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StarOffice 7, GNOME-Office 1.0 Released
Jim Hall writes "I just noticed that Sun Microsystems has released StarOffice 7. I've been using the StarOffice betas for a while now, so I have been eagerly awaiting this release! StarOffice is, of course, based on the ever-popular OpenOffice.org. StarOffice 7 software adds functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format. It also introduces the new StarOffice Configuration Manager, the StarOffice Software Development Kit, a macro recorder, and support for assistive technologies, as well as for complex text layouts. Multi-platform running on Linux, Solaris OS and Windows. Only US$79.95 to buy your copy for home (free for edu, plus cost of media+shipping.) Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge has a 'drive-by' 'quick-peek' look at the new StarOffice up on their site."
One suggestion on office software for the Free Software desktop: Casually re-start a friend or co-worker's Windows computer with Knoppix and show them you can open their Word files with OpenOffice.org. Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne viruses until they reboot into Windows.
AP talks about another Sun thing, code Mad Hatter or "Sun Java Desktop". What's the relationship between StarOffice and this Mad Hatter deal? Why would they work on two parallel projects like this? Presumably MH builds on the translation libraries from OpenOffice? Inquiring minds want to know...
I have read various comments on this but wouldn't mind the /. crowd's various takes. What happens when MS's Office switches to bastardised XML? Is it going to tip the whole cart over, or is it a small bump in the road? For someone considering switching to *nix, this could make a significant difference...
The Mothership
"Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor "
And people wonder why Linux isn't 'on the desktop' yet!? Seriously, apps like these are needed; they aren't some kind of swish extra that only Windows users can have. So while it's nice to see a decent 'quality' wordprocessor, it's also a bit embarrassing really.
What was everyone doing? Waiting for M$ to release Word or is it just a sign that Linux is still currently in the palm of techies, not office workers?
For most large companies, it's not about free or not free, it's about dedicated support. From a company standpoint, they would rather shell out money for the non-free version if they can call someone on the phone and get an answer. Sure, the free version may have mailing lists and USENET, but a company can't rely on that, and they can't point fingers when something goes wrong.
That's the same reason a lot of companies will pay through the nose for RedHat Enterprise---not because it does more, but because they have a single place to call when something goes wrong.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Word processors should be used for letters and very short papers. Anything approaching a book, or anything needing any kind of consistency should be done using a document processing language like LaTEX.
Same goes for spreadsheet 'programming'. If you have to automate some data analysis, write a program. Spreadsheets should be used for quick analysis, or a place to keep your notes for anything not complex enough to warrant a database.
Gnumeric has received a grant from Mitch Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3) to develop an interoperability test suite with leading proprietary competitors. The money will be used as form of bounty to fund the expansion of our existing tests for worksheet functions (eg =SUM, or =ODDFPRICE). Our goal is to ensure that a users data will produce the same results (or better
Exact prices have not been decided as yet, but this is an excellent opporunity for non-coders to help opensource programs, and earn a bit of money too. Specifics to be announced on the mailing lists in the coming weeks.
Official announcement here
If you want to take Gnumeric 1.2.0 for a spin, consider participating in The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project, a research project being conducted at UC Berkeley. We have prebuilt Red Hat 9 packages of Gnumeric and several other popular applications. These binaries are built with extra feedback instrumentation that lets us understand how the software is working (or failing to work) in the hands of real users.
Even if you have never written a line of code in your life you can help make the software better for everyone simply by using our special bug-hunting feedback packages.
Read more about it or download and install today!
The biggest coup for any productivity suite would be a nice document management application like iManage for DocsOpen. Law firms (like mine) MUST have such a thing with hundreds of thousands of documents.
According to the release mentioned above, Dr. McCullaugh recommends using Gnumeric instead of excel.
See what I've been reading.
I use Star Office at work and Open Office at home. Open/Star Office has certainly been noticed by MS however with a patented and closed source MS ".DOC" format (yes it's coming soon!), it may cause some hardship. My last three job applications (CV's) were in .TXT format (containing a reason why I sent the document in this format) and I am proud to say that on 2/3 applications I got the job!
Oh and don't forget finances!
XP Pro
Office XP
Firewall
Virus Checker
DVD Player
Photoshop .NOT(NET) Development package ..... etc
---------------
Lets call MS software updates (for a "Techie" user) 750.00 per annum
Linux 0.00
Allways nice when you have an imaginary balance of + 750 each year and high tail it to France backpacking! Or you could put it in Bills pocket ..... your choice =)
Vote With your feet ----> GPL
The problem with KOffice being it doesn't convert from MSOffice docs as well as OO
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
Just to second Jody's point: I've seen spreadsheets (specifically Excel) used for, of all things, spacecraft design (among other things). In fact, JPL's Project Design Center (aka Team X) uses a whole slew of linked workbooks to develop entire conceptual mission designs. The beauty of spreadsheets is that they are very flexible, and it's easy to create and modify low-fidelity models very rapidly. As a result, Excel gets heavy use throughout the aerospace industry for doing all sorts of back-of-the-envelope calculations and simple math modelling. As Jody says, they make a great scratch pad.
