Slashdot Mirror
Review: Sun StarOffice 7
ValourX writes "Here's the Internet's first comprehensive review of Sun's new StarOffice 7 suite. With the ability to export to PDF and SWF and greatly improved conversion filters, Sun's $80 office suite is more than a match for the upcoming ultra-expensive Microsoft Office System 2003."
I am suprised that Sun's Star Office recieves so much attention from slashdot and the open sauce community.
Ability Office offers similar functionality in most cases, it can export to PDF, open all MS Office file types and doesn't use a ugly as hell windowing toolkit.
It can even be run on linux. Star Office is not very similar to Open Office at all, sun kept the best parts to themselves (database app) so why are they seen to be *cooler* to open source zealots then other perfectly good office sweets?
Also its cheaper than StarOffice, Ability only costs 69.95
There is no god
The next interesting advantage that Calc has is the ability to give a substitute name for columns and rows. In other words, instead of column "G" you can name it "the column formerly known as G" or "sales reports" or whatever is relevant to the data in that column. This makes it a little easier to keep track of what you're doing in your equations.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Sun's on the ropes as a business and they're switching from hardware to software?? Maybe?? I like the new features, but they've got a hill to climb to convince me to make a commitment to the product while their business is struggling.
I'm use an older version of staroffice (back when it was a free download) and there's lots of things such as newer slide shows or documents with macros it won't view. Does this newer version address any of that?
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
star office: 79.95
office xp: 448
or, open office......
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
Why would I want to export a document to Flash?
I wonder if the SWX format will ever really take hold. No doubt it will need something like a very good StarOffice suite to bring it into its own. (And maybe a boost from Microsoft secure documents / forced upgrade)
I have wanted to bring my company onto the free/cheap opensource software bandwagon for some time now. And I have the authority to do it. But I always have to consider the issue - can non-techsmart people handle it? Will they be able to open the documents they receive and use them.
In many ways a really good Office suite will help linux/open source just as much as the benefits of the OS itself.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Okay, let me get this straight -
No PIM (Outlook)
No document review functions
Fonts don't look right
This might rock the casbah for casual home users, but the real money is in the enterprise. Who could reccomend this to their CTO without a PIM? MS might be expensive but the stuff just works.
The reviewer accepts when he cant do things (like test how fast it actually starts up compared to earlier verions), looks at the important stuff etc /. crowd would find interesting
My favorite is this one though, the author shows that he looks in places which only the
The license agreement is rather odd. A part of Sun's legalese (which also appears in the Solaris license) stipulates that StarOffice 7 is not intended for use in (or by those contracted by) a nuclear facility.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
When our kids went to school september 1st, I volounteered as computer fixer. First thing I did was throw off ALL (I'll repeat : ALL) office suites of all computers. That included MS Office, Open Office and Appleworks. I replaced them with Wordpad and similar "silly" editors.
We're september 19, and NOBODY noticed. I got 1 remark from a teacher telling me that this year, the kids seemed to get along better with the computers compared to last year.
All this just to prove that 90% of current software can be reduced to the max in 90% of all machine instances.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I'm sure all of you have read the article about how Sun "lost the Linux Wars" in Wired Magazine, and for me it just seems like another desperate attempt by them to not go under. Now, don't get me wrong, If I had a company I thought was going under, I'd be desperate, as well. But why pick this when there are better OS's, and better (open source, even) Office Suites?
I have just convinced my boss to switch over StarOffice 7, and the features and support were a major factor in putting it into his comfort zone. He was quite reticent before then. I don't think Microsoft will really be hurt by it's release immeadiately, but it will help a lot of companies start to slowly adopt more alternative options.
It's time for us geeks to belly up to the bar and pay for something that we want. Everyone claims to hate MS, and to use OpenSource whenever possible (except for games, and well, MS Word, and Flash, and aww heck, just reinstall Win2K). $80 is peanuts, compared to the price of MS Office, and 50% more than the price of a good video game. Nobody will think twice about paying $50 for Half Life 2 (which runs on Windows), but everyone will flame Sun for the gall of charging for StarOffice. OOo is free, yes, but StarOffice or other commercial Office alternatives (Applix on Linux anyone? Yes, I bought it.)
People can't write good, free-as-in-beer software forever. People need to eat, breed and pay their taxes. As romantic as it sounds, you can't have coders working for free for the common good w/o ultimate payment. MS can give away IE because they've already been paid for it due to their enslavement of the desktop.
Support Sun, fight MS, and buy the damn product.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Yes, but is it still slow, unstable, and ugly? If so, I'll keep using MS Office and K Word.
