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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.
So, for the time being, I'm using MSWord2k in VMware. If SO/OO can reproduce most of the functionality I need (which, for the most part, it does... I was using SO6b happily until I discovered articles going to print with typos because Word's spellchecker ignored them) then I'll happily switch.
For me, the only substantial difference between SO6 and OO641C (last time I checked) was fonts... SO6 came bundled with a few extra fonts that made it easier to interact with MSWord users. If that's the only major difference, I'm happy to use OO and rip my own fonts...
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Is this sarcasm, or is Roblimo actually implying that Smart Tags are a good thing??
In a comparison between MS Office, this should be a huge +5 for Sun. Smart tags are idiotic and intrusive, and should not be supported in Open/Star Office ever!
Okay, I agree with you.
Maybe two months ago, my laptop's win2k partition started getting scuzzy, and I decided it was time to reformat and reinstall (needed to repartition for WinMe (only for ie6, i swear) anyway). Before, I had had MS office, installed on a workplace license from the summer. but I didn't have access to that any more, so I decided to go with some form of StarOffice.
5.2 was not desirable, so i ended up with the latest OpenOffice. I haven't looked back. The word processor is slick and responsive (128MB, 833mHz piii) and uses the formats I need. The powerpoint analog (forget the name; i use it rarely) served very well when a family member needed a laptop for a powerpoint (as in a .ppt file) presentation.
I don't usually use many Office apps these days besides word processing, but when it comes to word processing, the latest OO is excellent. The only problem I've encountered- and I remember this from MS Word - is when pasting content from MS IE. OO makes it a bizarre formatted content block, but i'm used to filtering clipboard text through notepad. Heh, it's even replicated the ms word annoyances.
So. OO word processing rocks. Nothing missing, that I've found.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
I have been using SO for about a year now. I've been running the 6.0 beta since it became available on my SUSE box and on my NT box.
I do a lot of volunteer work and whenever it comes time to shoot documents to different folks- some have office, some have works, some don't know.
I'd tell people - "Get Star Office. It is a free office suite from Sun Microsystems."
95% of them wouldn't even consider it. I think they were afraid of something free.
If I can tell them "Yeah- you can go buy it for a 10th of what you would pay for office" I think they will be more apt to go for it.
As a side note. I've never been able to get ADABAS to work on my NT box. And my attempts have just been out of curiousity as just reading the docs tells me that it cannot come even remotely come close to Access.
I cannot tell you how many small companies I work with that use Access. I work with a collection agency that has up to 100 people working of a single access database.
The price of Access looks small when you compare it to a real database. I'm not advocating this- but it is reality.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Actually, Sun is also apparently going to be charging for Star Office 6. (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-865257.html) - The News.com article points out that they are going to have a hard time going after MS's market, especially when MS only charges $48 for an academic license to schools.
Who is John Galt?
Yeah, the Macintosh issue. Still no support for OS X, and last time I checked they were asking for people to help complete the partial port to X.
Which sucks, because I recently got an iBook and love OS X (this is my first Mac and so I don't have a bunch of OS 9 apps to worry about) but really really really want StarOffice/Openoffice file compatibility. I've installed Linux, but it's not quite as polished as OS X on that hardware.
WordPerfect kept essentially the same format from v6 (~1994) to now (v10). It's odd for SO to say they're only compatible with v6 and v7.
d perfect/
WP introduced a 'compund document' format ~v8 which was not backward compatible, but hardly anyone uses it that I've seen (and yes I see a few WP users).
Completely OT: Wouldn't WP's tagged formatting code method make it an ideal way to create low-end XML? It already has great word-processing features, and claims an XML format. WP could output SGML 8 yrs ago or more. Re: WP and XML, search google or see, for example:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/05/31/wor
"Linux is not totally mainstream yet, because:
A) No adobe photoshop yet. GIMP is inferior, don't even try..
B) StarOffice is very slow, and not 100% compatible with MSOffice. Microsoft word is still the preferred word processor and such.
"
With A.) I have to say that adobe photoshop is not a mainstream app. Its expensive and only photo designers and a few web site designers use it. Not on pc's but mainly macs.
B) StarOffice is very slow,...
Star office 6 is alot faster and much of the bloat has been removed. I have never ran it but one of my friends has. He told me its alot better and almost 3 times as fast and is comparable to office97 and has better file compatibility. Version 5.2 on my pentiumIII700 runs ok anyway.
"and not 100% compatible with MSOffice". Well about an hour ago a just imported some old excel spreadsheets into Starcalc and I had no problems at all with the imports. Not to mention my resume which was originally written in word2000 went through fine in staroffice 5.2. I only had one document which ever exhibbited some errors.
