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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$79.95 to buy your copy for home (free for edu, plus cost of media+shipping.) Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge has a 'drive-by' 'quick-peek' look at the new StarOffice up on their site."
One suggestion on office software for the Free Software desktop: Casually re-start a friend or co-worker's Windows computer with Knoppix and show them you can open their Word files with OpenOffice.org. Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne viruses until they reboot into Windows.
Microsoft is at, what, Office 2003? That's 1996 versions beyound StarOffice 7. Come on guys, get moving!
AP talks about another Sun thing, code Mad Hatter or "Sun Java Desktop". What's the relationship between StarOffice and this Mad Hatter deal? Why would they work on two parallel projects like this? Presumably MH builds on the translation libraries from OpenOffice? Inquiring minds want to know...
Openoffice is based off of Star, not the other way around.
2.0, as specified in the article title, or 1.0, as specified in the article text?
StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org, which is based on StarOffice.
Around and around we go!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
I suppose you could go do the StarOffice pitch to your boss, the only problem I forsee is trying to keep up with M$ and their new ideas for keeping Office locked down with the proposed security interface with Win2k3, and incompatibilities with other Office suites. Could be more of a hassle than it's worth down the line...
Blah...
Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."
Why not switch the company to OpenOffice.org? I doubt the company needs StarOffice.
You're just going from one pay-for product, to another (albiet less cost). If you REALLY want to show your boss the beauty of alternative software. Show him something thats great, FOR FREE! (that will get any bosses attention).
And if you choose StarOffice just because "Money means better" to the management, you're just as bad as MS.
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
I don't see any problems with gnome-office listed in your discussion of gnome's failings. Can you elaborate on any issues you've had with recent versions of Gnumeric, AbiWord, or GNOME-DB ? We're quite interested in constructive feedback.
Try Qt. It has superb documentation, examples and tutorials. And once you pick it up, the KDE API documentation (which assumes you know Qt) will make much more sense.
If I run KDE, will I be able to run Abiword?
You'll need to install some Gnome libraries to get it to install, but yeah, there's no problem running any app in any window manager or desktop.
I'm sorry if this is a bit O/T but it's something I've wanted to say here for a while and no closer topic has shown up lately either (so please don't mod down...): Since we (probably) all want to avoid lock-in and thus open formats to be more widespread (ie. other office suites than MS) I have a suggestion that others might want to follow. I've tried to help Open Office spread in the following way (the reason chose Open Office is that it's supported on more platforms than any of the others AFAIK and is thus most suitable for this purpose): I'm (among other things) a business student and frequently books on eg. finance include a CD-Rom with Excel spreadsheets as examples of some concepts in the book. I test whether the sheets work flawlessly in Open Office and if so send the authors a suggestion that since Open Office would definitely fit on the CD they could spread that along for free and thus allow students who don't have access to MS Office to use the additional material if they just have a computer. So my suggestion is simply that others too do this when they encounter such books. Please note, however, that the authors of such books are businesspeople and thus "MS Sucks, Open Source rulez!" is not the way to approach them - just try to emphasize that it adds value to their book and that it's very easy to implement (you can tell how easily it worked for you) and if you feel like it you might mention that MS surely needs some competition (and they certainly acknowledge that since MS has been used in books as an example of how a monopoly sets prices).
Karma. Moderation. Is my
Sorry, it is you who are wrong; the original statement is correct. Although the original codebase was StarOffice, the main tree is now OpenOffice, which StarOffice is now just a branded child of (there are others, like Ximian's OpenOffice). StarOffice includes some other things as well, which can't or won't be open-sourced.
Yes is would be very nice if we could stop replicating each others work. However, its difficult to do that in practice because we're all operating on what are in effect completely different platforms. KDE uses entirely different data structures than GNOME, which is in turn different from OO, which is different from mozilla ... and MS sits on the sidelines and smiles.
Adding to the technical challenges are the politcal bits. I've writting elements of gnome-office (libgsf) with the specific intent that it be sharable between the different platforms. Why bother rewriting OLE import/export 3 times ? Unfortunatly, that teeny little 'g' is a big problem. The kword folk have accepted the library, but the kspread team seems intent on writing their own. The OO people can't even look at it because 'the mac people would scream when they saw a glib depend'. Its depressing.
For the time being we're stuck. Each of us feels our project can produce the best result in the shortest time. At best the projects can share test suites and documentation. Which is where Mitch Kapor's grant to Gnumeric comes in handy. We're using it to commission a set of tests in xls format (so that we can all read it, even Ms Excel). The other projects are welcome to use it along with all of our other interoperability tests.
You using the NVIDIA drivers for XFree86? I've heard that for some reason Gnome/GTK2 has in the past (and maybe still has) problems with those drivers making it run slow.
Nope, I've been running Abiword CVS HEAD for about a whole year (on a Gentoo stable box) and those types of problems haven't been around for months now. Are you trying this out with the Abiword 2.0 stable release or a pre-release?
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
When I first read that I thought you were joking, but as I read the rest of your comments, I understand where you misunderstandings lie. I don't know anything about Apple's APIs, but I imagine that they are very clean. Win32, on the other had, is a mess. Linux *does* have very clean and well-defined system APIs. You are mistakenly thinking that windowing and GUIs have something to with system APIs. They don't. And they shouldn't. Instead, userland libraries supply this functionality. The windows gui is quite a hack, api-wise. And it has many, many security problems because of it's being put into the kernel as a system api.