For those OO/SO users out there. What do these products offer that will do what Visual Basic does in MS Office?
Can you access Star Office documents from applications in any RAD languages like you can in with MS Office/VB?
Thought this might be a good place to get some input on that. At my work there are a lot of apps written in VB that generate Excel spreadsheets. I'd love to know that I can replace that functionality with something else.
This is a serious question and there'll be those who want to flame me for just mentioning VB but the truth of the matter is - there is tons of small office stuff written in VB and VBA, which is where I make my living. I can't move people from office unless I can replace that too
.
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?
ValourX, the author of the review, also has a comprehensive comparison of word processors, and here OpenOffice doesn't fare so well. The author seems much more impressed with TextMaker for Linux.
No advertising so the general public can learn about this great product, regardless of their OS "choice." Not so hot.
We were already considering evaluating this as our cross-platform solution, or at least as our Linux/Solaris solution to handle these chores well while playing with the folks who use MS tools.
OpenOffice has been waaaay too slow. I've been using gnumeric and abiword, with the odd foray into Impress, since there doesn't seem to be an alternatove. My biggest complaint with abiword (besides needing its own fonts, fixed in 2.0) is that it doesn't import HTML - it treats them as plain text. Brain dead! I looked at TexMaker, which has most of what AbiWord is missing, but it's just ugly as can be, and has some braindead GUI issues, like folders on the right, files on the left. Did I get a broken i18nized version?
Now if only StarOffice included an Outlook-compliant calendar, email and PIM. (We'll still try it, despite not having these.)
So where is the MS Project clone? As of not long ago, Mr. Project still couldn't read or write Ms. Project files...
I'm not knocking any of the completely OSS suites, far from it. But I think Sun is doing everybody a service by demonstrating to the PHBs that a major software player can produce credible competition for Office and sell it for peanuts. I want to see people making money out of FOSS - because that will keep it developing - and if Sun's work leads others to produce customised and extended office suites based on other OSS suites, that should get back the pace of development that has been so held back by the MS monopoly.
Also, although I'm too old to use the terminology without looking sad, the XML output format rocks. People will be able to do some really creative things with this.
Remember: once upon a time almost all tires were crossply. Then along came radial. No technology has a right to a monopoly for longer than it takes for something better to come along.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I've never been like "Damn! If I only I was using Word!"
You'll have to agree that the quirkiness of Word is character building. You don't have that in OO.
As much as I'd love to use SO (or, insert other non-MS product here), the unfortunate reality is most business applications my company uses (and our clients as well) that sit on the desktop require Office. It simply isn't enough to say "This can open & save Word / Excel / etc. documents." A true replacement needs to support MS plugins, VBA (ugh, but sorry, its needed), and so on before we can even consider it. Unfortunately, as absurd as MS pricing is, its an all-or-nothing battle too, the cost to support each additional Office Suite is just too high for a midsized (500-1000 user) shop. We've tried talking to dozens of vendors just to get a timeline on this sort of thing, and with the occasional exception of a few that are porting apps to Java, most aren't even considering it, simply because of the costs they would incur for what appears to be a small market. Unfortunately, I know its a chicken & egg situation: My company can't switch until a good number of our business apps support non-MS software, but... well, this is slashdot, you know the rest.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
Am I missing something or Shockwave has been ported to other OS-s(besides Win) since the last time I checked??? I agree that
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Although I don't have an accurate method of reliably measuring the time it takes to start the program, I'd say its about twice as fast as StarOffice 6.
Maybe one of these would help. Difficult to operate, I know.
Haida Manga
From the API FAQ for OpenOffice.
"OpenOffice implements the API with UNO (Universal Network Objects). Currently there are language bindings for Java and C++. You can implement your own language binding, and in fact we are actively looking for a volunteer to create a C language binding.
Additionally UNO allows control from scripting languages and scripting environments (for example debuggers). Currently StarBASIC (VBA syntax compatible) can call on the API and there is a prototype written for Python integration. "
If OpenOffice can di it, I'd wager StarOffice can too. The StarOffice SDK should have all the details.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I actually bought StarOffice 6.0 about a year ago, will there be an upgrade, either free or a nominal cost? If not, that would be bad form by Sun Microsystems for those who did support their product early on.
"Although I don't have an accurate method of reliably measuring the time it takes to start the program, I'd say its about twice as fast as StarOffice 6." With all the savings from not having to use MS Office maybe this guy will be able to buy a watch with a stopwatch feature.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Sun StarOffice 7 fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my Solaris box(a SPARC/455Mhz w/1024 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one directory on the hard drive to another. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Sun box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Suns, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Sun that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Suns' faster chip architecture and RAM size. My 286/33 with 4 megs of ram runs faster than this 455 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Sun is a superior machine.