I see a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a database app. How about that other stalwart of the "office productivity" suite, presentation software? Much as it pains me to say it, Powerpoint has become almost indispensable (at least in my line of work) these days. OO.org's Impress is nice, but still not quite on a par with PPT. A Gnome-Office PPT equivalent would be a nice addition to the suite. Or is there some other open source presentation option out there I'm not aware of?
Also, the story claims that one of Abiword's distinctive features is, "includes proper footnotes". Well what is this supposed to mean? I've never had any difficulty making OpenOffice.org Writer do footnotes properly. Is there some widely known deficiency of which I am completely unaware?
There were also a number of other issues last I tried; perhaps this have since been resolved:
Seemingly no support for automated numbering of a proper outline (i.e. cycle Roman numerals, capital letters, numbers, etc.). I can't even get it to work manually, changing the sort of "numbering" I want at each level of indent.
select+delete or cut text fails to properly redraw the screen, leaving a line of the removed text visible, and leaving me to wonder whether I actually removed the section properly, or if it is just due to improper redraw.
In "Web Layout", strange breaking occurs where page breaks "should be", leaving me to wonder whether it hit "Enter" accidently, or if it is merely this bug.
Scrolling results in text distortion, making one or more lines unreadable until scrolled off the screen again, or until the application window is covered and redrawn (although disabling "smooth scrolling" seems to "fix" this).
Also, Abiword doesn't appear to allow the insertion of any "objects" other than "pictures". Of course this isn't a "fault", as I suppose it is waiting for a framework to be standardized for this sort of thing.
No, between everything else, I don't have the time now to get a handle on the code base and fix or implement these things myself, and so please don't tell me to.
I'm simply stating that as I found it last I checked, it was not sufficient to meet my needs, and I will, if most of these issues still remain, have to wait a while longer before I can adopt or endorse it for regular use.
I look forward to switching.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
"but Office XP is far superior in terms of usability and productivity."
That's all well and good, but is it four times the usability and productivity of SO? Because that's what the price tag says (and that's just for the standard version). Hell, WinXP Pro retails for less than that.
I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to buying software (and, yes, I buy software), but when it digs into my pocket book as much as a proposed MS Office solution does, I'm going to spend on SO instead and use the savings on ways to make money.
unfortunately for me, AbiWord doesn't come close to OpenOffice Write. OO does a better job of converting MS documents. AbiWord, in all my tests, is pathetic at it.
for OpenOffice, any MS Word doc with graphics is hosed and forget about Word Art.
Quite frankly, both have a lot of work ahead of them IMHO.
-- DuckWing
which debuted first on the Macintosh, who purchased ClarisWorks only to produce AppleWorks and later created Mac OS X
It should be noted that Claris always was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple. Apple did buy ClarisWorks from Claris and rename it to AppleWorks (which is also the name of a word processor Apple created back in the Apple II era), and Claris renamed itself to Filemaker, Inc. which is still an Apple subsidiary.
Claris the company is not to be confused with Clarus the dogcow.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What a spectacular troll! Seems like a straightforward question, but the weakness of Unix has always been the standard windowing system, or more specifically the lack thereof.
Just about every Unix system has an X11 server, but few seem to know the dark arts of programming directly to X. Everyone picks the windowing toolkit flavor of the month and programs for that, apparently under the assumption that everyone will eventually see the light and pick their toolkit.
KDE, Gnome, CDE, OpenWindows, OS X, etc all have one OR MORE windowing toolkits! Even though the underlying OS is basically the same in all cases. I love Unix but I can see why folks prefer programming for Windows. The APIs may suck but at least there are fewer of them.
Looks like the future may be an abstracted or even interpreted language, like Java or Dflat. At least a developer has a chance of writing multiplatform code in one sitting.
At my company, our biologiests and chemists rely heavily on spreadsheets. While thye could do the calculations themselves, the spreadsheets give them instant gratification. They just have to enter the results from an experiment (or have a device automatically dump them to a spreadsheet) and have a macro or set of equations generate a report.
Most of these scientists don't test 1 compound; they test hundreds at a time. So doing it themselves would be a pain in the ass. Using spreadsheets, they can instantly see the resulting graphs and determine where the good data is.
I'm sure you're right about OO's performance here. Unfortunately, you can say exactly the same thing about Word opening slightly complex .doc files. Word will choke when trying to make them, choke when trying to save them and (it's wonderously consistant!) choke trying to open them.
I have opened a ``moderately complex'' Word document on the same version of Word on two machines, and had it paginated differently. I have seen one copy of Word fail to import some of the features of a document created on another copy (again, same version).
I think that's no different, and no more lying, than pretending that Word can easily open all Word files.
See what I've been reading.