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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...
Just upgrade to Silver membership, it's worth $60 ;-)
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.
This is an anecdote about installing it. There was no mention of how it handles Office200/XP document importing and exporting. There was no mention on how stable it was. There was no mention of how well it integrates with the KDE or Gnome desktops, cut and paste, drag and drop. There was no mention on how it's usability has evolved.
There are MUCH bigger issues with Start Office than does it install quickly or does it hog the screen. How about, can it gracefully replace MS Office for a MS Office user and if not why not?
The big three apps are Outlook, IE, and Office. We have Evolution, Mozilla and ???? A contender for the missing piece of the desktop puzzle deserves a better review than this.
No, only open-office is available in the main distro as far as I know. StarOffice is avaible for download to Mandrake Club members now (Silver members and above) (look at http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/club/]) and will be in the packs (ProSuite, Powerpack...) in one month I guess...
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.
In a stunning upset, a Linux user that never uses MS Office thinks that OpenOffice is perfectly adequate.
That never happens. Certainly not on Slashdot.
Gimme some reviews from people whose opinions actually matter and you'll start changing mindshare. Articles like this are just preaching to the choir.
(And if you're going to compare StarOffice and OpenOffice, at least a rudimentary review of the additional features that come with StarOffice would be beneficial. Like, instead of just mentioning the database features are there, how about saying if they're any good?)
That is the Java Runtime environment, genius. It installs the JVM that allows you to run Java programs, not the development tools.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I'd assume that the part in there that says "with prompting" is the warning you are looking for. And it's the runtime environment...the same way many Win programs install VB runtime components, or for that matter, any other number of DLL's.
do not read this line twice.
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.
A) GIMP is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Photoshop, although it can do some stuff Photoshop can do without taking up huge amounts of memory.
B) StarOffice is not supposed to be 100% compatible. The actual shift which needs to take place is towards an open document format which everybody supports. RTF bloats a little bit too much to fit in there, there are loads of others, but anyway, progress is being made. If only I could make corporate policy force RTF or something, anything instead of MS .doc format (which changes with every bloody office release anyway).
I too am gutted that StarOffice 6 will be a pay-for app, but Sun have to justify development costs sooner or later. At the end of the day, most companies do not object to paying for Office software, and it has to be good. You don't get rid of Microsoft forced Office dominance overnight. Most of my clients think Office comes with Windows, and are shocked to find out they don't have Word when they boot a brand new machine. Wankers.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Cost to Join Mandrake Club at Silver Level to download StarOffice 6: $120.00
Cost to upgrade initial membership to Silver Level to get StarOffice 6: $60.00
Cost of a copy of StarOffice 6, Deluxe Version with documentation from local retailer: $40.00
And I should join or upgrade my membership why?
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
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!
Because you want to support Mandrake? If it was all about StarOffice, it would be called "Buy StarOffice from the Mandrake store" not "Join Mandrake Club"
sic transit gloria mundi
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
it's a Satellite 1005-S157, the cheap-oh model :)
;) Try explaning even to a retired engineer where to find the 2nd and 3rd ISOs after he's closed the browser sometime! I'll be back there later in the week to grab the other ISOs and burn the CDs.
It has 256 megs of RAM, 1.06GHz celeron, NiCD battery (oh well), 15GB hard drive (eh, I can't complain much, my hard drives are all mostly empty anyhow).
For 900 bucks (800 after mail-in rebate), I am pretty pleased with it, but the Linux aspect is the only sticky thing -- the chipset in here is the i830M. That means it's supported in XF86 4.2, but not earlier. I'd like to do a clean Mandrake install, though, and since I want 8.2 anyhow, I'm downloading that. Rather, I started the download at my dad's place 30 miles from here on his cable modem
I'm told that this model works great under 8.2, though. Should, anyhow -- XF86 is the hangup with 8.1, which otherwise goes on fine. Lovely unless you want to use the GIMP, KWord, etc.
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"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.
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?
The biggest surprise for me was that Sun will be selling this software for $49 or $99 per seat. This could be the legitimatization of Linux software. When someone can charge money successfully for a widely used peice of software, it will seem much more legit to many businesses and consumers, expecially if the quality is there too. I was waiting to dl it for free, but now I will be purchasing it when it's available and telling some of my contacts about it.