Sun addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Sun over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
i've been thinking of migrating away from the wysiwyg word processors to latex.
I'm just tired of caption numbers not being updated automatically and selecting/changing styles all the time.... well hopefully staroffice/openoffice does that better than m$office in this upcoming version...
my blog
http://www.ability.com/linux/abilitylinux.php?ln=e n
The task of porting the Ability applications fell into two parts:
1. Converting Ability's common library of Windows calls to Linux. This is actually the bulk of the work (most of which is complete) and relies heavily on a technology called Wine - see below.
2. Recompiling the actual applications. Thanks to the 1997 re-write, this turns out to be very straightforward.
The Ability applications will be native Linux code - there will be no "Windows code" that needs interpreting and Ability will not be restricted to Intel boxes. This contrasts to the Corel's Office Suite under Linux where an interpreter is used to run what is effectively, standard Windows code on Intel platforms only.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
According to a button on Microsoft's Office System Beta page, you can attend a Microsoft Office System Launch Event, and watch someone get hanged.
(hint: look at the character on the right, and the unfortunate placement of the edge of the whiteboard)
SIGFEH
Install the open source applications side-by-side with the commercial applications that you plan to replace. You can install Staroffice or OpenOffice right along with MS office, and make sure that it is as support or even more so by your IT department. That means, the users don't get "We don't know, you're on your own" answers from Tech for Staroffice, but then get a dissertation when they ask a question about MS Office.
After you have a installation that is supported ( internally ) and documented as well as ( or better ) than MS Office, ( I know, easier said than done, but do your best ), and the users have had some time to become a little familiar with Staroffice. Start promoting StarOffice as an alternative to MS Office. This could be done easier now. You can direct, for instance, people who need to create simple PDF files to StarOffice for instance. Thats something MS Office can not do without 3rd party software installed.
I think IT departments should give the user an incentive to move to cheaper, well performing software. Eg. The department could get a cut from the money saved, while IT gets a cut and the company holds the rest. This may be difficult to execute because many IT managers don't like decreasing they budget, even if doing so may, in a roundabout way, leave them more money in they pockets at the end of the day.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. It was about scaling and allometry - a very interesting subject. The assignment was to take some measurements from various lagomorph (rabbits and hares) skulls and to plot them against one another to see what sorts of scaling relationships there are between characters in different ages of the same species (ontogenetic allometry) and between different related species (phylogenetic allometry).
The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel. I was planning to do my assignment in OpenOffice Calc, and to let the instructor know that there is a free alternative for impoverished students to use, but Calc doesn't do everything that I needed it to do. Calc will add a trendline using various types of functions, but it will not show the equation or the R squared value on the graph. After digging through OpenOffice Help I found a discussion on the OpenOffice forum about it. It's issue #4509, and it's not scheduled to be fixed in 1.1. So I grudgingly used Excel and Word to make my report, and lost a good opportunity to spread the word.
In defense of OpenOffice: I have used it for months now and I dig it. This is the first time I've had any problems with it, and this is actually a pretty minor thing. I especially like OpenOffice's style tools, which have really changed the way I author documents.
Well you know us open sauce zealots...We can't decide between a tomato source and a cream source!
- The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind. -- Humphrey Bogart
I think the last 20 years proved people can write good, free-as-in-beer software forever.
The fact is free software/open source has an endless pool of resources to draw from: kids just arriving at the field. Some of these kids are smart enough to write their own operating systems, their own word processors or their own browsers. Few of them will manage to build a whole career writing only free software. Most will go on to work on commercial projects and new kids will take their places in the projects they mantained (if those were demanded). Also, many older, experienced developers will turn to open source software at the end of their careers as a way to keep playing.
I use OpenOffice and have absolutely no need to switch. Never receive a document, spreadsheet or presentation I couldn't open. Of course I am a software developer, so my development tools are far more important than my office tools. But as it is, I would donate to the OpenOffice project (or the FSF) many thousand dollars before considering any commercial alternatives.
Someday I used MS Office. I thought it is the only software that can do what we need because our country, in fact, is owned by Microsoft and US.
Last year I have tried OpenOffice. It was nice, although not easy to use. It has nice vector drawing package. Anything else was copied (at least visual part) from MS Office. Anyway, it is nice office package with russian and latvian language support.
