Linked by William Ku on Sun 16th Jun 2002 18:45 UTC
You may have heard of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice which is being offered as a viable and cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office. Openoffice.org is the open source (or, free indefinitely) cousin of StarOffice. Staroffice used to be free as in you can freely download and install in as many computers as you like but Sun Microsystems has recently decided to charge for Staroffice. However, please do not fret as Openoffice.org will always be free and we are going to show you in this article how and why Openoffice.org instead of MS Office and StarOffice is for you.
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Used to Microsoft Word? Its universal loved look-and-feel has been adopted and adapted by most of its successful alternatives such as StarWriter (from StarOffice(R)), KWord (from KDE's KOffice) and Abiword. In this "attack of the clones", Openoffice.org's Writer is no different and its look-and-feel will immediately set you in ease; you can start using it immediately!
Actually, KWord imitates Frame Maker. StarOffice's Writer is based on OpenOffice.org Writer. And Writer doesn't actually clone Word's UI, and if it is, they are terrible cloners. How I know? I run both MS Office XP, Office 2000 on a older machine and OpenOffice.org, and recently migrated from Office to OpenOffice.org 641 (and later 641B, 641C and 641D and 1.0). It seems that OpenOffice.org instead decides to use Microsoft's Windows-like UI, which is consitent accross platforms. That is not neccesarily a good thing.
Users move around between apps in a platform more often then they switch platform. And having a UI (and look, for OS other than Windows 9x) is annoyingly inconsitent with the rest of the OS (or desktop enviroment). For example, the save dialog, the position of the buttons "Yes", "Discard" and "Cancel" is inconsitent with Windows' "Yes" "No" and "Cancel".
The usual features are all there: popular fonts, style formatting, tables, spellcheck and others-you-nam-it-they-should-have-it.
Actually, OpenOffice.org hardly comes with any "popular fonts". Maybe ugly fonts, but certainly not popular. It's sister, StarOffice, does contains quality third party fonts. And as for the spell checker... well, it sucks. It sucked that badly, in SO 6.0 they included a third party spell checker that is way ahead of the one in OOo.
Impress your peers with a non-Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. The usual transition animation and effects are included along with a host of other unique ones. An integrated drawing tool (Draw) complements Impress, Openoffice.org's presentation component, well and allows the creative user to draw specific clip arts for the presentation. Functions for some fancy (or cranky) font design and 3D effects & animations are also available.
Hehe, my experience with Impress isn't as impressive (nice pun) than your ad. There is way less features for animation. As for integrated tool, I normally use Photoshop, and PowerPoint together (that is the one reason I still have Office actually, on Windows). I don't find Draw particularly useful. At least it is more useful than GIMP... but on Linux, I open GIMP more often - it is way faster.
Draw cannot compete with digital graphics applications such as Adobe Photoshop and GIMP but it would suffice for simple drawing. For those who wanted to dabble in digital art, Draw might be the initil stepping stone that you are looking for.
Actually, for what I normally do with anything graphical, I find Draw more useful than GIMP. GIMP was obviously made only for retouching photos, and minimal support is given to other stuff.
Anyone who needs to prepare documents containing mathematical equations would know that it is not easy to find an application that combines the required pretty printing of word processing and the representation of mathematical equations to look like as if they are hand-written, rather than some muck-up subsitutes using characters from your keyboard. Even Microsoft Word and its companion Maths Equation Editor do not fully satisfy this requirement. As such, many have turned to typesetting software such as LaTex but at a tradeoff of complexity and the power of word processor software.
It is very useful for a maths teacher setting a maths paper. However, my teachers still uses WordPerfect, and therefore annoying papers :-)
Openoffice.org is cuurently available for the Microsoft Windows, SPARC and GNU/Linux platforms. A Macintonish version is on the way. As for hardware requirements, Openoffice.org is not quite as resource-hungry as Microsoft Office or Staroffice(R) but it will still require at least a decent Pentium PC with 64 MB RAM and some 250MB of hard disk space. I would encourage that for a smooth Openoffice.org performance, install it in a PC with lots of RAM; you would certainly feel the blazing difference in speed than if you have installed it a lesser PC.
I don't know about resource hungry. I find OpenOffice.org 1.0 loads much more slower than Office XP, and overall a little slower than Office XP. Also, I find OpenOffice.org on Windows XP takes up much more CPU power and memory than any of Office XP apps. OpenOffice.org on Linux takes up more resources than the Windows version, you can't say that Microsoft have the advantage of getting better access in Windows' API.
As for the Mac version, unless they throw out their "cross platform consitent" ideology, it would never succeed. The Mac version is essentially the Linux version with BSD APIs, running atop XDarwin. If they decide to stop using XDarwin and use Cocoa or Carbon, it wouldn't be fair to Linux and Windows users who have to live with an inconsitent app in their platform of choice. Also, it would ultimately defeat the "cross-platform consitency" idea.
William Ku is a Singaporean...
Cool. You're from kiasu-land (hehe, being kiasu doesn't neccesarily mean bad), which explains the advertisement... err... article. I'm from Malaysia.