14 DAY TRIAL // Although the Mountain View company works on its own Office suite meant to compete with the famous Microsoft Office, Google made a major addition to the Pack of software offered for free. StarOffice, a package of utilities that includes StarWriter, StarCalc, StarImpress, StarDraw and StarBase is now available for download within Google Pack, the collection of free utilities provided by the Mountain View company Google. StarOffice is created by Sun Microsystem and allows you to work with most document formats compatible with Microsoft Office.
"Because the StarOffice installer is such a large file (up to 210MB depending on your language), we recommend a broadband connection for faster installation. If you have a dial-up connection, it may take several hours to download. However, during that time, Google Updater will manage the download so you can still surf the Web and use your computer for other tasks," Google informs the user on the official page of the Google Pack.
As I said, the tools included in the StarOffice are all able to replace the famous Microsoft Office suite and work with its formats. For example, StarWriter is the word processor that is very similar with Microsoft Word. StarCalc works just like Microsoft Excel while StarImpress is a freeware PowerPoint alternative.
The latest version of the StarOffice suite comes with better compatibility with Microsoft Office, a function that might boost the number of interested users. "Enhanced import and export filters give you seamless word processing, spreadsheet, presentations and support for password-protected Microsoft Word and Excel documents. Your tables, headers, footers, and formatting, even complex Excel formulas and text frames, will all look better," the creator of StarOffice mentiones on the official page.
Just as usual, if you don't want to download StarOffice from Google's Pack, you can take it straight from the official page of the producer available on this link.