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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."
But OOo only costs $0.00.
;)
Seriously, I use Windows and OOo, and there isn't anything I can't do with them as far as I know. I've never been like "Damn! If I only I was using Word!" Now I know there are probably a few features Word has that OOo doesn't, but chances are, Ability and Star Office don't have them either.
By the way, spell checked with OOo!
**Prepares for anti-OOo flames**
Why would I want to export a document to Flash?
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
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.
Well, first of all, I've never even heard of Ability Office. While I'm not omniscient, with the years of Slashdot and Freshmeat perusal under my belt I'd wager that if I haven't heard of it, many here have not, as well.
That's the first hurdle. The second is long-term availability. StarOffice gives me (and more importantly, my wife) a solid office suite whose file formats I can guarantee will be around as long as I can compile its little brother, OpenOffice.org. You can't say that about many other non-MS office suites or word processors. Two years ago I made my wife switch from WordPerfect 8 for Linux to StarOffice for the same reason. Corel pretty much dropped the product after the woeful WP 2000 suite.
Ability might be the greatest thing ever, but odds are that they will be out of business trying to make money by competing with MS in the the office suite market. I for one do not want to have to migrate my documents again when this happens, when I have to move to another product. SO/OOo gives me some security from that event.
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?
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...
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.
As soon as I realized that the Linux "port" required Wine, I lost interest. Wine is OK, but there's no way I'm going to base our company-wide office suite on it.
Look for the words "Linux Port".
Click there.
Notice it uses Wine.
Port, huh?
[Said with XXX-rated cigar in hand:]
I guess it all depends on what your definition of "port" is.
Would you *reallY* like normal users installing MySql and postgresql on their machines with the easiest to use options (read:insecure options) by default? Using Berkely db or adabas is much more sane.
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.
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.
Use anything you want to use for your studies if you can do it and it allows you to achieve your goals!
:)
Goals are primary. Software is secondary. It is our (Open Source people) fault when we cannot prove that our software and philosophy is better
I also happen to feel that PIM is an enterprise function that should not be bundled with an Office package.
If you use 95% of Word, well and good, but how many people out there actually do?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Quirky and Flaky are both far too generous. Crappy would probably be the least insulting of any words I'd use to describe that hulking piece of expensive, bad, and buggy software.
Cheers,
Greg
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
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*
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)
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.
Seriously, I use Windows and OOo, and there isn't anything I can't do with them as far as I know.
Same here. I actually find Open Office more usable than MS Office. Open a document in MS Word, leave it open and untouched for 15 minutes, then try to close it out. It warns you that your changes have not been saved? Uhh... ok? I find that very annoying. It makes me feel like Word corrupted my document just by being open.
That fact aside, what do *most people* really need with MS Office that they can't get from some free alternative? Granted *most people* probably just pirated their copy of MS Office anyway so they don't care about the $300-$500 pricetag, but with software gaining online intelligence, those days are going to come to an end soon enough. So many programs check for automatic updates when you start them now. Now that people are good and use to that idea, the next phase is to have said software application verify that it was paid for.
The best editor for publishing is TCI Scientific Workplace which is similar to sticking an "MS Word" front end onto Latex. I use it for writing scientific papers and its the best publishing system that I've ever used. Highly configurable by adding latex scripts. Equations,etc can entered directly as latex if one desired.
Its a surprise that it isn't well know outside scientific circles. Not exactly cheap, but its worth the money. (Its MUCH better than LyX, BTW)
Its only for Windows/Mac (unfortunately).
Simpler products *can* be used -- that's why Microsoft has Works and WorksSuite as inexpensive OEM offerings. Corel has WordPerfect Essentials at a competitive price as well.
-JemI 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?
You can do as I already suggested above and send her an .rtf file, or, as I have had to do a couple of times, just send her a .doc file. If you know she'll have trouble the .swx it's silly to send her one.
.in vim ( as is my wont and has never caused a problem internally).
.doc files to the terminally confused.
.rtf doesn't seem to confuse anybody.
As it happens my business over the years has transformed from instore customer service/retail into information handling that requires a good deal of external collaboration ( don't ask, life gets strange sometimes). The only time I've ever had a hint of a problem was when I sent someone a document I had produced myself. .
I got an amused "iritated" email from them. When I replied with an apology they told me it was no sweat really, they had just converted it with . . . StarOffice!
Go figure. They already had it and knew what to do with it. It's nice to work with pros. In fact, I highly recommend it.
Internally if you don't have the computer skills I need, and/or are willing to acquire them, you don't work for me. It's that simple. It's a bit more trouble to find/train people, but it's a joy every day thereafter, virtually eliminating any troubles, because even if the troubles originate externally my people can deal with whatever it takes to resolve them.
Like sending
I think we've had to do that twice,
KFG
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.