Sun's StarOffice 8 enhances Office features

Sun last week said it plans to release a new version of StarOffice that includes new features to address the software's compatibility with Microsoft Office, one of the chief areas of complaint among users of Sun's office productivity suite.

StarOffice 8 includes a macro converter that converts Microsoft Office macros to work in StarOffice, says Iyer Venkatesan, a product line manager at Sun. The product also enables easier conversion from Microsoft Office features such as tables and password-protected files.

Additionally, Sun improved the look and feel of the product to be more familiar to Microsoft Office users, he says.

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Sun last week said it plans to release a new version of StarOffice that includes new features to address the software's compatibility with Microsoft Office, one of the chief areas of complaint among users of Sun's office productivity suite.

StarOffice 8 includes a macro converter that converts Microsoft Office macros to work in StarOffice, says Iyer Venkatesan, a product line manager at Sun. The product also enables easier conversion from Microsoft Office features such as tables and password-protected files.

Additionally, Sun improved the look and feel of the product to be more familiar to Microsoft Office users, he says.

Other new features in StarOffice 8 are context-sensitive toolbars for specific tasks that automatically pop up when a user begins one of those tasks in an application, he says. For example, if a user begins to build a table in StarOffice's word-processing application, a toolbar for building tables will open, he says.

The toolbars can be placed anywhere on the screen depending on a user's choice, Venkatesan adds. In previous versions of the suite, toolbars were stationary.

StarOffice 8 is the first office productivity suite to support Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, as the standard for office documents. Developed within the standards body Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, OpenDocument is an XML-based file format that covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents.

OpenDocument gained attention recently when the commonwealth of Massachusetts decided to support the format for all office documents within the agencies of its executive branch. Sun believes there is a growth opportunity for StarOffice because it is the first commercial office suite to support OpenDocument, Venkatesan says.

Sun does not break out StarOffice sales, and it did not provide statistical information for any success the product might have against Microsoft Office in the market. However, says Herb Hinstorff, director of marketing for Sun's Client Systems Group, there have been more than 53 million downloads of StarOffice and OpenOffice, the open source version of the software on which Sun's suite is built.

StarOffice 8 is the first new version of Sun's office productivity suite in a year and a half. The new version originally was scheduled to be available in July but was delayed as OpenOffice.org made significant changes to its version of its software.

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