Windowing has nothing to do with the standard C library (which all c compilers link against, even on windows -- that's what msvcrt.dll is for). This library, combined with the system apis (chapter 2 of the man pages) provides lowlevel access to the operating system. User interaction on linux comes through other higher-level apis from libraries such as gtk. This may seem backwards to a Windows developer to separate it this way, but this gives a great amount of development flexibility and increased application security.
It's quite funny, actually, that experienced unix programmers wonder the same thing about win32 developers. I recommend checking out some books on linux development. I think you'll be slowly impressed as you discover the unix model of development and the simplicity and power of the posix-style api, and the tremendous availability of programming libraries to do things like gui programming, you'll be impressed.
Yes, of course. You just need the gnome libraries installed (but not the full environment.
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!
I respectfully disagree. Spreadsheet make a very nice interface to complex analytics. Real practitioners do their own calculations on the complex bits and use a spreadsheet front end as a scratch pad, a way to quickly twiddle data. Spreadsheets are not databases, and generally should not be used that way. However, to dismiss them as being merely stedding stones to real databases is to miss the point entirely. They're quite good at lots of other things.
It's a shame that the parent comment is a blatant troll because it does harbour a truth or two.
Gnome Office and OpenOffice.org (I couldn't comment on Star Office as I have not used it) are many features behind Microsoft's latest incarnations of it's Office suite.
However, Microsoft Office has had a head start. It's been going for a great deal longer than any of OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and Gnumeric. It also has many more developers.
Yet the Free Software Office programs seem to be catching up. AbiWord has matured massively between 1.0.x and 2.0 - they're almost unrecognisable from each other.
Gnumeric is the one exception to the 'fewer features' since it actually boasts more functions that Excel. A little bit of polish, tweaking, and a few subtle feature additions and Gnumeric will be superior to Excel - some argue that it already is.
OpenOffice.org is also making great strides. 1.1 is far better than 1.0 in all areas - features, speed, and general polish. The plans for 2.0 are promising - there is a detailed roadmap that makes for interesting reading. Version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org will be a major milestone for the project. 1.0 was the initial release, 1.1 was the produce of a bit of spit and polish, 2.0 will be the first to feel like a true individual project as opposed to a bastard-brother of Star Office.
How is it that these Free Software programs are gaining on the software developed by the software giant?
Since Free Software developers develop for free, I think there's a pride assosciated with their work that inspires them to overcome obstacles insurmountable to a payrolled team. It could also be that we have a superior development platform, but that's just flamebait.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
According to the release mentioned above, Dr. McCullaugh recommends using Gnumeric instead of excel.
See what I've been reading.
Koffice Loads faster than OO, has proper footnotes, has never had its "own" font directory, and is properly integrated into the rest of KDE.
Actually, I agree. And it's just MIME-type games. But here's how it works. You save your file in Abiword 2.0 as a Microsoft Word .doc. What Abiword does is it is actually RTF but with the extension .doc. If you do want a true RTF with the proper extension, that option is there too. How's that work for you?
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
Or have them get annoyed at you when OO screws up and loses all the formatting of the word doc.
.doc import feature loses its charm.
Sorry but even as a big OO booster, I'm the first to say that importing word docs is still a total crapshoot. Plain text letters etc come through fine most of the time. In fact most of the content comes through, but when it comes to even slightly complex word docs with images and lots of formatting OO chokes badly. Sure you end up with most of the text and images, but then you have to spend 5 minutes trying to move everything back to whre it should be the
I don't fault OO for this since sucky MS won't open their file specs though. Unfortunately MS knows that proprietary Office file formats are the key to its desktop monopoly, so don't expect that to change in our lifetime.
Honestly though I just don't think its right to outright lie to people and say OO can easily open all Word files. That's probably never going to happen. For me its not a problem since I never deal with a ton of word docs anymore, but for those who HAVE to both send and recieve word docs all day long I can't say they should see that as a plus for using OpenOffice.
God I hate proprietary file specs and protocols.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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
Just one question about all these wonderful new "office" suites. They all use the same, standardized, open file formats by default, and are 100% compatible with each other, right? Right?
Because that would be a huge benefit of moving away from MS Office, right? Because all these different office suites are totally compatible and interchangeable, even though they can never be totally compatible with the secret, changing MS Office formats.
So I don't have to keep saving in DOC just to exchange files between StarOffice and GNOME Office and KDE Office, right? I can save in some new, default, standard, universally recognized file format, and easily exchange files between all these different programs without any translation problems or confusion, right?
And Microsoft will quickly be forced to create a patch for their Office products so they can read and write this new open file format that the whole world is suddenly standardizing on because it's used by default by every open source office suite in the world, right?
Or am I smoking crack and about to get my first -1, Troll rating for openly wondering why there is still no apparent single, open, standard, widely used file format? One to compete on solid ground with the single, closed, proprietary file formats from Microsoft and others that we all revile on a daily basis.
We've had 15 years or more to replace DOC and its brethren. Where is the replacement for DOC? Or the replacement that can be used for anything, like a combination of DOC, XLS, PPT, PUB, etc? I'd really, really, really like to know. Because until I know that, I feel pretty stupid telling people to drop the nice, simple, standard (de facto if not de jure) Microsoft Office file formats. When they ask what they're supposed to use instead, I have no answer.
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