Here's keeping our fingers crossed that this is successfull. Of course, there are plenty of free/free alternatives for those who choose them.
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?
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.
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/
Roblimo mentions something about creating and editing pdf files, and appears to implie this is included in Word and Wordperfect. To my knowledge it is not, it requires the purchase of a $200 piece of software from Adobe.
Roblimo then goes off apparently comparing the price of retail editions of Office to Staroffice. Keep in mind, most companies already have Office from Microsoft, so they'd be paying upgrade prices. There are also various discounts available, especially on the Select license agreements, OEM bundles, etc. XP Standard is more like $200 and XP Professional around $300.
But then he makes a claim that this substantial savings($100-200 per desktop) would prove you were "a company that respects its stockholders (or a government agency that respects taxpayers)". But what justification does he give for this? I don't see it.
$100-200 per machine is really quite a small amount of money in the big picture. If I have staff that already knows how to use MS Office, sending them to a $500 training course to learn how to use Staroffice negates any cost savings from software licensing. Even if only half my staff needs training, that's still substantial. Then what about productivity gains? Will I be able to do the same work in Staroffice as MSOffice in the same amount of time? Will it take more time, less time, etc?
If I give a project to someone and it takes them an extra day to complete because they used Staroffice, once again we've completely lost the $100 cost savings.
Those are factors that come into play when making corporate buying decisions, and it is something that Roblimo clearly doesn't grasp or understand. The review he gives of StarOffice does not go into near enough detail to prove that it is a viable product.
"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?"
I'm not the original poster, but here is my take on this: Word Processor != Desktop publishing.
The problem seems to be that MS is trying to make Word into a full blown desktop publishing system. It isn't one, and will never be one. The problem this causes is that you end up with a pile of dog doo that is trying to be everything to everyone. It is FULL of features (and the bugs to go with them) that most people will never need. It makes the program overly complicated for neophytes, slow, a memory / disk hog, etc.
Word is also full of other crap MS added because they COULD, not because they SHOULD. Scripting: probably less than 1% of users even care about it, yet it has been one of the most common ways viruses spread. Why is it enable by default?????? Yeah, the most recent versions of office FINALLY seem to have SOME protection, but it has taken 6 YEARS to get it. 6 YEARS PEOPLE!!!!
I've been tracking all the crap that MS has done since the original IBM PC / Apple ][ days, and Wordstar was king (anyone remember Visicalc on the Apple?). MS Office has gone from a TOTAL PILE OF CRAP that wasn't worth the shrink wrap on the box, to just plain old ordinary crap that STILL crashes on a regular basis. MS has NO excuse for
delivering such buggy software. None. Office XP solid? What kind of crack are you smoking?
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!
RTF might be the closest thing we have to a cross-app, cross-platform file format, but it sure isn't perfect, or even adequately reliable. I use StarOffice for Windows and Linux, and save in RTF. I try to get others to send their Word docs in RTF. I try to keep my formatting as simple as possible, to avoid problems. But still, maybe 30% of the time, a document created in Staroffice loses its formatting when opened in Word, or vice-versa.
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!
Does anyone know if StarOffice on Windows can:
a) Print to PDF?
or
b) edit PDF?
This is undoubtedly not a new, point, but worth repeating: printing to PDF is a really key capability for Star Office, in that it would provide users with an easy way to send documents they know most people can read (I'd love to say they could send it HTML, but we all know the perils of print-based formatting in HTML).
If StarOffice had something as simple as a little checkbox when you used File->Send to email the current document to someone that said "Also send a copy of this document in PDF, for maximum compatibility", StarOffice could make a the state of document formats. Even more so if users could then fire the PDF up in their word processor and change it back.
Viva la PDF.
"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 "
Why is this important? My wife depends upon a grammar checking program. On average, it brings up her score on term papers by a letter grade. The only product with a grammar checker for Linux is WordPerfect. I purchased a copy of Corel Office 2000 and installed it under Mandrake 8.1, but it is extremely unstable (sometimes it silently crashes, allowing her to enter text but saving only empty files). Since Corel sold their Linux OS division, they also nuked their online Linux help for Corel Office (which seems to be a violation of their EULA, since they still own the Office for Linux division, but that's another story). The only place this help exists is in Google's cached pages. I would purchase Star Office if it had a grammar checking program.
