Designer's Gallery > Consumer Software > Star Office

Star Office is a monolithic office suite that's intended to compete with the Microsoft Office suite. The program doesn't use animated characters or Microsoft's online help system. Instead Sun Microsystems created it's one unique methods for delivering online help. It's not outstanding but compared to the competition it's at least as good and worth studying.  

Figure 1 shows the Star Office robust bubble help. The pop-up displays when the mouse pointer hovers over any active element in the interface. The feature can be turned off or on from a menu pick under the Help menu. 

Figure 1

Figure 2 shows a typical Star Office wizard (Auto Pilot) and the online help window (Help Agent). While the Help Agent is a separate free floating window, it automatically displays the applicable help topic for any interface element that can be selected. For example in the figure the list box in the Select a Page Style group is selected and the Help Agent shows the help topic for that element. Figure 2 also shows the robust bubble help window for the Screen option in the Select output medium radio button group. 

Figure 2 also illustrates the use of good design principles in the layout of the Auto Pilot. It shows the number of the panel in the upper right corner and the preview window shows the choice in the Select a Page Style list box. 

Figure 2

The following figure shows the full screen help window. At any time a user can quickly expand the Help Agent window to a full screen window. This figure shows the table of contents for the help system. A user can select a major topic area from the dropdown list or by clicking a tab at the bottom of the page. 

Figure 3

Star Office is free and can be downloaded from the Sun Microsystems website.