"Microsoft word is still the preferred word processor and such" This is mostly true in regards to mindshare until microsoft began heavily doubling and even trippling the licensing costs of Office and now is also trying to monthy charge the usage of Office with its upcomming
Linux is not totally mainstream yet. Your right. That was never quite the goal of linux and it probably never will be. Linus himself admitted he would quit out of principal if it ever caught more then a third of the market.
http://saveie6.com/
The psychology of pricing is interesting. Sun may be better off going with $99 than $49. Many years ago, in Guadalajara, Mexico, my grandmother met a street artist selling paintings for a dollar or two each. My grandmother told him to include nice frames (that he could buy for less than one dollar apiece from fellow half-starved locals) and up his prices to $50 or more. He thought she was nuts, because no one he knew could afford to pay that much for a small painting. Annie (my grandmother) fronted him money for a dozen frames and helped him with the repricing, and sales soon took off -- not to locals, but to American tourists who thought $50 to $100 was a great value for an original painting of a pastoral Mexican scene enclosed in an attractive, hand-carved wooden frame. A year later the artist had his own gallery and a house with indoor plumbing -- and Annie got some of his best work for free and had a friend for life.
That's really a very beautiful story, and perhaps the best part of the article. It almost has strains of JonKatz in there, while remaining just on this side of probable. Even though it's pretty much unrelated to the review/comparison, it's a nice touch. Well done!
Yes! That guy!
OO runs nearly as quickly on Windows once you get it up and going, although because it's Java, some of the menu's and other 'buttons' are sluggish to respond.
But Mandrake 8.2 - WOW! Open Office 641 is included as an installable component in the 3 CD ISO set that you can download for free, and it is quick! Once loaded in KDE 2.2.2, it just seems to fly - faster than MS Word on my particular machine (dual-boot Win2k/Mandrake8.2 AMD Duron @986MHz and 256MB 133SDRAM). Given the cross-platform compatibility, I'm going to be using OO at home from here on out for all of my 'Office' needs.
Now I know not all of you have a good broadband connection to download Mandrake 8.2, but it's definitely a stable improvement upon the 8.1 release.
Now the only hurdle left is convincing people that don't play complex DirectX video games that Linux does everything for them and more when properly configured (which took me only 2 hours - Win2k took 4hrs BTW, and I've been using it longer than Linux).
I hate to sound like a buzzworthy press release, but I've been messing around with Linux long enough to see how annoying it can be. Fortunately, I finally have found a Linux desktop I can recommend to my non-computer literate friends. (And if I buy the gaming version, maybe I can convert my fiancee to Linux, OO, and The Sims on Linux ;) ).
heheh I actually posted a reply on the newsforge article about how to do this.
Here's a link to the article on my website
Quick and Dirty PDF Printer
You'll need samba, ghostscript, mpack and a decent postscript printer driver.
hope it helps.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Gartner has a brief analysis of StarOffice's viability in the corporate work place.
They see it as a potential replacement for non-power users. I their analysis, they anticipate a retail price of $100 and licensing at $25 - $75. The key to the savings that could be made seems to be Microsoft's recent changes to volume licensing. Some firms, according to Gartner, are about to see their Office license costs double.
Gartner's iffy prediction (0.6 rating) is that Star Office will take over 10% of Microsoft's Office market unless Microsoft make significant changes to their price structure.
Still not good enough. I almost got my boss to drop office and go with openoffice... Until we tried to import our price sheet. It failed. So I thought I would just got to openoffice.org and report the issue. I would even send them the doc file that failed. I figured that if the duplicate the error they would fix it.
The answer I got back was..."The import was not too bad. I is easy for you to fix the formating".
I love Linux and use PostgreSQL everyday. I have even gotten my company to use Linux for our servers and PostgreSql for our database... But that answer sucked.
Though I can't say I normally use any parts of an office suite other than the word processor (which I'm pretty sure is the case with most users), why has nobody mentioned two other alternatives to SO/OO that work great - AbiWord and KWord? I don't do anything heavy-duty, but these word processors both work great for basic day-to-day use. Personally I favor AbiWord, but both are quick/unbloated, can read word files without problems, and I have yet to encounter a task that I haven't been able to do in one or both of these.
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
Actually, if Microsoft made drastic changes to their file formats at this point (like they did between Office 95 and 97) then it would likely accelerate the migration from MS Office to StarOffice. Microsoft had nearly all of its large customers up in arms over that particular fiasco, and MS Office's competitors are in a much better position now then they were in 1997. Gartner believes that StarOffice will have a 10% share by the end of 2004, and that is without Microsoft pushing their customers into Sun's camp. The harder Microsoft squeezes their customers the more tempting it is to switch.
The fact of the matter is that StarOffice poses much more of a threat to Microsoft than Linux does. Linux requires that you change everything about how you use your computer, and it competes with Windows that comes preinstalled on every computer. StarOffice only requires that you change your office suite--you can continue using all of your Windows software--and it is very compatible with MS Office. More importantly, most people actually pay for MS Office (well, actually most people "borrow" copies, but that is much more difficult with Office XP).
After years of watching Microsoft push their Windows operating system higher and higher up the enterprise food chain Sun is finally actually attacking into Microsoft territory instead of trying to merely defend their own turf. Much of the R&D money that is being used to push Windows into the enterprise comes from MS Office, and Sun's StarOffice will almost certainly put pressure on Microsoft to lower their prices so that they are more competitive.