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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**
I believe the reason why they keep the database application in StarOffice "to themselves" and not release it with OpenOffice.org is that Adabas is commercial software and Sun had to license it. They can't turn around and open source it or releasing it with OpenOffice.org... at least without paying an ungodly sum to the maker of Adabas.
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.
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.
Probably for presentations; have a read only, run anywhere presentation format. A lot more people have Shockwave than even the viewer for PowerPoint. a lot fewer still have {Star,Open}Office.
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.
why does the PIM need to be part of the office suite? It doesn't make sense.. everything else is managing documents, PIMs are calendaring and email (why those to are shoehorned together is another post entirely..).
Get your pim elsewhere. There are TONS of options these days.
I post links to stuff here
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.
I don't understand why people are so hung up on the no PIM issue. Aside from glaring security issues, Outlook is a very usable PIM, but I rarely (if ever) notice/use/desire its integration with the other MS-Office programs (in fact, it's ridiculously annoying that it wastes the memory to load word as its default editor of e-mail messages). I am perfectly happy using my PIM as a standalone piece of software (eg. Evolution) and not having to tolerate an entire (annoying) office suite just to have a PIM. Besides, so much integration and interoperability is being done on the OS level that it should not be necessary to buy all the programs you need as a suite for them to work well together.
On the font topic, this has plagued linux in general for a long time and is not exclusive to StarOffice, though it is (slowly) improving.
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
Who could reccomend this to their CTO without a PIM? MS might be expensive but the stuff just works.
Yeah, it works alright. Because management's hard for Outlook, our IT department makes us keep our machines running 24/7 with mandated re-boots every night so the continual stream of patches and security fixes.
It's the height of irresponsibility to include Microsoft's Outlook on any desktop... that thing is the source of most of the headaches in corporate computing than all others put together (a major vector for viruses, trojans, etc.) The only reason it's got such devotion is because the PHB's love the calendar and the scheduling integration. But it's just not worth it, considering the grief.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
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 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
Firstly, Star Office is built on the same base as OpenOffice.org and they do share code. But you are right about proprietary bits. Still this makes Star Office appealing to Open Source Advocates (though it may rankle some in Free Software).
Secondly, the simple fact you can make Flash presentations with this is one reason I am about to shell out $80 for it. I had been thinking of doing some Flash, but Macromedia wants something like $1000 just to do it and I would have to run Windows. This is $80 to do flash on Linux, plus have a nice office suite. That is a very good value to me.
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.
But "If you are a student, researcher, staff, or faculty member you can download StarOffice for free." Also, "Academic and Research institutions, including Primary and Secondary (K-12) Schools, 2-and 4-year Colleges, and Universities" can get an unlimited site license for the cost of media and shipping.
I rtfa and it was pretty light - more questions for anyone who's used Star Office in a professional environment - hows the automation (does it have anything equivelant, or, hopefully, better, than useful-but-bugriddled VBA?) How's the interoperability with MSWord documents? Can you go from Word to OOo/StarOffice and back a hundred times in a large document that 20 people have edited in 70 different ways, with embedded graphics, tables, etc. U know, does it WORK?
.1 - 1%, which is a lot if you have a half million documents) of them will).
I'm as close to an expert in MS Office as anyone (outside Woody of WOPR and the lovely lady behind slipstick), I write VBA (when I have to) and have taught classes in the thing. And I hate it. It's truely a horrible product, MS tried to do too much and failed to get the important things right (like, say, making sure that if you have 1,000 large documents on a network storage device, none of them experience format-wrenching corruption at any point over thier lifespan. With Word, anywhere from 1 - 10 (yea, that's
Have any large, document-oriented shops (like, say a law firm, or pharmeceutical company, or something) ever done a real, hard test, both on the suite and its interoperablity with MS stuff?
closed minded is as closed minded does
The Adabas database application is not soemthing which can be replaced by BerekelyDB. They are very different things.
Adabas is a database application. It is like MS Access or Quatro Pro, or theKompany's Rekall app. It includes a database engine, which IIRC is called the same thing. (Adabas D or something) What is being discusse- and what is included with StarOffice- is a GUI-based db app like MS Access. You could replace Adabas in StarOffice with Bereley DB than you could replace Mozilla with wget.
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).
Read the article. Just so you don't have to do all that work, I'll quote it-
"The database is incorporated in key components of the Sun Java Enterprise System, formerly known as Project Orion, and the Sun Java Enterprise Desktop System, formerly known as Project Mad Hatter, both launched on Tuesday."
No mention of StarOffice in that quote of products to use BDB, nor is it mentioned in the rest of the article.
Sun also uses Oracle, and there are articles which will confirm that. But that has nothing to do with StarOffice does it? (unless Adabas can access other database engines for backends, like how you can use Access as a front end to any ODBC SQL Db, etc etc)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
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?
I believe that you're right.
Get it here. Free, but not Libre, I think. Read the licence.
See what I've been reading.
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.
There's a Slashdot article that talks about SAP-DB. And, there's a decent article by someone who installed it.
= 9J =
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?