New OpenOffice.org-Based Office Suite

Voidhobo writes: "SOT, a Linux-distributor from the home-country of Linux, is offering SOT Office, a free productivity suite partly based on OpenOffice, for Linux and Windows. According to SOT, it is the only office application you will ever need, as it is fully compatible with MS Office and StarOffice." OpenOffice is great, so I hope their claims have merit.

Comments

who needs this when open office has debs now.

[Anonymous Coward]

its very exciting.

you can get them here.

Who needs Office?

[Lemmy Caution]

You can get Vigor, a vi clone with a talking (and evil) paper-clip assistant!

Re:Difference between SOT and OpenOffice?

[Arker]

Apparently most of their work has been in localisation. I understand it works better than straight openoffice for Finnish and other languages used in the area, it can spellcheck Finnish documents and so forth.

Re:This is now illegal

[reddogcandy]

It is not "illegal" in any country. You are thinking about the End User License Agreement for MSDN Library, which potentially makes it a license violation (which isn't the same as a violation of public statutes or criminal code). I will quote: "you may use documentation identified in the Library as the file format specification for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and/or Microsoft PowerPoint ('File Format Documentation') solely in conjunction with your development of software product(s) that operate in conjunction with Windows, Windows NT, or Windows 2000 that are not general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, database management, or presentation graphics software products or an integrated work or product suite whose components include one or more general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, or database management software products. Note: A product that includes limited word-processing, spreadsheet, database, or presentation graphics components along with other components that provide significant and primary value, such as an accounting product with limited spreadsheet capability, is not considered to be a 'general-purpose' product. For licensing terms relating to use of the File Format Documentation for purposes other than the use described above, please contact Microsoft Corporation."

I will point out several things:

• The EULA covers use of Microsoft's documentation. If you don't use Microsoft's documentation to implement your file format compatibility, the EULA doesn't apply to you.
• Although this provision remains in the current EULA for MSDN Library, Microsoft stopped including the Office file format specifications in MSDN Library years ago, so it's somewhat difficult to violate this provision today.
• Most of the Office applications are moving gradually to using XML-based formats. Although Microsoft has implemented proprietary schemas and styles, all of it is still readily visible as plain text and fundamentally easier to inspect and reverse-engineer. The absence of documentation will only grow less and less important as XML takes over.

Real time review...

[Rogerborg]

Stream of consciousness installation process for Windows version (on WinXP)...

• Tricky getting to the file. ftp server is hosed. http gets there eventually, then serves at 109KB/s. Nice. Now serving over gnutella, "soto_en.exe", incidentally, 41MB or so.
• Unzips OK. Installer is nice and clear. Still can't understand why it needs 102MB of disk space though.
• Hey, where's the clickthough? The fuck? Did I blink and miss it? Can I just use this thing?
• Start->Program->SOT Office 2002, let's see, "Text Document", that's 90% of the use cases.
• Do I want to import my Windows Address Book? OK then, do it.
• Fails. More information. Ah, it's looking for an Outlook Express address book. Fair enough, I'm not using that P.O.S.
• OK, a blank document. Looks pretty much like any StarOffice/OpenOffice/Word clone. I could easily forget this isn't Word.
• The basic test: open a Word '97 .doc... 100,000 words (yes, I'm one of those poor struggling "content producers" you keep hearing about), no styles (ask me about styles in StarOffice 5.2 or Office '97 under Wine for that matter, go on, ask me). Opens fast, looks fine, the endnotes are all intact.
• OK, options, Load/Save. Looks just like Word. Autosave every minute, create backup (oh yes). Oh, default save format? "SOT Office 6.0 Text Document"? A quick save reveals that this is a binary format, not anything sane like XML. So, no, I don't bloody well think so. Word 97/2000/XP, please. "This may cause data loss.". I'll take that risk. If I can't use this to reliably read/write Word 97 .doc binary formats, it's no use to me (sorry, but it isn't).
• Languages now. Again, looks just like Word 97. Default locale, set as English (UK), language as English (UK).
• Spellcheck time! Uh, "The spellcheck is complete". I don't think so. Try again. Apparently it's complete. No, it clearly isn't. What's going on? Oh, there's no dictionary for English (UK), only for English (US) and Finnish. It would be handy if it could actually say that.
• Back to the web site. Uh, sotoffice, addon, dict... it's empty. No English (UK) dictionary for me. Damn. OK, get it later, press on with English (US). No, dammit, it's still not checking. Come back to this.
• OK, try loading a Word '97 document with embedded images. Hurrah! There they are, in the right place. Actually, in better places than in Word '97, it's fixed the image that was spilling over the page end. Make some mods, save it out, load it back into Word (this is vital). It look fine.
• Back to the spellchecker again. Let's check those languages. Ah, what? It's changed to German. Hmm, wasn't that a "feature" of StarOffice 6 beta?
• No, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get it to perform a spell check (or to tell me why it isn't). Also, I can't see a word count tool or find it in the help; this is an astonishing omission.

So there we go. It looks like Word, it opens Word, it saves Word (so far), but it's got bugs (I'm back to German as the default language again), the spell checking works unusually (which means badly if you're trying to attract Word users), and there's no word count. My god, there's no word count. I really cannot do without a word count.

But it's free, and it looks good. I'm certainly going to stick with it for a few days and see if I fall in love. Definitely worth trying... unless you need a word count. ;-)