An Early Look at StarOffice 8

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.

Comments

No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[octaene]

So, after reading the article, I didn't see any compelling features beyond what OpenOffice.org 2.0 promises. I saw several references to StarOffice's superiority over Microsoft Office 2003, but that's about it.

Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?

Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[einhverfr]

Furthermore, who doesn't depend on Microsoft Office documents for production work? Everyone I know has to send/receive documents in these formats-- at least Word and Excel.

This being said I have several buisnesses using OOo 2.0 Beta 2 for production work. They do this simply because the betas for OOo 2.0 are simply so much more stable and functional than 1.1.x that there is no reason not to use them. Yes, I know-- don't use beta software for production work this seems to be the exception.

This being said, I don't use OOo much. I find that it doesn't have applications in any are which are best-of-breed and the only value I see is that you have an integrated suite. Gor example, Gnumeric is such of a great spreadsheet I can't imagine using anything else for production work.

Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[AKAImBatman]

The differences basically amount to:

1. StarOffice has better MS Office support (I assume thanks to the Sun/MS Deal)
2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo
3. Sun provides corporate support for StarOffice. You're on your own for OOo.
4. Extra bundled stuff like fonts, clipart, and templates. Nice if you do a lot of office documents, but not critical or irreplacible.

Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?

When it's done. They've released betas of it as OOo 1.9.x, so you can go grab a copy whenever you feel like it.

Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[einhverfr]

production work means you have huge excel sheets that calculate important things your company can't live without, or you have office documents with Macros that do things you can't live without. Just typing notes and letters, or doing simple excel tables is not "depending" or anything.

I can even do VBA macros in Gnumeric. And macros in Python, etc.

And I can do detailed financial analysis, etc.

Re:OpenOffice

[dcstimm]

it is, but staroffice is normally better because it has features you would pay for. Like more asian fonts or something... Blah Ill stick with abiword and gnumeric

Re:OpenOffice

[ciroknight]

It goes both ways. OpenOffice was an open sourced derivative of StarOffice, and now the advances in OpenOffice get rolled back into StarOffice (don't ask me how this works; I'm sure they've got some license comment somewhere that says they can).

So the products are symbotic now.

Re:What is based on what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda. Star office used to be a free as in beer, binary only application.
Sun then bought Star Office. Due to much community bantering about open sourcing it (or maybe they had plans anyway? Either way, there was much bantering), they seperated out all the parts of star office that could not legally be open sourced, and open sourced the rest, under the name Open Office. They then set up Open Office.org much in the same way that red hat set up fedora.

So, OOo *was* originally from Star Office code tree. However, I'm pretty sure that most of the active development goes on in OOo land, and that SO releases are branched off of OOo. So therefor, SO is now based off of OOo code rather than the other way around.

(Slightly O/T) OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I like OpenOffice on platforms for which it was designed to work (Win32, Linux), but it uses so many non-portable Linuxisms that it runs extremely poorly to not at all on OpenBSD, even with Linux emulation and Linux-style /proc enabled. That is to say that it runs, but consumes far too much memory and crashes frequently. And I'm too lazy to try patches from NetBSD pkgsrc or FreeBSD ports, so right now I've been using AbiWord and gnumeric in place of OO. They are fine, but don't do Office formats as well, and AbiWord generates really lousy postscript, which means that anything I print comes out looking like shit.

(Please don't make this into a question of Linux vs BSD or free vs propriertary OS, that's not the point I'm trying to make.)

From a usability perspective I like OpenOffice, but I wish it were more portable. In my mind, if a program uses too many Linuxisms that don't hold on other Unix-like systems and require non-trivial patches to port, it is a good sign that the code is poorly written. I.E. it's doing stupid things like relying on Linux-specific values in /proc, or not checking return values of functions that can fail, or making generally unsafe assumptions that just don't happen to come up on Linux. That's a sign of bad code. In defense of OO, it is fine to work with where it does work, and in some cases I like the UI better than MS Office. The best I can say is that it's come a long way since StarOffice 5, which ran poorly, even on systems on which it was designed to run.

Clipart? who needs it?

[matt me]

Clipart is a bane on our society. The average lame-ass user puts them onto every poster and leaflet they make, otherwise fine (unless they used MS Wordart) making them look appallingly bad. Of course, now everyone thinks my designs are professional (I can charge for theme even!) just because I either get real images from elsewhere or don't use any rather than crappy little cartoons.

Not ready for prime time yet

[tobybuk]

Our company uses MS Office period. After reading about OpenOffice on Slashdot I thought I'd try it out for myself. So I thought I'd see how it handled our system spec doc. About 250 pages with graphics, nothing too clever in there but in MS Word format.

Well, I fired OO up and loaded the file. What normally takes say 10 seconds with Word took over 15 mins! I assumed that this was a one time hit converting from MS Office format, so I saved the document in OO native format so I would subsequently time opening from the native format. Took 15 mins to save the bloody thing and the same to open it again.

For us this product isn't an option. Its pathetic at loading/saving when compared to Office.

Might be OK for small doc but for us it just doesn't cut it.

Re:Learning StarOffice is Hard

[bigbigbison]

I wonder what will happen when the new Microsoft Office 12 comes out and it has the radically different menu system? If OpenOffice.org can get some publicity out by then it might make people look twice at a program that looks kind of like the old office rather than the new office which looks so different.