Well, I used StarOffice 8 all day thursday while working on one of the chapters for my new book (a Linux title, of course). So here's a quick run down of what I've found so far.

First up - compatibility: the chapter was originally written in Word from Office.X on Mac OS X and there were no problems loading up the file, or saving it and opening again on the Mac. The templates, using the different styles and online layout and formatting all work fine. Compatibility is certainly not an issue.

Second up - general use: Fine. There's nothing here that I had a problem with. There are some UI elements which I've always found to be slightly odd (for example, the separate window of styles) but I realize that this is largely a limitation of the base Unix UI (the X Windows System). Nothing though that scares you - just, different...