For geeks like me these "ofice suits" are too hard to learn and use. I prefer \LaTeX{} for russian texts and Omega (thanks A.Kryukov for Antomega package!) for Latvian ones.
the ability to export to PDF and SWF
First it was jobs, now it's women.
If we keep exporting all of the Single White Females, who will geeks date and marry?
So I say: screw sun. I used to like sun, but not anymore, I'll stick with openoffice
Indeed, I'd rather use abiword and gnumeric for those tasks, although star draw and impress are awesome programs for those tasks and I do use them.
But the thing that would get me to using SO exclusively would definitely be a good project management program.
Why should even high school teachers or students be required to make Powerpoint presentations? They need to learn this in high school? Or is it just a waste of time better spent on other things -- e.g, like learning how to write?
Similarly, why should high school students be required to use a spreadsheet? So they can continue to avoid learning basic math?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I have only ever posted 1 diary on kurofaghin.
rkz
They are both Scum Sucking User Screwing Businesses. If I want to fight Microsoft, I'll invest in OpenOffice sending them my $350*$NUM_USERS. THAT IS A GOOD INVESTMENT. Not Sun which will be gone in 5 years.
10 Reasons to Upgrade to Office Professional Edition 2003 Managing information with XML and safeguarding your data with information rights management (IRM) are among the many compelling reasons to upgrade.
Is IRM another way to say DRM? Or did I miss a memo?
Open source (Linux) or the SCO threat.
Which is it, Sun?
You can't pick both and still be credible.
Am I missing something or Shockwave has been ported to other OS-s(besides Win) since the last time I checked??? I agree that .swf may be *EVENTUALLY* cross-platform with the appropriate plug-ins, but Shockwave, wtF??
Yes you have been missing something. Here you go. Man I could not deal with Linux if I could not get my swf pr0n and homestarrunner! :)
Indeed it has been ported to just about every platform including the Amiga.
Why would you think the Flash Player is for Win only? It never was Win only. It used to be MAC and WIN only. Then MAC/WIN/ JAVA. Then Macromedia opened the format, allowed anyone willing to port the player a SDK to do so and anyone who wanted to make SWF creation tools documentation and a free liscense to do so.
You are trying to substitute one broken tool for an even more broken one. Write your assignment using Latex and plot your graphs using Gnuplot.
What do these products offer that will do what Visual Basic does in MS Office?
You mean, what products will be offered to allow malicious hackers to gain easy access to our GNU/Linux systems?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Again, of course I do know that Flash is ported and that's what I meant about plug-ins. Sure you don't need to go any further if all you want is view a .swf, but the SHOCKWAVE player is still not available for Linux/Mozilla and in the initial post it was well said SHOCKWAVE, not Flash.
There IS a difference.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
But can it run on OSX? If only it could.
Jonathanjk.com
How about Star Office for OS X? Plenty of people are buying Macs today, and why should Microsoft get revenue from that platform as well? As it stands, Sun could make money in this endeavor because how many rank-and-file OS X users are actually going to stoop to using Open Office via the X11 Window? And officially, Open Office for OS X is being delayed until 2005! Apple surely cannot assign any of their programming staff to working on the OS X port because Microsoft would then cut out all Mac development in response. So all I can see are $$$'s if Sun would be so inclined to spend a little cash on porting Star Office over to OS X...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Let's face it, where I work, most users barely use Office 97 features. True, you can do some really cool things with Office XP, but for users that can't remember how to do basic things like use templates, those advanced features are a waste. They only exist to cause IT calls when the users set some weird stuff up and can't get back to normal. Sure, it'd be nice to train everyone to use revisions, tracking, and macros...but that's a lost cause when you're still trying to get most users to use the network drives instead of local disk!
As far as PIM, I'd rather move all my people to webmail than continue to deal with Outlook. Again, my small shop would cost $4k+ for an exchange server [that gets rooted often , spreads viruses, etc.] versus my simple POP boxes on my as400 for "free" The current state-of-the-art in webmail is almost as good as exchange...without buying anymore expensive and buggy software. I've found the only users that care about all the office features are IT, and "power" users with way too much time on their hands!
OpenOffice and StarOffice are fine if you want one package with everything in it. But why bother?
LyX can be used to create professional documents using standard typesetting, which prevents a whole slew of the inconsistencies generated when the user has to define the typesetting. We all know how many database, spreadsheet, and presentation-creation programs there are that you can use for GNU/Linux -- a lot. There's also tons of e-mail programs too.
