When Bristol City Council began to investigate its options for a new office software suite, the biggest issue for users was compatibility with their existing software.

Council staff wanted to know that they could do their jobs with as little change as possible – and ideally none at all. As a result we put a lot of effort into comparing the support for functions used by our staff in MS Office and StarOffice, and confidently predict that other Councils will need to do the same.

This report summarises our practical experience of evaluating and using StarOffice 7, and also compares the features available in StarOffice 8, released in September 2005. The features we describe are all available in OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 or 2.0 respectively. We compare with MS Office 2003 as the current version of the dominant product.

The report aims to answer the question of how compatible StarOffice and OpenOffice.org really are with MS Office. Councils who use this data will be able to speed up their decision making and reduce their costs in the process.

Download "A Feature Comparison of MS Office, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org" (PDF, 1.3MB)