Sun StarOffice is an all in all product designed and developed by Sun Microsystems to provide all the benefits of Office suite to users at a very nominal cost when compared to other leading office suites dominating the industry. This office suite includes programs such as Writer, which is equivalent to word processor; Calc, an effective spreadsheet; Impress, that part of the suite which takes care of presentations; Draw, used for graphical purpose; and Base, which provides the simple database part of the office suite. This suite is very conscious of its professional look and sleek image, and this quality keeps this suite far ahead from many other suites fighting to get a share in the low cost market.

The Writer and Calc are the most sought out and enquired products of this suite. And the makers of this suite have well understood the expectations. These products are compatible with Microsoft Word and Excel files and can open and edit the doc and xls as well as the files from Office 2007. However, there are some formatting issues in opening files from Office 2007, such as docx and xlsx from this suite of products. By itself, the Writer and Calc perform extremely excellent and provide almost all the features available with MS Office counterparts. This suite is also compatible with other developmental projects such as MS SharePoint, Alfresco CMS, and MySQL and also allows us to integrate with popular websites like Wikipedia. This suite does not provide its own email client, but has integrated with Mozilla’s Thunderbird for email and calendar services.

The reliability of this office suite works to its advantage since it is supported and funded by Sun Microsystems. The customer care and community services are well established and standardized. The regular updates from Sun on its platforms also keep in mind the stability features of this suite. The most mentionable feature of this suite is its affordability and reliability. Though there may be some features which may be not as attractive as the MS Office suite, there have been constant improvements in the look and feel and above all functionality aspect of the suite. The productivity index of this software is on the rise with every new version release and this is what an end user will be interested in looking out in office suites. Above all, this software is comparatively cheaper when compared to MS Office suite which makes a budget savvy user much happier.