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StarOffice 6.0 Beta Available
Lumpish Scholar and 753 other people wrote in to let us know that Sun has released its beta of Star Office 6. CNET has a blurb about the release as well. I was hoping that Sun's site might be unclogged enough to try it out myself, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards today.
See OpenOffice.org for that one.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Here it is:
Star office 6.0 beta, linux x86, english
Scant amounts of ram?
Someone mod this +1, Funny, please.
I'm running Office XP right now. Outlook is currently using 23M of RAM. Word is using 28M. (Windows 2000 + Office XP)
Word doesn't even have a file open, not even a blank file.
I don't count that as 'scant amounts'.
And it loads quick because that "Microsoft Office" icon in your startup menu preloads most of the thing during your boot/login process where you think it's normal for your disk to be thrashing itself apart.
Because Microsoft uses incredibly proprietary formats. These days, it's not even a file format you could call as such, is a serialized COM stream. That means it's dependent on the processor type, OS, etc., and therefore extremely difficult to reverse-engineer.
Have they gotten rid of that "integrated desktop"?
Yes. I think that was everyone's single biggest complaint about StarOffice. They have also gotten rid of the "memory hog" problem with 5.2, which was that it loaded all five applications into memory and used up about 64MB of physical RAM whenever you wanted to load it.
Their big new feature is using an open XML format for documents. I also believe they have killed the problem where StarOffice took over all of your email clients, other text editors, etc.
I think this version of StarOffice is honestly the first one that will be a real competitor to MS Office, but I think it will really only be used by small businesses and individuals. Large corporations are already dependent on Outlook/Exchange/macros to do their work, and I don't see any large corporations switching off of those anytime soon (especially since there is no real groupware solution that Sun offers that compares with Exchange.)
Its pretty easy. Your are not allowed to reverse engineer the format by the EULA on MS Office license. You can try to do it from the documents since you do not sign any license for these, but then you don't get the whole format. You get just some features used in every document. And its binary and intentionally obfuscated format so its even way harder. I was doing some format conversions earlier and even with DOCUMENTED formats its extremly hard task.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
The source code available at OpenOffice.org does not consist of all of the StarOffice code. Usually, the reason for this is that Sun pays to license third party code to include in StarOffice that which it does not have permission to make available in OpenOffice.org. Those things which are or will be present in StarOffice but are not available on OpenOffice.org include:
Looks like Sun is giving away everything that doesn't cost them money to give away.
Everyone is making a big deal at how it doesn't open Word Documents very well.... Well HECK, there isn't ANY support for opening WordPerfect documents.
Before folks complain about what's missing or doesn't work well, it would pay to spend a few minutes actually installing the software and checking it out.
I've only used StarOffice for about half an hour so far, but it appears that the import/export filters are actually quite extensive. There is ALL KINDS of support for opening WordPerfect documents from ver 4.1 to ver 7. No, there's no ver 8 filter, but considering the length of the filter list, I'm assuming it's just a matter of time before they write it (there are filters for Xywrite and Wordstar, ferchrissakes).
Choose "Custom Install" or to to the setup app after installing and pick from their very extensive list of filters.
As for Word support, Star Office opened a bunch of very complex (but macro-free) documents for me without a burp. I was even able to set Word (and Excel) as my default file types for saving.
I say so far so good.