Sun's StarOffice 7 Office Suite, the big brother to OpenOffice came out recently and I decided to pick up a copy (MSRP $79.95).
Any office suite that wants to take on Microsoft Office (as most do) has to be compatible with its file formats and StarOffice does a pretty good job. I have not run it through any kind of test suite, but it read our 120-page masters capstone project (created in Word 2000) and I found only three problems.
The first is the pagination changed. I'm not sure if I tried to set the default margins it would have kept the page breaks but in a document this large, having to go through it page by page to check the breaks is not a Good Thing.
The second is an embedded bullet list. The list shows a numbered list with bullets within the numbers. To be fair, I had a heck of a time formatting the list in MS Office so it shouldn't be a surprise that StarOffice also had problems.
The last problem is with the margins for some imported Excel spreadsheets. The print area was wider than the page and would required some reformatting to fit.
For the most part, I consider these problems as being minor but only you can decide how important they are.
As for me, I still need to test how well a WordPerfect document, which StarOffice, unlike OpenOffice, is supposed to be able to open and edit, works. But if you don't need WordPerfect compatibility, and don't want to send a lot of money to Redmond, you may want to check it out.
