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Sizing Up StarOffice 6.0
The installation was dead simple, and therefore better than most software: I popped in the CD, and with about 10 minutes of point-click-whirrring, the software was installed. The only notable aspect of this process is that the CD included (and popped onto my hard drive, with prompting) a new Java runtime environment (Sun's standard JRE, version 1.3.1). The helpful timer that accompanies the install is conservative, which is nice -- it started out estimating 14 minutes for the "transferring files" portion, but quickly dropped down to less than five.
Having not touched StarOffice for a while, it's nice to see the features in OpenOffice trickle in -- most importantly, getting rid of the monolithic desktop makes it actually usable to those of us who hate screen-hijacking software. And at least on this 1 GHz, 256MB laptop, even "bloatware" features like auto-correction are snappy enough not to be bothersome.
Two small notes on Roblimo's review for anyone curious about using SO under Windows: The Windows version does claim to open "WordPerfect (Win) 6.0-7.0" documents, which is at least a start toward WordPerfect compatibility. And under Windows, the nice X-Window style one-click text transfer isn't an option. One more note for 6.0 Beta testers: you can download a patch from Sun to extend the life of the beta from March 31 to June 3 2002.
I never had any problems at all with 6.0 beta... In fact, I'm still using it! Not a single crash, and much better than 5.2
Just because I AM paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get me.
"The much anticipated StarOffice 6.0 for Linux is now available for download to Mandrake Linux Club Members. We are proud to announce that Club members will be among the first Linux users to have the privilege of using the newest version of this premiere Linux Office Sui
te. Since StarOffice 6.0 has a new licensing model (it is no longer free as were previous versions), MandrakeSoft is currently offering the download service to MandrakeClub "Silver" members (and above). To provide Mandrake Club members the opportunity to reach Silver status, MandrakeSoft has set up a simple upgrade procedure.
StarOffice 6.0 is comprised of five distinct components:
StarOffice Writer is a professional wordprocessor; StarOffice Calc is a spreadsheet application; StarOffice Impress is a multimedia presentation tool; StarOffice Draw is a 3D graphics and special effects designer; StarOffice Adabas is a user-friendly database.
The new features include a new XML-based document format that results in dramatically reduced filesizes (compared to StarOffice 5.2), improved file filters and support for OLE objects that provides excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office documents, new font rendering, an improved user interface that makes StarOffice 6.0 more intuitive and friendly than ever, better system integration with other applications that allows, for instance, the ability to send office documents with an email client directly from StarOffice, and more!
StarOffice 6.0 is supported under the following Mandrake Linux versions (x86 only): Mandrake Linux 8.0, Mandrake Linux 8.1 and Mandrake Linux 8.2."
There should be a story on Slashdot soon since it mentions the recent controversy about the Mandrake Club Silver membership...
I've been running OO 641C since it was released. My machine is a PII-266 with 224 MB of RAM, so it tends to lag at times. However, SO 5.2 was never usable on this box. OO has replaced 5.1a.
.doc. I don't know if this is a good thing, a bad thing, and whether it's a reflection on the OO programmers or MS and its moving-target document formats.
.docs in case things look screwy, but I hear fewer complaints than in the past.
I'll add my voice to those cheering the death of the SO 'desktop'. What a worthless feature, a waste of everyone's time. Now I get right to the good stuff... after about 20 seconds of startup.
MS document compatibility seems much improved. Strangely, I recently had more trouble with Word users opening a 95-formatted file as opposed to a 2000/XP-formatted
Font detection seems *greatly* improved under X. OO appears to use X's own fonts as well as its internal fonts, meaning no more headaches and hacks to install TrueType fonts under SO. Printing hasn't been a problem at all, although North American users (guilty) may want to make sure the page size is set to "Letter" before printing; A4 seems to be the default.
Spell-checking is a bit loosy-goosy in detecting misspelled words, as it will sometimes stop at words with double quotes on one side or the other, but it works.
I still tend to warn people when I send them
I'm eagerly awaiting the next release of OO. I'm not sure if I'll buy Sun's StarOffice 6.0, since I'm not sure the value-add will be there, but I'm satisfied with the program the OO team has produced.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I use OpenOffice 641c seamlessly with coworkers who use MSOffice. No problems so far, to the point where I don't even think twice about importing or exporting. The powerpoint thingie (whatever it's called) works well enough that I routinely send presentations to MSOffice hostages without any difficulties.
You need to read the actual review. The little blurp here on slashdot is worthless.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
Correct. This is not a review. But if you follow the link over to NewsForge, you'll find the review there.
I think the clue was in the phrase "Over on NewsForge..."
--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)
Not sure if you realized this (I hope you did) but the first link in the Slashdot blurb goes to the actual review. He doesn't address everything you've asked (good points, btw) but he does talk about who should buy it and why, as well as potential cost savings.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
"anything instead of MS .doc format (which changes with every bloody office release anyway). "
.doc format has now gone through three releases(97, 2000, XP) without any substantial format changes. Yes, the newer versions do support new features, but the format itself is backwards compatible such that I can create a document in XP and load it in Word 97.
Actually the
It depends on what you are looking for, if you just want to be able to read a document... no problem... the substance is there. If you want to colloborate on the creation, well then you have to limit yourself on features and not worry too much about complex layout, etc.
As far as RTF... That is a Microsoft standard, but a good one for interoperability because it's reasonably well documented. I don't understand your comment about bloat. Do you want support for word processing, or are you just looking for a fancy text file?
