OSNews

I've been using Open Office exclusively at University and at Home for the past month. It has been a pleasure to use and integrating equations, screenshots, flowcharts has been a breeze

"It's a pity it has to look so like a Windows product. It would be nice to see a good new office suite that was rethought from the ground up, rather than being an
attempt to imitate a MS product"

StarOffice 5.2 which attempted to do something new and integrated an explorer interface the result was clumsy, I hated it. From the second the application loaded it felt claustophobic stealing large chunks of screen real estate.

It is ludicrous to suggest that imitating a microsoft product is a pity. Sun weren't trying to change your life by releasing StarOffice and it's source. They are trying to gain market share, or more to the point take market share from microsoft. Familiarity breeds content. This is the best move Sun could possibly have made. How many people out there with computers have never used Office? Then why would you possibly want to learn an all new interface? What woul be the benefit of having a new way to make text bold, or a new way to enter equations in a spreadsheet?

If anything I think staroffice doesn't go far enough in it's emulation, if you're going to emulate go the whole hog. One of my major annoyances is subscript, superscript and font size shortcuts are different, what is the point in that?

"I gotta say that Math program looks pretty snazzy and better than MS Word's Equation Editor"

And you based that on the picture?
The good thing about the math editor is that you can type in the equation in an XML form, as well as having the ability to select characters and symbols from menus. But to date I have found several things I cannot do with it, a problem I have not had with microsoft equation editor basic though it may be.

P.S. Customising toolbars does not make you a "power-user" as you call it.

"You might be wondering that if that is the case, StarOffice will always be the better product. However, this may not exactly so since Openoffice.org is constantly being improved by expert programmers, users through their bugs reports and feature requests, technical writers with their excellent documentation all around the world"

As was recently explained by Sun, Sun take everything and anything they want from the OpenOffice and the only thing they return are bug fixes. Thus Staroffice will always be a superset of OpenOffice. It remains to be seen whether the extra features will warrant the extra cost but I have no doubt in my mind that the Sun product will be of higher quality.

Also I find that "being constantly updated" is not a good thing in the real world. Almost all changes produce a number of unforseen bugs. It take time for these to both appear and be resolved. Constant updating means constant bugs in my experience. I would rather a product that was updated infrequently but stable.

In summary just download the damn thing if you don't like it that's fine but I have yet to find anything I can't satifactorally do with it or get around with it.