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StarOffice 8 in July
McSpew writes "Sun Microsystems plans to release StarOffice 8 in July. Can this mean that OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be ready in the same timeframe?"
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Sort of. You could think of their relationship as being similar to the one between Red Hat and Fedora.
Star Office = Open Office + some proprietary add-ons and a business-friendly support plan
This is why the submitter speculated that this new major StarOffice release would beckon a new major OO.o release. This is probably true, as both of these new versions have been sitting in beta for weeks/months and are certainly ready at this point.
You obviously haven't looked very hard, they are all released in binary format on their mirror sites.
Damien
In this day and age, we routinely import and export MS Office documents with OpenOffice.org 1.x many times a day; we also routinely rescue damaged MS Office docs for MS Office users who can't do that using MS Office.
Amongst other things, I'm a technical writer, submit all of my OOo writing in MS-Word DOC format, and have never had a glitch as a result. I have also done several PowerPoint presentations on provided equipment, the presentations were of course created in OOImpress (all six of the machines running in this house run Linux), and they have all worked OOtB.
So far the only big disappointment has been OOCalc's importation of Excel macros, which I'm sure you will be delighted to know is on the table for radical improvement as I type. The few documents that don't import perfectly generally feature the same baroque style which causes problems going between versions of MS Office, or (on MS Office, anyway) if you try to print it to a different printer than the original was connected to.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
For those not in the know, OO.org/StarOffice are instrumental in unseating Microsoft's monopoly regarding Office. Microsoft Office literally costs hundreds of dollars, and for what? A so-so word processor, an often misused presentation program, an awful calendar program, a weak database, and probably the real star of Office is Excel.
Given the expense of MS Office, OO.org and StarOffice offer a _real_ alternative for an insignificant faction of the cost. StarOffice is now integrated at no cost into Solaris 10. OO.org is the de facto office suite on Novell and Red Hat. Millions of people use OO.org. One by one whole companies are switching over.
Everyone should at least try the next major versions of OO.org/StarOffice. I've found that they really are an adequate replacement for Office. I even use StarOffice to make simple web pages, resumes, mailing labels, etc. Odds are, if you haven't tried it, that you could start using it as a drop in replacement for Office right away.
The sore losers in all this, of course, are the people who used Microsoft's proprietary automation system, Visual Basic. You should probably stick with Office, then, because that's what lock-in is all about.
But I guess even misreading an article is more than the Slashdot editors might do. ;-)