The vast majority of users don't use half of the features in various Office Programs. For those that do need that kind of functionality, you can get it in StarOffice or OpenOffice, along with Evolution for e-mail. But I'll tell you, the vast majority of people who use Microsoft Outlook or Evolution use them just to check their e-mail, and not as a central planning point for their lives.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
When our kids went to school september 1st, I volounteered as computer fixer.
If you prepped that post in Word instead of Wordpad, you'd get a little red squggly line telling you that "volunteered" was mispelled. But maybe I'm just being silly.
I think what used to be called just Flash is now Shockwave Flash, and what used to be called Shockwave is now Shockwave Director. Confusing, isn't it?
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
i cn, cn yu?
Beta? What beta? I'm using OO 1.1 RC4, which seems like a pretty advanced beta. Beats the snot out of any beta software I've ever produced. Besides, I thought it was the other way around. Didn't OO start out life as StarOffice?
I'd buy a copy just to help keep Sun in the office suite competition except for them giving money to SCO. They soiled themselves on that one. I'll probably buy more of their stuff, some day. Just not today.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but in trying to find out how much the "ultra-expensive" Office actually is, I went to Microsoft's FAQ page, which says "Find retail pricing and upgrade information for Microsoft Office System programs, servers, and services at Microsoft Office System Pricing Information."
And when you follow THAT link, you get a 404 error.
So, it's so expensive that even Microsoft doesn't know how much it is? Or don't want to say?
Either way, doesn't bode well.
http://www.thejemreport.com/software/staroffice7.h tm
"Also, personally I would really like to see StarOffice 7 ports for FreeBSD and OS X, but Sun says that isn't likely to happen because of the extensive platform testing that goes into StarOffice."
Say what? The reason why Sun won't port Star Office to OS X is because of "extensive platform testing"? What is so extensive about the Mac platform? You could restrict it to G4 and G5 class Macs and that would be a lot less headaches than with the Windows platform with a myriad of devices to support. And how can there be more differences between Solaris and OS X than between Solaris and Windows? That is seriously a king size load of _______.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Why BDB? There is PostgreSQL if you love BSD license. And there is MySQL if you prefer GPL. And there is ZODB if you need OO layer on a top of BDB.
However, it is possible that Sun could write a whole new database application using BDB as the backend; or, Sun could write a layer for storing word processing, spreadsheet and other kinds of documents in BDB, affording some cool features that we don't get with flat binary files (which suck).
What kind of idiot would decide to do so? Only one who doesn't know (or doesn't want to know) about even one database I have mentioned above.
Less is more !
And I can't find a way to just make the default to just delete the value in the box w/o the dialog...
If I could figure this one out...I don't think I'd have any other complaints...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's NOT "one package with everything in it." The last release that was was StarOffice 5.2.
The article simple explains that the apps use a common "shell" that wraps around the GUI. Instead of each app having its own design, they are framed with the same toolbars. This, in theory, adds consistency and reduces code.
It sounds to me like you use other applications to get your work done and not StarOffice or OpenOffice.org. Those that do use them, those that are best qualified to comment, generally say that the consistency from one app to another is a nice feature.
> By far the most important aspect of any office suite is its word processor
Son, you're living in 1993. By far, it's email. Indeed, the main job a word processor is to compose mail.
I think it's great that a new version of StarOffice is out. What extra features does StarOffice offer that OpenOffice doesn't?
And what does this mean for other office suites such as GNOME Office and KOffice?
I in fact do use them, though very rarely. I was thinking of MS Office when talking about that.
My point was that for many users, much less functionality is needed; thus, a much smaller set of programs.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Hi
I am a Pro-OpenOffice (or pro-staroffice), and have been using it since quite a long time. If i only have to use it for myself, then there is not a single time that i thought "Damn.. I should have got MS-Office". However, there are still a LOT of issues with document conversions, specially if you have stuff like drawings and all in your document. This even forced me to use MS-Office when i have to mail the documents to other people (Its too sad that everyone i know uses MS-Office). Even in my university (www.usc.edu), none of the public machines have OpenOffice/StarOffice, they all have MS-Office. so its increasingly difficult to use OpenOffice as others dont have access to it.
Hope they install OpenOffice at more places or do something about the MS-Office compatibility issues. (installing is a better, cheaper option. I feel that openoffice/staroffice is still used by more "technical" or "IT" people then the general user.
Well with a link to the urinalpoop.org gallery, I'm sure that he's a fine upstanding member of our community.
The fact that most of the students (and teachers) don't use styles, templates, headers and stuff, doesn't mean that they don't *need* it. If I see the papers my classmates and teachers write, I start to puke. Different fonts, no headers, hand-made indexes because there aren't headers (with wrong pagenumbers of course), images that overlap text, indexpages with header/footer and more stuff like that. People just don't know the tools they use!!
