Re:StarOffice vs. MS Office 2000 (Score 3)

Though I can't comment a great deal about the extended functionality of StarOffice, one line regarding extended featuresets in general caught me eye:

> The new features offered in Office 2000 however useless do seem to be more abundant.

The uselessness of features is generally true of about 95% of the functionality for any given user of an office suite. I agree that most of the features in O2K are decidedly not the type of functionality that the average person is interested in; it is important to note, however, that for each time that a user actually does use one of these obscure features, the following generally hold true:

• That user experiences a major boost in productivity because an otherwise tedious or complex task has been automated or simplified;
• A document that has used one of these obscure features can be edited by pretty much any other installation of that office suite (assuming either full install or ready access to the installation source);
• The more a user can use the obscure internal functionality of an office suite, the fewer obscure function-specific applications the user will need to acquire, run, and distribute;
• The fewer specialized applications an office needs, the less of a support headache that office is going to have.

Thus, the average word-processing user has little use for things like column layout options; multi-editor, multi-version markup tools; flowcharting; advanced statistical analysis tools; and other niche functionalities. To users who need that one little feature, though, the ability to use the same office suite as everybody else in the office saves incredible amounts of time, effort, and frustration.

$0.02,
Sundiata