Review: Sun StarOffice 7 476
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."
Re:Other Office Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
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**
Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
Match for Office? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, let me get this straight -
No PIM (Outlook)
No document review functions
Fonts don't look right
This might rock the casbah for casual home users, but the real money is in the enterprise. Who could reccomend this to their CTO without a PIM? MS might be expensive but the stuff just works.
Looks like a good review... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
C'mon, money where the mouth is people! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Other Office Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Macros (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you access Star Office documents from applications in any RAD languages like you can in with MS Office/VB?
Thought this might be a good place to get some input on that. At my work there are a lot of apps written in VB that generate Excel spreadsheets. I'd love to know that I can replace that functionality with something else.
This is a serious question and there'll be those who want to flame me for just mentioning VB but the truth of the matter is - there is tons of small office stuff written in VB and VBA, which is where I make my living. I can't move people from office unless I can replace that too
.
Price Performance Ratio (Score:2, Insightful)
No advertising so the general public can learn about this great product, regardless of their OS "choice." Not so hot.
could be... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
document support is only half the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Match for Office? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Other Office Apps (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Match for Office? (Score:1, Insightful)
It doesn't really make sense to throw a database frontend (Access etc) into an Office Suite either, but it gets done primarily for marketing reasons -- buy one package from one vendor and you are all set.
Eventually someone will finish Mozilla's Calendar project and Sun could include the Mozilla suite with StarOffice.
Re:Match for Office? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Other Office Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Other Office Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Match for Office? (Score:3, Insightful)
Haven't we gotten the fonts, fonts and more fonts out of our system yet? If you really need lots of fonts, you are probably publishing and be using a frames based application. Wait, Swriter is frames based.
Seriously, 90% of the people who use spreadsheet and word processing software can barely use them above the level of a glorfied type writer. The hundreds of dollars you may be spending for these people are probably going to waste.
The truth about StarOffice (Score:0, Insightful)
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Suns, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Sun that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Suns' faster chip architecture and RAM size. My 286/33 with 4 megs of ram runs faster than this 455 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Sun is a superior machine.
Sun addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Sun over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Re:Macros (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. I am not a huge MS fan, but one thing they have done well (security issues aside- oops) is structure Office so that you can automate tasks and add functionality. Any of the Office apps, esp. Excel, can act as a rudimentary application development platform, b/c you can easily build a GUI and then tie it to the built-in machinery (XL functions, etc.). I rely on this heavily for my work. I can then share the 'applications' with my co-workers and clients, who can use and partially modify the app w/o any special training.
I'd love to get away from Office, but to start, I need a replacement with comparable (or better) scripting capabilities.
Re:Match for Office? (Score:1, Insightful)
What is missing (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, I'd rather use abiword and gnumeric for those tasks, although star draw and impress are awesome programs for those tasks and I do use them.
But the thing that would get me to using SO exclusively would definitely be a good project management program.
Re:Not Quite... (Score:2, Insightful)
Goals are primary. Software is secondary. It is our (Open Source people) fault when we cannot prove that our software and philosophy is better
Re:Been using 6.1beta2 for a while now (Score:3, Insightful)
I also happen to feel that PIM is an enterprise function that should not be bundled with an Office package.
If you use 95% of Word, well and good, but how many people out there actually do?
Re:Yes but adversity builds character! (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheers,
Greg
Re:document support is only half the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's fair to expect product developers to implement something like "MS plugins and VBA" compatibility. It is not their fault you have effectively vendor-locked yourselves into Microsoft to the point where migration to other products is impossible or extremely prohibitive in terms of cost.
There's a saying that goes: "A smart person will find a way out of a difficult situation; a wise person won't get into it in the first place."
You are not the latter.
you mean security exploits (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean, what products will be offered to allow malicious hackers to gain easy access to our GNU/Linux systems?
Re:Macros (Score:2, Insightful)
Some of us like a good deal more still. Office is an Application as well as being a suite.
Any of the Office apps can use the functionality of the others where they're best, through automation in VBA ('macros'). It's not so much that Word is a Word Processor, more that it's the bit of Office where the good document presentation and text processing stuff is. The best calculating goodies are in Excel.
If the thing wasn't such an unholy security nightmare, Outlook is where the calendaring and messaging functionality lives. And then there's the ability to use all those other IDispatch-flavoured COM servers for PAFing addresses and BACS-checking bank account numbers and so forth. Sometimes people are just more comfortable using Word as their interface to SQL server, and if I was as good at drumming up business and keeping the clients happy as them, maybe I'd be in a position to criticise that. But I build software to help them stay employed, and they liaise with clients to help me stay employed. Everybody happy.