Just spend a couple of hours reading a tutorial about writing *real* documents in the wordprocessor of your choice, spend another hour by making templates for common documents, and in the next years you can focus on the content instead of the lay-out, and your papers look much more professional!
Oh, and the direct fontselector should be forbidden for writing large texts. It's added because 'everybody' uses it, but it makes a mess of any text, and it's better to let the user only select fonts by defining paragraph/header styles (and thus forcing them to actually use styles)
cheaper than the upcoming ultra-expensive Microsoft Office System 2003."
Yeah only ultra-expensive to those they are stupid enough to actually buy it. For the rest of us that kazza (or insert favorite p2p software here) it, then who cares?
Does StarOffice 7 have OLE, or something similar? The ability to embed content created in a different app, and edit it in place, is a big plus for Microsoft Office, in terms of ease of use, and in terms of document management (everything in one file).
IMHO any office suite needs an "open" embedding and linking protocol in order to be able to compete for the power users' desktops.
I have thousands of documents in WPD format, so it's one of the problems with migrating to either Star or OpenOffice.org.
Speak before you think
But it is X11, not native
-- ac at home
Before we all start well-wishing Sun too much, recall that they've got blood on their hands as well. Schwartz really elucidates sun's position clearly here.
They might be a microsoft competitor, but they've got no love for the penguin either. Outright hostility, I'd say.
You say
The port itself is easy -- after all, there's already a PPC OpenOffice port. But the trouble is hiring the staff to run the tests they need to run to certify the software for OS X. Then they need to buy equipment, hire or retrain the support team, etc. So the demand has to be pretty high in order to ensure a profitable outcome. I know, it sucks -- I'm on FreeBSD here and StarOffice 7 won't install on it.
-Jemcat > $FILE works for me.
And I think it's about time that the open sauce community received more attention. I can't be the only one tired of all these restaurants using proprietary sauces. I mean, I have the right to know what goes into my sauces.
Oh, and by the way, that's GNU/sauce.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
the common office suit means people can randomly give eachother files that will work, and that theres a program with these common files that fits a wide range of users needs. the real commonality is in the format, which is one of the reasons openoffice is so important (and its easily portable and still comprehensive format)
otherwise you put up a gnumeric spreadsheet and an abiword document and someone who uses koffice will have to download those programs to read them and someone whos stuck on a windows machine cant read one of them.
for now we have MS formats, which is the worst possible solution as far as choosing a single format.
I bought Star Office 6. It was awful. It was of less practical use that 5.1, (still better that SO 6 and OO). I was never able to find any patches for the bugs on Sun's site, and eventually went back to 5.1. It's going to take a lot to convince me to invest in SO again.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majoirty of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.
While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.
I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.
I have been using StarOffice 7 for several days now on my home Windows and Linux computers. I am impressed by the speed improvements over OOO-1.0.2 shipped in Red Hat Linux, and the extra features beyond OpenOffice 1.1 are worth the money to me. Overall I feel it is far more polished and enjoyable to use than StarOffice 6, which itself wasn't bad.
Unfortunately, StarOffice 7 does not solve the single greatest problem, the fact that it does not automatically create a profile when run by a new, instead users need to go through the "Workstation Install" process which is too complicated for end-users.
At my workplace (medium sized high school in Hawaii) OpenOffice 1.1 and StarOffice 6 was previously judged as "acceptable" for campus wide deployment, but unfortunately due to this problem alone they went with buying Microsoft Office XP for many new desktop machines this year.
While it is easy to script automatic profile generation using the autoresponse config file method like the ooffice script distributed in Red Hat or Mandrake, I do not understand why Sun does not consider the lack of automatic profile generation in a user account to be a problem. Using it on a new user account is way too complicated compared to Microsoft Office or Abiword on Windows or Linux.
Only two simple changes are needed to make this situation acceptable:
1) Like Microsoft Office, the StarOffice menu options should go into the program menu of Windows and Gnome/KDE globally for all users.
2) When run, it should automatically create the user profile without any prompts.
Why is this a difficult concept?
In the review, a screenshot of Star Writer show a blantant attempt by the author to plug his more *ahem* creative writing.
I sure hope Star Office can use anti-aliased fonts.
Taxes are to fund the common good.
It's not so far fetched, is it?
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
i desnt run on the second biggest OS,(OSX) at least office runs on a mac...
