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An Early Look at StarOffice 8

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the any-open-format-will-do dept.

polar_bear` writes "NewsForge has an early review of Sun's StarOffice 8, set to be released in mid-October. From the article: 'StarOffice 8 is not perfect, but it is an excellent value for businesses that do not depend on proprietary Microsoft formats for production work.'" And yes, for the uninitiated, NewsForge is still owned by the same parent company as Slashdot.

6 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. OpenOffice by kevin_conaway · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the article, StarOffice is based on the OpenOffice.org source code, and is very much like OpenOffice.org 2.0, with a few enhancements

    I thought OpenOffice was originally based on StarOffice?

  2. What is based on what? by GenKreton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "StarOffice is based on the OpenOffice.org source code, and is very much like OpenOffice.org 2.0, with a few enhancements:"

    Not to be overly-pedantic, but isn't OOo based On StarOffice...?

  3. From the article... by gardyloo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    StarOffice developers claim better Microsoft Office compatibility with every new release, but like all programs that are not Microsoft Word, Writer will never convert every single document perfectly.

          Hm. So is the writer implying that Word perfectly converts every single WORD document? Because that's totally orthogonal to my experience.

  4. Learning StarOffice is Hard by fragmentate · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We tried the "open source initiative" here.

    StarOffice, although complete, is too different from MS Office. It's not that people can't use StarOffice as efficiently as they can use MS Office...they simply do not want to. It was difficult to get anyone to take it seriously. Even though every single feature of MS-Office that they actually use is in there, they were hell-bent on refusing to use it because of the features StarOffice lacks that they never use.

    Talk about stifling oneself.

    --
    My ZooLoo
    1. Re:Learning StarOffice is Hard by swordgeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What you're saying is really a universal truth: Something new and unknown is harder to use than something old and familiar. Or more succinctly, people are lazy. If you give people the option, they will virtually NEVER switch to something new, even if it has significant (but not compelling to them) advantages. That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life. Ditto for MS Media Player and Outbreak--both utter excrement.

      --

      "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
  5. Too much Sun Java stuff in StarOffice now by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful
    In this new release, the installer is in Java. And apparently only some versions of Java work. Guess whose.

    Each new version of StarOffice seems to have more dependencies on Sun's Java. This is not good for OpenOffice.

    It's not Java, per se, that's the problem. It's the dependency of open source software on closed source software, the evil that Stallman always warns about. You don't want someone to be in a position where they can cut off your air supply.