that you don't have to tap the enter, tab or spacebar key multiple times just to position text in the middle of the screen or somewhere off to the side. Tools for drawing figures in Star Office's text documents are also significantly better than Word Pro's, with the ability to create and edit bitmap images using Star Office's simple but functional image editor.

Then take the now popular "auto-correct" feature. This is sometimes called on-the-fly spell correction (not checking, the word processor will correct "Teh" with "The" without prompting you, for example) or "text macros". The idea is that a replacement word or block of text is used to substitute a keyword the instant you finish typing it. This could be something as simple as correcting common typos on the fly ("becase" to "because") to inserting signatures, addresses and other frequently used blocks of text. I could program either Star Office or Word Pro to substitute my mailing address the moment I type "address1", for example. But while Word Pro only lets you create substitutions of words and paragraphs, Star Office's "AutoText" feature(.GIF, 8K) is considerably more flexible. With Star Office, creating an AutoText macro means having an entire page to work in. You can use text, tables, images, drawings, whatever you want. Then you could assign the keyword "MyDaughter" to automatically insert a photo of your baby daughter and a short paragraph that gives her name and date of birth.

Both suites also feature on-the-fly marking of misspelled words. In Word Pro your misspellings are highlighted in cyan, in Star Office they're underlined with a wavy red line similar to Microsoft Office. But while Word Pro will display a menu of its suggested corrections in a button at the bottom of the window, Star Office lists them with a right-click of the mouse over the misspelled word. My personal preference is the Star Office style.

But it's not all bad news for Word Pro. One feature we liked a lot in the Lotus word processor that isn't present in Star Office are the special views. Here you can pick from a variety of presentations that display your pages in a mix of thumbnail representations, outline views and draft views all in one. One, called "DocSkimmer"(.GIF, 30K) is our favorite. In one frame is a draft view for editing text, another frame has an outline view for arranging sections and headlines, and a third frame displays thumbnails of all pages in your document. All frames are updated in real-time, so as you type in one you can see the letters and changes appear instantly in the other views as well. Extremely handy for managing large documents and reports.

Yet one more feature that Word Pro can boast about is its "Ask the Expert" help system. With it you pose "How do I...?" style questions and Word Pro's sophisticated help system pulls up what it thinks is the right answer. Star Office has something similar in its Help Agent, but when we tried it we found it wasn't nearly as good as Word Pro's. "How do I link frames?" in Word Pro pulled up the right answer instantly, but the same question, even re-phrased a few times to use Star Office's terminology (it calls frames "text boxes"), didn't get us anywhere near an answer at all.

Spreadsheets

Both Star Office and Lotus 1-2-3 fight fair and well in regards to spreadsheet creation and editing. Star Office offers practically the same function set as 1-2-3 and adds to that with a function editor that makes it easy to assemble multiple functions together into a larger formula. Both have good editors for writing your own custom functions, with 1-2-3 using LotusScript as its programming language, and Star Office using Star Basic. Neither use Rexx.

Both also let you create charts by highlighting data and clicking on a chart creation icon. But we found that 1-2-3 was not only much faster than Star Office, creating a basic chart the instant you finish drawing its bounding rectangle and intelligently figuring out what's data and what's a label, but it was also faster at changing the chart's appearance later. Star Office, in comparison, wants you to go through its "wizard"(.GIF, 15K) before it'll actually create the chart, needs you to explicitly tell it if the first row or column contain the labels, and does not update the document's embedded chart on the fly like 1-2-3 does - only the dialog's preview thumbnail changes, and that's often too small. But both will update the charts on the fly if you change any of the data in the source table, of course.

Presentations and Graphics

It's almost no contest between Star Office and SmartSuite for drawing. Star Office wins by a very wide margin, sporting some of the best drawing tools we've seen on the OS/2 platform. Star Office is what you'd want if you needed the closest equivalent to Corel Draw. It features sophisticated 3D modeling tools(.GIF, 40K) (that let you fuse basic shapes together to make complex ones), bezier curves, a range of "connectors" that will draw connecting lines between objects and adjust those connections as you move the objects they connect, and even the elusively simple "text on a curve". But Lotus Freelance offers only the basics, a big disappointment for us.

Freelance also competes poorly against Star Impress - the presentations editor for Star Office. It's very hard to beat the intelligent user interface that Star Office has for switching between views and layout modes. It's truly a gadget lover's paradise.