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
And its not easy to deal with ms office documents better when those documents have been engineered to make reverse engineering as close to impossible as difficult can get. It's a feature SO/OOo shines at compared to other Office suites.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Sun should concentrate on and market OO.org and sell addons (or boxen for that matter) that work with it. And make it more modular. They're being leaped over by koffice and others on *nix and get little interest from the windows side.
;-) Marketing is hammering something into people's skulls.
Although I did install OO on my SO's PC (XP) so that we didn't have to buy MS office. It would already be a huge gain if Sun would throw some marketing at it... "the future is open -- openoffice
But well, Sun is Sun I guess. They always have a hard time spotting easy profit. Instead they sign the dotted line over at Salt Lake City. Ugh!
Inertia or angst, I dunno.
Too many ' really cant test this '..
So it really wasnt a fair comparison of useablity or features.. beyond the price..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Adabas is now known as SAP DB, and you can download it at www.sapdb.org.
It's GPL. If Sun wanted, they could certainly ship it with OpenOffice.
Excel, actually.
Most liberal arts types just use a page in a spreadsheet and mail merge from that. It's easy.
If you have another activity or donation record, just use another column. Real social workers don't worry about normalization.
Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president at Sun:
You keep believing that, Jonathan.
As I stated in other posts, adobe, macromedia, and sun are dead as soon as they can't cook the books anymore. GNU/Linux is passing them by in a hurry.
And don't believe what the analysts say. Don't forget that they had a buy rating on Enron even after Enron declared bankruptcy.
If the other executives at sun believe what jonathan believes, as I'm sure they do, sun won't last more than a couple of years at the most. After that, they'll be a shell company the same as sco.
Transition back to solaris? What color is the sky in your world, jon?
And I can't find a way to just make the default to just delete the value in the box
Just go to the cell and hit backspace. Presto! Contents erased, no dialog...
Just downloaded the evaluation copy and can't seem to register it as a full version for Educational Use.
.doc file I have. Well, it opens it, but only the first page and ingores the other 6...
Also not impressed with the MS interoperability. It won't open the simpilest 7 page
You'd think they would brush this up a little more before releasing it. Sheesh.
Thanks for the links. I wasn't aware of these scripting options.
When you think of a vast polulation whose native language does not use alphabets, internationalization is one of the fundamental features any self-respecting office suite should not miss.
StarOffice 7 will have Japanese and Chinese versions (under the name of StarSuite 7), and the OOo community has been putting much efforts to make other languages available.
In fact, from what I heard of, one of the show-stopper in the release of the OOo1.1 final is a bug in Chinese font handling.
Here's my experiences working with the latest OpenOffice RC (I believe that is what StarOffice 7 is based upon):
Writer is pretty good, but has some serious flaws with page numbering. Namely, there is no concept with OO/SO of sections in the same way as MS Word. You have to bend over backwords to make it break a document so that the table of contents, for example, is numbered using lower-case roman numerals while the main body is numbered starting from 1 using Arabic numerals. Creating a document that excludes the page number from the first page but prints it on all other pages is also a pain in the ass. Importing MS Word documents that are set up this way is broken. Changing formats for heading styles half way through a document is also broken. Resetting numbering for outlines half way through a document is also broken. Every complex document I've ever worked on utilizes all of these features. OpenOffice is very nice, but these features are a necessity for me. In my opinion, this makes OpenOffice unusable for complex documents, and makes its use for interoperability somewhat limited (although interoperability is less likely an issue when dealing with complex documents).
Calc is very good, and I have only noticed a single obscure problem. Excel allows spreadsheets with 65,565 rows, while Calc only allows spreadsheets with 32,767 rows. This is an obscure limit, and I would recommend against creating any spreadsheet that pushes this limit. However, if converting an entire organization to OpenOffice/StarOffice, this may be a problem. A bigger problem for conversion would likely be the lack of Visual Basic support. I don't consider the row size limit to be a show stopper (whereas the Writer limitations are show stoppers, imho). Calc is very good as a whole. However, if your organization relies heavily upon VB macros, then you should consider the effects this will have on any migration.
I have not stress-tested Impress enough to notice any limitations/bugs. So far, everything I have thrown at Impress comes through fine.
As for formatting, I have only had minor issues regarding formatting (like a single line being thrown onto the next page with a document). These issues are similar to those encountered when changing printer types under MS Word. They are a nuiscance, but not a show stopper.
This "comprehensive" review was anything but. If the author had investigated OO/SO's shortcomings even a little bit, the page numbering issues would have been apparent. But, hey, that's what Slashdot is for, no?
--Be human.