As solid of a product as Office XP has turned out to be, Sun has an uphill battle with regards to StarOffice. I also think XP will probably be the last release of Office that Microsoft is able to sell because it has hit maturity and does just about anything and everything one could want.
It depends what you are doing. If you are a Word power-user and use it for medium-duty page layout, expect lots of problems. For example, documents containing a lot of graphics in floating frames with text flowing around in my experience do not convert well. On the other hand, I've had no problems at all with letter- and report-type documents.
OO also has a bug where if you use 'focus follows mouse', the menus are completely unusable. This of course makes OO completely unusable.
If I installed MS Office and found that it also installed Visual Studio without even warning, I'd start leaving horse heads in Gates' bed.
You'd better go find some horses...
Start poking around on your computer after you install MS Office. You will notice that some parts of Visual Studio are installed. I assume this is for VBA or who knows what.
Comparing JRE to Visual Studio is not a valid comparison though.
Installing the JRE is more like updating DLLs on your system, which most installers will do if need be!
"About the ZDNet controversy
A recent story at ZDNet (also picked up by Slashdot, LinuxToday, LWN and others) contained the title: "Mandrake Linux policy angers members". We'd like to briefly comment on this story.
* http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866870.html
* http://slashdot.org/articles/02/03/23/0454208.sht
* http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-0
From reading the headline, someone might think that MandrakeSoft has indeed angered many members of the community due to a change of company policy. Unfortunately, the author wasn't able to contact anyone at MandrakeSoft for additional information (which we would have been happy to provide), so the story is based on a few select comments from the Mandrake Forum website. http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?lang=en&
First of all, we would like to thank all of the Mandrake users and supporters who questioned the basis of the story. By reading the many comments and talkbacks at the above links, it is clear that a large part of the community is not upset. It makes all of us here at MandrakeSoft extremely proud that our efforts throughout the years of maintaining close ties to the community and our long-standing commitment to Free Software has not gone unnoticed.
Secondly, the original thread at MandrakeForum was prompted by a press release that was released prematurely which mentioned StarOffice 6.0 and the Mandrake Users Club. As soon as the comments "
Both StarOffice and OpenOffice *can* create PDFs in both Windows and Linux: I've been using this method for about eight months with no major difficulty.
In a nutshell, the applications rely on farming out the task to Ghostscript. It's not perfect -- TrueType fonts will sometimes result in uncorrectable errors (most often with apostrophes), and of course you may lack the ability to generate indexes and searchable documents, but for the most part, it's more than workable. It's been a godsend for me.
Finally, both Star/OpenOffices include (on the Linux side, anyway) instructions on how to do this yourself. Use the HTML reference above as a guide, and you should have no difficulties.
As far as I can tell using this solution is not an option for commercial services, but I am no legal expert, so use this at your own risk if this is the case.
Good luck.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I've been using StarOffice 6.0 for writing a newletter and it's been great for that.
You can insert a graphic, scale it and position it where you want it based on Page, paragraph or even as a character. I am running into a bug with the 6.0 beta in that occasionly I get a "Read Error" and I lose the graphic. I had sent a bug report in about that and hope it's not in the release version. While it sounds like a really bad bug, if you have notes of how you placed your image, it's easy to reinsert. (at least with less than a dozen images and it normally drops about 1/2 on occasion.)
Having good MS Office filters would be enormously important for OpenOffice and StarOffice.
Word file format is the de facto standard in most companies and institutions. Most internal and external communication and documentation is done with Word and Excel, and you need to import , edit, and then export MS Office documents. Without perfect, 100% compatible filters, you simply can't use OpenOffice in such an environment. If even one word wraps differently, a table can go useless. Not that MS Office itself is totally free of these problems, but they are much worse with OO/SO.
OpenOffice export filter to MS Word breaks very easily. Sometimes even basic formatting is lost. Some images disappear. Bullets turn into strange symbols. Tables of Contents and Indexes break. Pages with complex headers or footers simply cause Word to crash.
Even really simple things such as WMF, JPEG, or GIF export filters are faulty in sdraw. GIF doesn't seem to work at all, and WMF and JPEG lose objects under certain conditions.
The filters are OO's definitely weakest point at the moment. I hope they get the problems solved, as it's otherwise such a great software.
Not to deflate your balloon but 641C still has trouble with multiple sections. At least with my resume...
~~ What's stopping you?
Want a grammar/style checker for linux? Check out diction .
;)
This is a free implementation of the one that has been in unix since forever. It includes two programs: diction, and style.
"Diction identifies wordy and commonly misused phrases. Style analyses surface characteristics of a document, including sentence length and other readability measures. "
Why other people have not pointed you to this is beyond me. Maybe OpenOffice.org can include hooks to this program, since that will enable them to provide basic grammar checking capabilities with hardly any effort at all.
Anyway, I hope your wife doesn't see that you were talking about her dependence on a grammar checker on slashdot! Whether or not this or other posts turn out to be helpful, talking about other people (particularly other people who live with you and know _exactly_ how to make your life miserable) behind their backs is very bad karma...
However, good luck.
Case
Check on openoffice.org, the groundwork for this is already underway. You're right, it doesn't make sense for all these competing office coders to 'discover' the secrets behind closed formats like Microsoft's.
There is an effort to join forces and share knowledge, perhaps codebase.
..Chuck Hunnefield
If you have a functioning PostScript for PDF converter already installed, according to the help.
it's in my head