Has anybody heard a rumor about plans for a grammar checking program in the next version of Star Office? Does anybody have any hints on making WordPerfect 9 more stable under Mandrake 8.x? Is it worth the money to upgrade to WordPerfect 10? Does anybody know of a stable word processor with a grammar checker for Linux?
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.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Windows ME is probably the sorriest excuse for a Windows operating system since Windows 2.0. You would be far better served sticking to 98 SE or going directly to XP.
What's so terrible about spaces in usernames? Me, I like 'em that way.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
The trouble with StarOffice not being free and open source is that Sun may dump it. Sun tends to do stuff like that. I have two paid-for, boxed, commercial Sun Java development environments that are abandonware.
This is documented in their manuals.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
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.)
Ms-word can read other things besides .doc.
Have you tried .RTF?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yup, this is the method I use as well (inna overview-stylee). I should mention that all the methods described by sheldon & DeadMeat above, as well as tweek's comments in this thread, work pretty much the same way (DeadMeat's proviso that WP does it internally notwithstanding).
Another point. Once you shovel on Ghostscript and a generic printer PS driver (I use Adobe's own myself on Windows) on either OS, pretty much *any* application that has a print option should be able to create a PDF.
Last point: As to electroniceric's original question on editing PDFs after the fact, that I don't know. I suspect there aren't such things around. Please post if you know differently.
Thanks.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
From The article:
:)
One place StarOffice falls down -- and falls down hard -- is its inability to work with WordPerfect files,
Maybe a hard pill to swallow for the desktop users who "fell" for the whole WP for Linux thing a year or so back (when in reality it was more akin to WP for Windows running under WINE -- than a native office suite..) Needless to say, if they were able to get a few documents created with the whole WP thing -- then chances are they would want to open and work with them in Star Office, right??? I hope they get this worked out. OTOH -- it is nice to see some commercial software making a go for the linux Desktop. (I wish IBM would dust off some of the old Lotus stuff and give it a run
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
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.
Another item on my StarOffice "wish list" would be the ability to create and edit .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files, something that is readily available for MS Word and Corel WordPerfect. Give me this feature, even if it's a plugin that costs $50 over and above whatever Sun decides to charge for StarOffice, and they'll get my money.
StarOffice 6 beta has this feature, and I'd be very surprised if the final didn't have it either. I think Roblimo just missed the menu option.
Yes, that's because RTF is mostly text layout, rather than using any binary p-codes or compression. I imagine this was done to make it easier to support as a transport mechanism.
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
The irony that lies with you telling somebody to learn their grammar better but being unable to spell the word is truly entertaining.
He wanted a pointer to a grammar checker, not a lecture on why his wife should practice her grammar.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Under Linux, I haven't seen these problems. I've created fonts as large as 200 points and haven't seen any jaggies (as long as I use a scalable font). Also, I've done work with pasting multiple images into panoramas. For example, one I did was at 15000 x 2500 pixels, and it contained 6 layers, all of which adds up to over 600MB. It was a bit sluggish (as expected, since I only have 384MB of ram), but it was still usable, and I was able to create the panorama. All I can guess is that the Windows version of GIMP has some limitations over the Unix version.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
"It is FULL of features (and the bugs to go with them) that most people will never need. "
With this one statement you proved you were ignorant. You could have saved a lot of time typing.
Why can't the Open Office crew abstract the file import/export into an independant library? I personally prefer AbiWord, and I'm sure many others have their own WP preferences. If all could share a common library then we could choose between WPs without fear of losing all our work to date. I would love to be able to read and edit Word files in AbiWord. Data legacy is the killer, and it's why M$ has the world pretty much under its thumb. I know others have already called for a unified Open WP format but really nothing seems to have been done. Why is this?
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
$40 for StarOffice was the price for the deluxe edition quoted to ZDNet by Sun. Hit the site & look it up before you assume I'm wrong. I do my homework.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Uh... OpenOffice is essentially a slimmed-down version of StarOffice that is available under the GPL. If you really want to "stick it to Microsoft" you should really consider abandoning their proprietary formats.
