Sizing Up StarOffice 6.0

Over on NewsForge, Roblimo has taken a look at Sun's new StarOffice 6.0 (due out in April for retail purchase), and comparing it to OpenOffice build 641C. I installed StarOffice on a new Toshiba laptop, and since my Mandrake 8.2 ISOs are still trickling in, have StarOffice 6.0 running instead under Windows XP. (I have just a few additional notes on this, below.)

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.

Comments

StarOffice 6.0 *is* available...

[joestar]

It's just been announced at Mandrake Linux website:

"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...

641C is nice

[Platinum Dragon]

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.

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 .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.

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 .docs in case things look screwy, but I hear fewer complaints than in the past.

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.

New OpenOffice versioning scheme

[abischof]

For those not aware, OpenOffice has adopted a new versioning scheme:

But for purposes of general intelligibility, and to accommodate a general expectation of how an Open Source project should number its public releases, an "X.Y.Z" numbering scheme will be adopted around the time of the release of StarOffice 6.0 this spring. Instead of referring to OpenOffice.org by its internal number (e.g., 64x), people will be able to refer to it by the new numeration.

[...]

The first version number will be "1.0.0".

Re:This is not a review.

[moeman]

You need to read the actual review. The little blurp here on slashdot is worthless.

Re:Office and Photoshop

[sheldon]

"anything instead of MS .doc format (which changes with every bloody office release anyway). "

Actually the .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.

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.

Making PDFs : not perfect, but...

[twilight30]

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.