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
Jeez, I wish Excel would have that. Oh wait. 1995 called, they want Kurt Cobain back too.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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*
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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