Microsoft Office Is the Most Popular Comprehensive

Microsoft Office is the most popular comprehensive bundle of productivity applications in the world. It contains word publishing, spreadsheet, presentation, e-mail, and database software and is most often used with the Microsoft Windows operating system. It can also be used with the Apple Macintosh. The Microsoft Office suite enjoys almost universal worldwide familiarity. The most recent version of MS Office is Office XP, which is designed specifically to be compatible with the Windows XP environment.

Functionally, Sun StarOffice is very similar to Microsoft Office. The chief difference is that it is written using open source code and may be altered by programmers to match their specifications. It is the most popular system for Linux and Unix-based computers and utilizes an XTML-based interface. It is considered an 'alternative' to the Windows system because it is popular with developers, who often criticize Microsoft for the fact that the source code is unavailable and the product may not be reverse engineered for the purpose of open scientific inquiry. Whereas only Microsoft employees work with Microsoft products, Sun Star is organic and dozens of free upgrades become available as more software engineers tinker with the source code.

Microsoft Word is considered the standard text editor. Other text editors, such as the one that is bundled with the Windows package, lack essential functions such as a spell checker and the ability to easily add graphics, graphs, tables and html-compatible functionality. One of MS Word's key features is that it allows the user to customize the toolbar. MS Word can utilize some of the functions of the other Office suite products and reference the files directly. The key difference between MS Word and the word processor that is available with StarOffice is that StarOffice edits documents using an xml format, making these documents readable by most Internet browsers as xml is an Internet format. StarOffice Writer can also convert files to PDF format for easy sharing, as this is the most popular format for scanned text documents.

Microsoft Excel is a fairly comprehensive spreadsheet program, and is used primarily intra-organizationally to provide internal reports. It features the ability to maintain workbooks with inter-referenced functions. In addition to its more basic features, MS Excel is used heavily in financial and quantitative analysis and may perform complex statistical functions with the help of an included analysis toolpack. The StarOffice spreadsheet program, Calc, is modeled after Excel, and both follow a format that was originally developed by Lotus.

Microsoft Outlook is a program that is used to send, receive and sort e-mail. It allows one to log on to remote e-mail servers through a POP3/SMTP connection and also can access a mail server on a shared local access network. It has scheduling features that allow a group of people to arrange a shared schedule and work accordingly. Whereas StarOffice lacks such a program, it contains a program called 'Draw' which can be used to edit and create pictures. The lack of an Outlook-style feature is due to the fact that this functionality is usually built into Unix-based systems.