Star Office 7 Review

Submitted by cel4145 on September 19, 2003 - 21:24.

Here's a detailed review of the new StarOffice 7. While personally I find that OpenOffice does the job for me since it is virtually identical to StarOffice except for a few components, I could see advantages in promoting StarOffice at an institution. Sun does provide support for StarOffice. And administrators may be better persuaded by an office suite which normally costs something (but free to educational institutions).

Link courtesy of Slashdot.

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platypus matt's picture

Exciting Stuff

Submitted by platypus matt on September 20, 2003 - 13:00.

I'm definitely excited about the potential of this new product. I've long felt the only real enemy Microsoft had in the field was the open-source army. If you think about it, it's like socialism vs. capitalism. Have you actually used this suite, Charlie? If it worked well enough, I'd probably switch to it.

cel4145's picture

have you used it?

Submitted by cel4145 on September 20, 2003 - 15:46.

i am using the openoffice release candidate, which is *exactly* the same thing as staroffice 7 except for a few minor features. the main differences are the access-like database module and additional, non-open source fonts which are not included in the os version.

so its sort of the same principle as the differences between netscape 7x and whichever mozilla version the netscape version is based on. so go for the current openoffice version. you'll get everything you need and i'm sure you'll like it. as far as i can tell, it's as good as or better than ms office.

OpenOffice nitpicks

Submitted by dilger on September 20, 2003 - 21:58.

The style creation and manipulation interface is not very good. Modifying a style cannot be undone -- that action doesn't go into the undo/redo queue. That's chapped my ass more than once.

Cursor application of font features (bold, italic, etc.) still leaves a lot to be desired. The nuances of where formatting stops and starts aren't handled well -- if you backspace or delete adjacent to an italicized or bolded text area, the cursor "picks up" that formatting. Ouch.

Even worse, the bug searching/reporting interface sucks. It's massively complicated. I understand that's probably to prevent lazy users from submitting help requests as bug reports, but jeez.

But having said that: this program rocks. The new fonts are great. MS Office interoperability is, as far as I can tell, flawless. The file format actually makes sense (compressed XML, so it saves disk space but can be grepped with zgrep). And there's a PDF button which makes pretty good PDFs -- much less a pain than printing to a postscript file and using ps2pdf.

I'm gonna push this program toward my students a lot harder next semester, especially as I learn more about its web capabilities.

cbd.