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StarOffice 5.2 Preview

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-it-if-you-want dept.

A few people over the last couple of days have pointed out that Sun has made StarOffice 5.2 available for preview. It's a big download, clocking in at 100+ megs for Solaris. There's also Linux (x86 only) and Win32 versions available.

2 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. RE: MS doesn't publish their specs, WRONG by caolan · · Score: 4
    I am blue in the face from repeating that they have published their specs, you can get them on the July 1998 MSDN cd, they had them on their website for over a year. They can now be got from wotsit.org. These are the Office97 formats, in addition worsit also has the word 6 spec

    Also my wv project has a passable word reader that abiword is using as a word importer, and gnumeric has quite a good excel importer

    C.

    --
    I sometimes write stuff
  2. Better import/export! Yay! by hatless · · Score: 5

    No, they haven't slimmed it down or made noticeable UI changes. This is a subtle upgrade.

    It seems a bit snappier than 5.1. The Win32 version now embeds the IE browser engine if it's present, which improves web browsing from within the app. The IMAP mail support is a bit slicker, roughly on par with Netscape 4.x but with some extra niceties thanks to its integration with the rest of the suite. It ain't Outlook 2000 yet, but then it's also not succeptible to script macros in message bodies.

    But the best improvement I've seen is in the MS Office import and export capabilities. It always did a better-than-average job of opening MS Office files, but it wasn't good enough to replace MS Office for shops with lots of Office documents floating around. Now, it's nailed every small to mid-sized Word, Excel and Powerpoint doc I've thrown at it, save for the Microsoft-dialect VBA macros, and it neither runs nor harms those. Based on my use of it over the past two days on Linux and NT, I now feel it's a viable product to roll into mixed MS Office environments for roles where VBA doesn't come into play.

    Now that 5.2 plays nicer with MS Office files, I will definitely be evaluating it as a server-based X app for a 20-person call center I'm putting together.