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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.
FInally, a ReaSon To consider Picking Out another office SuiTe.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
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?
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?
"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...?
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.
I heard Hexus has a review up of the new staroffice too...
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Is it necessary to disclose such potential conflicts of interest in so surley a manner? These clarifications are not a "favor" for the uninitiated, they are made in the interests of full disclosure; standards that all good reporting must adhere to.
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.
/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.
(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
If they don't mention the ownership ties between them, then /. gets accused of conflicts of interest in posting OSTG stories. It's effectively a financial disclosure statement: Yes, we might have a conflict of interest here...take this with your own-sized grain of salt.
I run Fedora Core 4 on an AMD 64 laptop. I had problems with OpenOffice not recognizing my JVM. After some research, I found out that OO.o is a 32 bit application and will not recognize/work with 64 bit JVMs. I installed a 32 bit JVM and was able to get OO.o to recognize it. Since Star Office is based on OO.o, I assume the problem the author had with SO and the Java installer is similar.
I wrote a more detailed article on getting OO.o to work with Java on 64 bit platforms, it can be found here
Expert Java EE Consulting
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
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.
Surely, Sun will offer SO8 for Solaris, Windows, and Linux, and although the article referenced is a review of the new product on Linux, this seems misaligned.
Perhaps the article should have considered a broader perspective of the new application than on a single platform.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
I always assumed it meant "Like unto an orthogon". Of course, that leaves the question of what an orthogon looks like.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Take OpenOffice as an example, the startup time scales QUADRATICALLY with the version number:
Starting OOdraw on my laptop:
69 secs for opening oodraw2 (1.9.126)
21 secs for opening oodraw (1.1.4)
So (2.0/1.1)^2 = 3.3, and 69s/21s = 3.3
Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY longer to start the same basic application?
I'll be sticking with Openoffice 1.1 over OO2 or Staroffice8 thank you very much.
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.
Since NewsForge and Slashdot are owned by the same entity (OSTG), some people might think there is reporting bias. Disclosure helps keep reporters honest.
I know I'm going to get slapped with troll, but I am seriously "what did i miss?"
a a07adc092f578f95a3
Anyone else notice that Star Office's Menus and Toolbars are strikingly close to MS Office 2003? Down to the names and order of icon placement in the toolbars. http://www.newsforge.com/blob.pl?id=a2c2239ed1854
I think the anti-ms crowd is intellectually dishonest not to point this out. If/whenever MS pulls something like that you guys scream from the roof tops. Why is it different when its done to MS? Is your argument principled or not? Or is it simply anything but MS? If that is the case, your stance takes us down a more dangerous road than only MS.
I know someone is going to scream its not the case. For those people, click on the above link and open Word 2k3. But if that's not enough then how about this for example; What happens if/when StarOffice 9.0 gets rid of the File menus and goes to the ribbon design model that MS is using with the next Office? Will that be acceptable too? I mean, I guess copying is the nicest form of flattery, but... well. go head, I'm bracing for the modding.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.