In the category of Productivity Applications, the eWeek Excellence Awards1 judges were looking for products that do more than just copy Microsoft's Office suite. Sun's StarOffice 8 does just that, offering unique features and a multiplatform system that uses ISO-standard OpenDocument Format (ODF).
[1] eWEEK Excellence Award Winner is a trademark of Ziff Davis Holdings Inc. Used under license.
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StarOffice 8 Update 10 Available Now With PDF/A Support The new chart engine introduced with Product Update 8 has been improved even further. StarOffice can now export to PDF/A which is a popular ISO standard for archiving read-only documents. In addition, Calc has improved DataPilot and Text to Column functionality, and Writer now has an easier way of changing the spell checking languages. Finally, Product Update 10 introduces VBA support, allowing a number of existing VBA macros to be run unmodified.
StarOffice 8 Server - PDF Converter Now Available The StarOffice 8 Server is designed to convert a large number of documents into PDF. It provides two interfaces: a web-based interface for integration into portal pages and a Java web service interface which initiates document conversion tasks from a web service client.
Introducing New and Powerful Extensions for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org Extensions are small add-ons that provide new functionality to StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.3. They include tools for many useful things like blogging, generating fancy database reports and sending and receiving faxes. The extensions are easy to install and even easier to use. Best of all, most of the extensions are free!
Microsoft Office users can now import and export to Open Document Format
The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plugin is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC).
The Plugin is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently, and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Office users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. The ODF Plugin runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in 16 different languages.
