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

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.

This is not a review.

[stuce]

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.

Re:This is not a review.

[emf]

"Maybe two months ago, my laptop's win2k partition started getting scuzzy"

Hey, your drive is either SCSI or not, it doesn't change.

:)

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

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?)

I would pay for a grammar check

[Paul the Bold]

My biggest complaint about this product is the lack of a grammar check. This is the one thing that distinguishes MS Office from most other software. From what I have seen, only WordPerfect has a grammar checking routine.

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?

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.