It's not a tale of architectural beauty, certainly, but it works, it's quick and easy to glue together and it's flexible when another client makes another U-turn. And for several years before my time, this firm (internet commerce, and still very much alive and growing) survived on Office development alone, not a copy of any other language / development tool in sight other than SQL server and they had no idea at all what the Enterprise Manager and the Query Analyser were for.
Re:Match for Office? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because I like to use a full blown wordprocesser when sending emails so that I don't look like a
Re:Match for Office? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is everyone so hung up on the enterprise? (And there are non-Microsoft alternatives for the PIM believe it or not!)
Outside the enterprise, there are vast numbers of non-enterprise machines that could use cheap or free office suites.
Schools? Small business (or not so small). Libraries, Internet cafes, or other public access computers.
And let's talk about Microsoft Works vs. OpenOffice.org. As someone once said: "...more than a match for poor Enterprise.". (i.e. NCC-1701-A)
the kicker quote on why there isn't an OS X port (Score:2, Insightful)
"Also, personally I would really like to see StarOffice 7 ports for FreeBSD and OS X, but Sun says that isn't likely to happen because of the extensive platform testing that goes into StarOffice."
Say what? The reason why Sun won't port Star Office to OS X is because of "extensive platform testing"? What is so extensive about the Mac platform? You could restrict it to G4 and G5 class Macs and that would be a lot less headaches than with the Windows platform with a myriad of devices to support. And how can there be more differences between Solaris and OS X than between Solaris and Windows? That is seriously a king size load of _______.
Difference between using and needing.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just spend a couple of hours reading a tutorial about writing *real* documents in the wordprocessor of your choice, spend another hour by making templates for common documents, and in the next years you can focus on the content instead of the lay-out, and your papers look much more professional!
Oh, and the direct fontselector should be forbidden for writing large texts. It's added because 'everybody' uses it, but it makes a mess of any text, and it's better to let the user only select fonts by defining paragraph/header styles (and thus forcing them to actually use styles)
OLE (Score:2, Insightful)
IMHO any office suite needs an "open" embedding and linking protocol in order to be able to compete for the power users' desktops.
Re:Other Office Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here. I actually find Open Office [openoffice.org] 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 [securityfocus.com].
Re:latex (Score:2, Insightful)
The best editor for publishing is TCI Scientific Workplace [tcisoft.com] which is similar to sticking an "MS Word" front end onto Latex. I use it for writing scientific papers and its the best publishing system that I've ever used. Highly configurable by adding latex scripts. Equations,etc can entered directly as latex if one desired.
Its a surprise that it isn't well know outside scientific circles. Not exactly cheap, but its worth the money. (Its MUCH better than LyX, BTW)
Its only for Windows/Mac (unfortunately).
Re:Been using 6.1beta2 for a while now (Score:2, Insightful)
Simpler products *can* be used -- that's why Microsoft has Works and WorksSuite as inexpensive OEM offerings. Corel has WordPerfect Essentials at a competitive price as well.
-JemRe:OLE (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Single Greatest Remaining Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Good for them (Score:3, Insightful)
As it happens my business over the years has transformed from instore customer service/retail into information handling that requires a good deal of external collaboration ( don't ask, life gets strange sometimes). The only time I've ever had a hint of a problem was when I sent someone a document I had produced myself. .
I got an amused "iritated" email from them. When I replied with an apology they told me it was no sweat really, they had just converted it with . . . StarOffice!
Go figure. They already had it and knew what to do with it. It's nice to work with pros. In fact, I highly recommend it.
Internally if you don't have the computer skills I need, and/or are willing to acquire them, you don't work for me. It's that simple. It's a bit more trouble to find/train people, but it's a joy every day thereafter, virtually eliminating any troubles, because even if the troubles originate externally my people can deal with whatever it takes to resolve them.
Like sending
I think we've had to do that twice,
KFG
Most people (home users) want free (Score:2, Insightful)
Although I did install OO on my SO's PC (XP) so that we didn't have to buy MS office. It would already be a huge gain if Sun would throw some marketing at it... "the future is open -- openoffice
But well, Sun is Sun I guess. They always have a hard time spotting easy profit. Instead they sign the dotted line over at Salt Lake City. Ugh!
Inertia or angst, I dunno.
Re:document support is only half the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's fair to expect product developers to implement something like "MS plugins and VBA" compatibility.
What does fair have to do with it? Does StarOffice want this guy's business or not? If not, that's fine. But what does it have to do with fairness?
It is not their fault you have effectively vendor-locked yourselves into Microsoft to the point where migration to other products is impossible or extremely prohibitive in terms of cost.
What does fault have to do with it?
Anyhow, your same argument applies to file formats. The StarOffice team could have taken the position that anyone who depends on proprietary file formats must be stupid and therefore it isn't StarOffice's job to try and win their business. But fairness, fault and farsightedness aren't the issue. Winning business is the issue.