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Reviews May 2006 • Vol.17 Issue 5 Page(s) 20-22 in print issue |
Productive Gains Office Suites For Less Than $100 | ||
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Jump to first occurrence of: [STAROFFICE] [8] When it comes to office suites, many users assume they have only one option: to spend a lot of money. A retail copy of Microsoft Office Standard edition costs $399. Its most visible competitors—Corel WordPerfect Office and Lotus SmartSuite—start at nearly $300 each. Even the upgrade editions of these suites cost $100 or more. However, alternatives exist. Off-brand office suites, such as the ones profiled here, offer a wide range of features at a modest price. We advise budget-minded home and small-office computer users to consider these packages the next time they go shopping for productivity software.  602PC SUITE 4.1 602PC SUITE is software with a past. It was developed in 1989 by a company that originated as a computer club in communist Czechoslovakia. (The 602 refers to the club’s government licensing number.) After giving the suite a once-over in the present, we think it also has a future. We had a good experience with 602PC SUITE. The download was quick, installation was a breeze, and registration no more of a hassle than Microsoft’s product activation process. Best of all, the learning curve for each component was minimal. Like the other off-brand office suites included in this roundup, the one from Software602 looks and acts a lot like Microsoft Office. Users who know anything about Word and Excel will quickly feel at home. The suite’s menus and toolbars come loaded with familiar commands and identifiable icons, for instance, and the program’s various components support all of the popular file formats for effortless sharing of files and documents. Of course, significant differences exist between 602PC SUITE and its American competition. For one thing, this office suite consists of only four components: 602Text for word processing, 602Tab for building spreadsheets, 602Photo for editing digital images, and 602Album for organizing digital images. And each component comes up short on extended functionality. 602Text boasts a multilanguage spellchecker and a MagicText feature for creating word art, for instance, but lacks support for programmable macro commands. Likewise, 602Tab can interface with ODBC (Open Database Connectivity)-compliant databases but cannot do pivot tables or error checks. But not all of the differences are negative. The Photo and Album components are nice extras, even if they do little more than provide basic image editing and organizing capabilities. The Read tool does an admirable job of converting alphanumeric characters to audio track in both 602Tab and 602Text. It correctly read “MB” as “megabyte,” for example, and translated “gen. practice” as “general practice.” We also appreciated the Export To PDF function, which converts any 602PC file to the PDF (Portable Document Format) file format. Microsoft Office doesn’t do that. Not yet, anyway. Finally, support options are quite good. Users can find answers using the downloadable users manual, online knowledge base, or interactive support forums. Email and phone support is available at a rate of $49.95 and $59.95, respectively.  Ability Office Professional 4 Ability Office has been around in one form or other for more than 20 years. And while it may have an established record in its native England, the office suite remains a relative unknown in the United States. The full-featured suite delivers six components in one package. There’s the expected spreadsheet and text editor (known as Spreadsheet and Write, respectively), along with a database, presentation application, drawing program, and image editor. Users also have the option of buying components individually or in other combinations. That’s a big plus for users with specific needs. However, we got off to a bumpy start with Ability. The product installs directly from the Web by default, which would be quite convenient if not for the network disruptions that interrupted the installation and forced us to restart the download from the beginning. Things got a bit confusing when it came to product registration, too. No instructions were provided, and we were prompted to enter the 18-character registration code each time we opened a component for the first time. Once the suite was up and running, however, our experience improved dramatically. The text editor and spreadsheet closely model themselves after Microsoft Office. In fact, users can configure the programs to mimic their preferred version of Office: Office 2003, Office XP, or Office 2000. We chose 2003 and were impressed by the similarities. Spreadsheet and Write also boast several advanced features, including support for macros and mail merge. Ability’s other components offer baseline functionality but, as expected, lack the extended features found in their name-brand counterparts. Each application supports output to PDF, and usability was never an issue. We liked the self-help wizards in Database and especially appreciated the well-equipped Photopaint Studio, which supports layers, 48-bit color, and a MagicWand tool for easy selection of like-colored objects. We had no problem importing existing files into the suite’s various components, although we remain cognizant of the fact that importing complex documents into these—or any other non-Microsoft—applications could present the occasional difficulty.
StarOffice 8
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