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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**
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?
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.
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.
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.
OLE has always been my greatest nightmare in Word and other Windows apps. Files bloat, software crashes, version upgrades do unpredictable things, ugh, to top it all off, for anything which is meant to leave your computer in binary form, OLE is almost useless.
I know how to use it, I know how to make it work, but I just haven't ever needed to use it... with the notable exception of putting spreadsheet cells into a document or presentation, or scripting OLE objects to perform certian actions... even then, I'm so worried about something crashing and corrupting the document, I wouldn't dream of using it for anything important.
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?