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StarOffice 5.2 Released
CMettler writes: "Just saw on the Sun Web site that StarOffice 5.2 is released. They improved the MS Office Import filters, better Database support and there is a player for playing StarOffice presentations without an installed StarOffice."
It would be an interesting test to take two people who have never used a computer before and see if they can more easily learn MS Office or StarOffice. You could use the results of that test to improve the interface of whatever product performed worse. My point is that these big, bloated office suites are becoming indistiguishable from one another.
Somebody should write an emacs-style editor with advanced Tex-style formatting features and WYSIWYG support. It should be able to import DOC, RTF, WPD and other popular formats. Just my $.02.
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Have you ever compared the X and Windows versions
of StarOffice? They look pretty much identical.
The buttons, scrollbars, menus, etc. I mean.
Most of the people who will use SO( assuming that
it starts to get some share of the users at all )
will be the kind of people who could care less
what OS/Windowing system they are running. They
are office workers, home users, etc. A user
who learns to operate SO on a Mac will *instantly*
know what to expect when they sit down in front
of a Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris box running
SO because the fullscreen WiW hides the underlying
OS and windowing system completely. An initial
learning curve and then no loss when moving to
another platform. In some sense the WiW is good
for people who would like to get Linux or some
other alternative OS out of the server room and
onto desktops. If the person who uses that desktop
is a heavy office suite user, they probably
wouldn't even know the difference.
That's not to say that I like the WiW. It's
annoying to *nix-ites who are used to multiple
desktops and terms spattered everywhere. I can
just understand why they use WiW. It's there
attempt to appease what they think will be the
largest chunk of users.
IMHO.
The first one is for the spreadsheet, the second for the word processor. More tips at the FAQ page: http://www.wernerroth.de/en/staroffice/faq/faq.htm l
Okay, I downloaded the full 96MB this morning and have been checking out some of the features during the day. But unfortunately StarOffice is still not good enough for me to convince others in my office from using word.
I work in a large corporation and Word is the standard for sending documents. I work at a Unix workstation and it annoys me having to go to another machine to read these files. So in recent weeks I have been looking at the various options. Yes StarOffice filters have improved from 5.1, but looking at documents I have been sent during the week, it still makes glaring mistakes.
I am running Linux and I have truetype support in my font server (with all the Windows fonts available). But Staroffice still see parts of my documents in a symbol font (correct font appears in word).
Another document conatining a table with lists of bulleted points in the cells. Some of the bulleted point come back with the wrong formatting. 5.2 did handle this document better than 5.1
A third document which has two images at the top and two URLs embedded is cropped short. 5.2 did a worse job than 5.1, adding in a large blank space between the images and the text.
Yes it does perform better but it is still not good enough for me to use it as a replacement. Oh, and like other postings I would prefer seperate exectables instead of everything clumped together. My next target to investigate is WordPerfect Office 2000 (I do not need it for free, but I do need it to work!)