I've been using OpenOffice as my primary office tool at work and home since beta C was released last year.

Last week I purchased the StarOffice 6.0 office suite from Sun and installed it.

After a week of playing I find that it is an excellent product. In addition to what OpenOffice has, StarOffice also includes a 461 page printed manual that is very good, the Adabas database, and the Samples subdirectory, which includes tons of icons, images, templates, soundbytes, etc... Both come with xbase odbc access built in, so Adabase may or may not be an advantage. So far, I have not encountered any operational differences and I've used both to open 4 MB Word documents, 2MB Excel documents, and the CAD functions in both are the same. While the menu structures are different, the active keys in the OO spreadsheet are the same as Excels, and Excel powerusers at work find they can use the same keystrokes in OO without experiencing a learning curve.

I've never used Presentation Manager in WinXX and so I've never learned to use it's equivilent in OO or SO, but I've been able to open PM documents in OO with no problems. In both WinXX or Linux SO/OO looks, feels and operates the same. Neither OO nor SO have crashed on me, on either platform.

If you have a copy of StarOffice 5.2 the Samples subdirectory can be zipped up and installed on your copy of OpenOffice.

Office users have a choice, and choice is great!