Star Office is to be run on Mad Hatter due December. But as i posted on OS maybe in that amount of time Sun could take a look at Java for X desktop environment that put v0.1 out. A little rough but with some development and some skins like those that were made for Morpheus, this could really be something interesting to look at and watch develop. http://jdx.sourceforge.net/ Seems to me like this would be the REAL Java Desktop System
Perhaps Sun meant, "We're not working on an OS X version of Star Office because we know Apple is close to fielding Appleworks 7, and we see no profit in competing with it." And that would be perfectly fair--particularly if Appleworks 7 just happens to be full of Open Office code.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
...So I grudgingly used Excel and Word to make my report, and lost a good opportunity to not spread the "Word"...
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Perhaps Sun meant, "We're not working on an OS X version of Star Office because we know Apple is close to fielding Appleworks 7, and we see no profit in competing with it." And that would be perfectly fair--particularly if Appleworks 7 just happens to be full of Open Office code.
Is this a known and substantial rumor? I just don't see Apple trying to launch a major competing software suite against Microsoft. It would be an extreme example of hubris or a dramatic suicide attempt. Unless Jobs wants to push Gates's buttons with a renewed antitrust issue, but again, I don't see that happening. At least with Safari, Apple could easily claim Microsoft was not keeping software development on IE at pace with its competitors on both the Windows and Mac platform; and IE was a dog under OS X. However, this would not work when it came to Office because it is a native OS X application and it runs well, so well that a great deal of people consider it superior to Office2000 and OfficeXP on the Windows platform...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
This isn't what I'd consider an objective review. It's like asking a Scientologist, "What did you think of that movie Battlefield Earth?"
The author has a vested interest in seeing Staroffice succeed, and I'm sure he relishes the opportunity to take potshots at Microsoft.
I'm not trolling, I'm serious when I say this: I feel more comfortable in MS Office than any other app, on any other platform. It feels very polished, a sense I seldom find with most other programs out there. You can tell that Microsoft realizes that they have a lot at stake in Office and plans accordingly.
Apparently, that's going to be a real pain as is. It seems that the UI needs a bit more of a divorce from the functions of OpenOffice before it can be easily ported, which is apparently what's going to happen for OpenOffice 2. So I rather doubt testing is the real reason Sun won't port StarOffice.
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
As for the part of you comment where you tells that BDB is more user friendly than PostgreSQL, I think you are trolling here. Unless you want to explain yourself.
Less is more !
There used to be a funky Linux office suite called Siag Office .
.
It worked.
I use past-tenses in my above sentences because the author of the Siag Office, Mr. Ulric Eriksson, got so offended by software patents that he shut down the Siag Office website in protest.
If you want to try out Siag Office, you can STILL download the latest version HERE
Download it before Siag Office is gone forever !
For example... Folks send me MSword docs and expect me to edit them and send them back in MSword. And when I go to a conference, or when I teach a class, the computers will be set up for PowerPoint, not Soffice/OOffice. Waiting until everybody else switches is not an option, even if it were likely. Therefore, import and export to the unfortunately-standard MSoft Office suite is crucially important.
The article failed to treat this issue.
My own experience is that OOffice (and, I assume, Soffice) is only gradually approaching the level of adequacy. As of a year ago, neither Soffice nor OOffice were worth the bother; they did a terrible job of important MSWord files containing anything technical (e.g. with Mathematics or with tables). I use OOffice1.4RC3 quite a lot lately, and it seems to be better (simple tables often work, but mathematics does not). Export to PowerPoint is halfway reasonable now, although the fonts get mixed up quite often, and the placement of graphics is incorrect (fields overlap), so that I always have to spend time in powerpoint sanding the rough edges. (And, yes, I have done my part by reporting bugs.)
I've not tried soffice lately, even though we have a site license so I can test it easily without cost. Maybe that, in itself, says something. I know I can get 75% of what I want with OOffice1.4RCx and both past experience and the referred-to article suggests I won't get a whole lot more from Soffice, so why get stuck accidently relying upon commercial additions (of which I assume there must be a nonzero number)?
If you want to collaborate on a same-file basis with 90% of colleagues, use MSOffice. If you want to collaborate with 9% of colleagues, use OOffice. And if you want to collaborate with 1% of colleagues, use Soffice.
I wonder if the SWX format will ever really take hold.
Maybe it will
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Give my druthers, I would really have preferred to see StarOffice OR, better, OpenOffice use postgres for the database backend. It's open source, sql, comes with most linux releases, and desperately needs a good report interface anyway.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
these moderators need a serious dose of negative metamoderation. I mean WTF.