Star Office 6 Beta

Star Office (SO) users, particularly on Windows, had one grievance–the time the application took to open. Version 6 has taken care of that by eliminating the SO desktop. Now you can directly launch SO application much quicker. An addition, the Quickstarter, which appears as a butterfly icon on the system tray, makes repeated openings of the application pretty fast.



The Beta is a 95 MB download, that gives you three install options: standard (191 MB), minimum (127 MB) and custom installation in between. SO requires JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and version 1.3.1 is provided with the downloaded exe file. This has to be installed once you select the components you want to install. There’s also an option to install without Java.

SO 5.2 had Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, Chart, Image and Schedule. Version 6 sees some changes–the standard modules being Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Math, and optional ones being Quickstarter, Java, Adabas Database, Additional Fonts, Graphic Filters, Language support and a Sync Client. The database, like before, is not included in the download. Chart, Image and Schedule have been dropped. The interface has undergone a subtle facelift, with some of the icons being dropped to get breathing space.

The ability to import documents created in most other applications has been one of SO’s strong points. Optional text filters for Writer in version 6 are exhaustive, and well arranged (filters for all versions of WordPerfect are available together, for example). There are 110 filters here. Strangely, during installation SO attempts to replace the Arial font family, barring Arial itself, with new versions. Adabas database doesn’t get installed like before and has to be downloaded and installed separately.

When you ran version 5.2 for the first time, it gave the option of using SO as the default Internet application to do everything from e-mail to FTP. That is no longer the case. But the old nag–telling you that information may be lost, if you are not using SO formats–still exists.

Issues remain when importing presentations created in PowerPoint, the most significant one being that embedded OLE objects (a word document embedded in a PowerPoint slide, for example) do not show up correctly; the text looks jumbled. To set it right, you need to right click on the object, select original size, again right click, select OLE object/edit, and resize the object to get it to display properly. Incidentally, this problem was not there with version 5.2. Minor alignment issues in slides which have both text and graphics continue to be there.

Help is now better organized and detailed, with the ability to search for specific text. Although help mentions extensive mailmerge options, we could not find them. The form letter menu item from version 5.2 is missing in 6. But the item is present in the tools/configure window. So hopefully, it will be back with the final version and will be better than what it was in 5.2.

When it comes to sizing the components of a graph, like the graph and the legends, StarCalc does a better job than MS Excel in ensuring that everything can be properly read, given the size of the graph. In most other cases, MS Office has an edge when it comes to fine-tuning your work.

SO 6 does away with the major crib that users had about previous versions–slow in start up–and polishes up its act in most other areas. For the final verdict, we will wait till the final version is out.

Krishna Kumar at PCQ Labs