Today, I had the opportunity to speak with Iyer Venkatesan, Product line manager for StarOffice at Sun Microsystems. He spoke to me at length about StarOffice 8, which will be released tomorrow. Read on for a summary of the interview, and be sure to check out the review at Newsforge as well. 
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Member since:2005-04-01
I already have Microsoft Office 95 and up installed, there is no need to migrate to either OO.org or Star Office.
C'mon, that's just silly. First off, Office 95 formats aren't even compatible with 97+.
Secondly, I think it's clear that it's the commercial sector that StarOffice is geared towards - and that OpenOffice.org is aimed at a home user with computer experience.
Then again, I'm pretty sure you're just trolling.
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2005-07-06
I use StarOffice and I'm a home user. It IS the same code as OpenOffice, but the "extras" are worth it...and it's easy to keep updated with patches throughout the life cycle. StarOffice 7 was a pleasure, so I have no problem shelling out a nominal amount for this fine office suite. Combine the provided clip-art and other things with templates (and add OpenClipArt too, if you like) there is plenty here that OpenOffice doesn't provide out of the box.
Now with the Open Document Format, things are even better. So, there are some people willing to spend a little for a piece of software...and the comment about Office 95 is pretty stupid. Some people DUMPED MS Office altogether because of the irritations and problems with it.
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2005-07-06
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Been using OOo2 (1.9.129) and if SO isn't any better they'll soon get customers running back to MS.
It's just full of glitches. Small things, but irritating.
It's a beta in case you didn't know. That is why when you launch the program, it says "OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta". In-case you weren't aware, betas are released so people can find bugs and report them to the vendor. So, since that is the point of a beta, here's a thought, submit a bug report and maybe, just maybe, those bugs might get fixed!!! :-O What a thought eh?
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So, since that is the point of a beta, here's a thought, submit a bug report and maybe, just maybe, those bugs might get fixed!!! :-O What a thought eh?
Yeah, sure. In some 5 years, maybe, if OOo is still around. I have some 4 years old issues reported that still are not fixed.
Member since:2005-07-06
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2005-07-06
Yeah...I've seen some bugs and I have been using it since 1.9.79 or so...but all of the bugs that I have seen have disappeared in my current 1.9.125, but do you really think people will "run" back to Microsoft? Just curious why you say that. My wife has been using this since StarOffice 7 and she is now using OpenOffice 1.9 until we get StarOffice 8 and she likes it BETTER and she has been using MS Office for years prior to that.
Member since:2005-07-06
Assuming pepole are checking out OO just for the sake of it. I think theyll find no compelling reason to stick with it. And the behavior is sufficiently dissimilar to MSO to get a feeling of bugginess
This is what I've found yet:
1. Slow rendering and rendering glitches (could be attributed to X/gtk and drivers though...)
2. Autofill in calc doesn't work as Excel. In excel if you autofill a single value it's repeated.
3. Pivot tables are called Data Pilot. Not a bug, but still an issue if the user thinks the feature is missing.
4. Enabling and Disabling of autofilter is confusing and buggy.
5. It's possible to remove the autofilter widgets by selecting a nonmatching query and not having a header row.
6. Data Pilot has a inferior query abillities.
There are more, but as you notice it's just a rather limited part of the whole suite I've had experience with jet. If the rest of it is similar...
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"Autofill in calc doesn't work as Excel. In excel if you autofill a single value it's repeated. "
So it works correctly then. In excel, autofilling a cell formatted as text that has a number stored, increases the number by one, and autofilling a cell formatted as number repeats the cell. What's the ***ing logic in that?
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I have had a very good experience working with Office 2k3 and I am definitely looking forward to Office 12 to come out. It looks pretty intriguing to me. Right now I am using 1.9.125 and so far it has crashed on me only twice and I have filed the bug reports. But other than those crashes I have had no probs none whatsoever especially using Writer and swapping back and forth between Word and ODT formats. I think its a great suite but nowhere near as polished or as fast as MSOffice.
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Free software(aka Open source software) is not about giving software away for free.
Software development costs money. Somebody has to pay the programmers.
Sun employs alot of people to work on open office. If they didn't make money from selling Sun Office then openoffice would probably not be in the functional state that it is.
Although I think the licencing of Sun office is unethical.
- Jessta
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Member since:2005-07-06
Actually Free Software isn't known as Open Source software at all.
Open Source is about the techincal and economical superiority in the development model. This is what ESR oulines in the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Free Software is about the moral and ethical right to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. This is why FSF created the GPL and GNU to promote it. Notice dependency there, GNU was created to promote GPL not the other way around.
Two completely diffrent beasts.
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If i get irritated enough. Just because SUN released SO as open source doesn't mean I'm employed in thier testing department working for zero salary...
----------Well if it bothers you so much, use something else. No one is holding a gun to your head to use betas of any software.
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have anyone checked OO or SO memory consumption. It is impossible to run on older computers. It takes forever to load also. Now dont push me to buy more memory because it is cheap! I can run MSO with same memory very efficiently.
my big question is will you risk an important presentation or report of being not formated well or glitches(minor to linux geeks) in front of your boss or a valuable meeting or conference
or
you would rely on MSO for such important presentations.???
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"And StarOffice 8 is based on that, then what does that make StarOffice? And people accuse MS of releasing products that are still beta 
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Actually, the exact opposite is true. The fact that StarOffice 8 finally shipped is very, very good news for OO users. Because both OpenOffice and StarOffice are owned and developed by Sun, Sun has a policy of releasing StarOffice first. Then in a few weeks or a month, Sun moves OpenOffice into stable and makes an OpenOffice release. What this means is that OpenOffice 2 stable will be released any day now.
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I can run MSO with same memory very efficiently
I think that's because Windows has already pre-loaded much of the stuff needed for MSO and SO/OOo being multi-platform has to supply its own.
But I agree it'd be nice to see a smaller memory consumption in SO/OOo
An interresting thing would be to run MSO though Wine in linux and measure how much RAM MSO acctually uses.
my big question is will you risk an important presentation or report of being not formated well or glitches(minor to linux geeks) in front of your boss or a valuable meeting or conference or you would rely on MSO for such important presentations.???
Why would a presentation made in SO/OOo not be well formatted in front of your boss?
If it's made in MSO and presented in SO/OOo there might be minor layout differences, but surely you don't run a presentation of someone elses MSO document unrehersed (and unadjusted), do you?
- Peder