The only failing that Star Office has, and which may be a deciding factor for laptop toting executives, is the fact that it doesn't come with a stand-alone presentations player. Freelance will let you "compile" your presentations into a small, highly portable program that you don't need the original Freelance application to play. Plus, Freelance can generate Windows or OS/2 versions of your presentations without actually needing both operating systems installed on your production machine. Star Office has nothing like this. You need to have the whole 70mb suite installed on the machine you wish to use for the presentation.

Finally, we found that Lotus Freelance has a much better selection of templates and Smart Masters (guides for creating common presentations, such as competitor analysis and sales reports) that you could use as a beginning for creating your presentations.

Databases

Star Office's database, despite claims of being updated with a new engine, still seems weak to us. Try as we might, we couldn't create a simple query that used multiple tables, despite its user interface hinting that it was supposed to be able to this. These kinds of queries are practically bread and butter for any database and are used for such simple tasks as identifying customers who have made more than X number of purchases or showing what employees are working on a given project. We also failed to embed a linked table into a form with Star Office. While it's possible to use drag-n-drop to insert the data from one table to another, doing something as simple as creating an order form (one that combines billing and shipping information from an address table with an items-ordered table) turned out to be a puzzle we couldn't solve.

Lotus Approach, by comparison, is easily a better database. It's easier to get started, it's more powerful, and if Star Office can create multi-table queries, it's Approach that has the more obvious method of doing it. Where Star Office fares better is integration again: the suite's address book is actually a database table that you can customize with its database functions, for example. Plus, you can use Star Office's "beamer" to display a table or query results so they're visible at all times, no matter what document or component you're using.

Both databases are suited only for home and small business use, however. These are not industrial strength databases that you could utilize as the back-end for a web site, for example, even though they'll both export reports to HTML format.

Personal Information Management

And what could ever compete with Organizer? Good question, and Star Office has a good answer. It's Star Schedule module(.GIF, 32K) does a good job of keeping track of events and ToDo lists, letting you combine those - and your address book - into a single screen: a feature that Organizer only loosely emulates. Star Office doesn't try to mimic a paper-and-leather organizer the way that Lotus does, but its clean interface is remarkably intuitive nonetheless. We especially liked the optional and context sensitive properties frame; click on a calendar event and the frame's contents adjust instantly to show further details, alarm settings and attachments.

What impressed us the most about Star Office's calendar was its reminder system. Oh it has the usual "pop up" reminder and alarm sound, but it can also send e-mail at a prescribed time (up to 2 days before the event) to any address you choose. A fantastic feature for organizing a team of remote workers or making sure you don't miss something important when you're on the road.

Star Office can import a limited number of other PIM's files, including Microsoft Outlook 97 and vCalendar files. But while it claimed to import Lotus Organizer events and ToDo lists as well, we didn't have any luck importing our Lotus Organizer for Warp 4 files into it. The Star Office address book is even more constrained: it can only import vCard files. If you have your address book in any other format you'll be in for a few hours of re-typing.

Overall

We think that the integration and data sharing abilities of Star Office are what you should consider the most when choosing between it and Lotus Smartsuite. Nearly everything else is a give-and-take. Not even file format support is a big issue, since the latest version of SmartSuite (1.1 for Warp 4, released recently), will import Microsoft Office 97 files as well as Star Office can.

The interface might be a deciding point for those who insist on using their own desktop rather than a secondary one that Star Office will impose. It might seem that Star Office would be slower than SmartSuite when it forces you to load the desktop, even if you only want the word processor, and while Star Office does take longer to start up than an individual SmartSuite component, we didn't find the margin of difference to be that considerable.

There's also, of course, the issue of continued support for the platform. Star Office 5 is the same on all platforms, even OS/2. All the extra features found in the Windows upgrade of 4.0 to 5.0 were found in the OS/2 upgrade too. And Star Division seems dedicated to OS/2 as much as for Linux and Mac. But Lotus SmartSuite cannot be viewed in the same light. Take Organizer, for example. On the Windows platform Organizer has been updated to a new version with more features and connectivity for Palm Pilot users. On OS/2, despite a refresh of SmartSuite being shipped only a couple of months ago, Organizer is still the same and Lotus have told us the newer version will not be ported. That, we think, is very important to consider.

Next: Our final conclusions...