Get StarOffice Free with Google Pack
Google Pack, a nifty bundle of free software (including such gems as Google Earth, Picasa, and Spyware Doctor), just landed a major addition: Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 8. This full-featured office suite ($70 if purchased directly from Sun) includes a word processor, spreadsheet manager, presentation builder, database, and drawing tool. As noted on the Google Operating System blog:
[StarOffice] has support for most Microsoft Office formats (except for the formats introduced in Office 2007), but it can also export documents as PDF out of the box.Shut up! A free office suite from Google? I am so there. Admittedly, it's a bit puzzling Google didn't choose open-source fave OpenOffice.org, a similarly comprehensive suite, but maybe we'll find out the reason behind this in the near future. (The aforementioned blog posits a plug-in that would enable StarOffice to sync with Google Docs, which would be pretty killer.) In the meantime... free stuff!