Yah, I remember Visicalc on the Apple. And this point is worth noting: even running under an emulator, it absolutely leaves Excel choking in its dust for speed on twin 1.2GHz CPUs... (-:
I also remember MultiPlan, and why Microsoft killed it.
FWIW, Word sucked up until about version 5, then began to be quite useable (albeit a little crashy and with all of those bugs you mentioned), then between about 5.5 and 6.01a seemd to do all right modulo the viruses. After that, it was just more bloat for very little extra functionality (except on the Mac, where it was a case of removing deliberately-installed hobbles which MS inflicted on Macs for not being owned by Bill).
I've been using SO5.2 extensively for interoperating with MS-Office, and no problems. The poster who wrote about Word-XP (Word 10?) docs being readable by Word-97 (AKA Word 8) is full of it. One of the things I use SO5.2 for is inhaling Word2000 docs and making them readable by Word97; the `Save As...' type-WordXX feature in the later MS-Words seems a bit hit and miss.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not to deflate your balloon but 641C still has trouble with multiple sections. At least with my resume...
~~ What's stopping you?
Ah, yes, that would explain why cdrecord operates IDE CD burners through the
I also have a USB scanner which uses SCSI packets layered in PartPort (IEEE-1284) packets layered in USB packets because doing it with a string of converter chips was apparently cheaper than doing it properly.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
I'm hoping that they have really cheap student pricing for the thing. I love the beta, and it's replaced Abiword as my Linux word processor (I'm still rooting for Abisoft though, Go! Go! Go!) and I'm pretty comfy using it in place of MS Office, which is something I wasn't comfortable doing before. I wouldn't mind paying the $50 bucks, but I'll use OpenOffice before I pay $99. Here's hoping the student discount pays off!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
The fonts in OpenOffice are the ones installed on your system. No more no less!
The speed is about the same.
spell checking is included and works for me.
Printing works fine here
Moritz
You need to install it as a network install. then run the install for each user and use the workstation option to install the users files.
Which is IMHO a bad practice for a number of reasons. Quite a few of the things it copies don't actually need to be copied, a few M does not sound a lot, but with a large number of users it can easily run into a lot of wasted disk space. Also it is quite trivial for unix and NT machines to pull such information as a user's realname out of their user database.
I get the impression of a program originally designed for single user/stand alone use, where multi-user support was added at a late stage. Expecting end users to install software in any way is IMHO a very bad idea. End users should simply be able to run a program and have it work. If certain per user settings don't yet exist then sensible defaults should be used be used. Not an error message and certainly not a "techie screen". Also it should be as much as possible up to the system administrator (rather than the application programmer) to determine which settings should and shouldn't be end user configurable/alterable...
klyx and contemporary lyx files are not interchangeable.
klyx will never remerge with lyx; it's forked from too old a version. However, gui independence s the big project in lyx development right now, and will result in multiple toolkits (e.g., qt) being supported.
hawk
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/wordperfect/
Hardly off-topic, since SO's file formats are a very valid dimension of it's readiness for the real world. WordPerfect's document capabilities are often underrated due to it's UI. I've had a love/hate relationship with WordPerfect over the years - it's positively user hostile at times and when things go wrong, it's as opaque as vi without the benefit of simplicity. Still, it's the only WP I've ever found that handles long documents well (which is why it's still the standard in much of the legal and real estate businesses), and the "Reveal Codes" feature is very nice for power users. In many ways it's the best mix out there of word processor and desktop publishing capabilities.
As an aside, I've used SO6beta for several months now, and *if* you put in the small effort to learn it's slightly different UI philosophy, you'll find that it's a VERY capable office suite. There are a few bugs (which I and others have filed) that keep me from making it my everyday tool, but overall, it's really quite good. Although there are some holes realtive to MS Office, it also covers some nice areas that Office doesn't. Sun's got a winner here. When it hits the shelves, I'll buy a boxed copy rather than upgrade the Office 97 I've been using for years - I really think it will be good enough to make that viable. The fact that it runs on non-Windows OSes is just icing on the cake. (C'mon BSD!)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last