October 10, 2001
I've been testing Sun's StarOffice 6.0 beta and have to say it's excellent. Truly. It's everything that I'd hope to find in an office suite. Superb interoperability with Microsoft Office, even Word's revision marks. I'm pleased, too, with their use of an XML file format. See Matt Sergeant's Adventures with OpenOffice and XML for more discussion of that. If you're looking at office software, even just a word processor, I happily encourage you to check it out. It's even a free (albeit hefty) download.
My only complaint is that there is no version for the Mac. I'll have to wait for an OS X port of OpenOffice (the open source version of StarOffice, sorta what Mozilla is to Netscape). Pity, too, since AppleWorks pretty much sucks. I'd happily drop MS Office in favor of StarOffice, especially considering the $500 price tag on Office2002 for the Mac.
