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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Two points that aren't in OpenOffice.org's favour, for anyone who's used to the installation of MSOffice, or suchlike, is that in OpenOffice.org, you are left with the whole process yourself. And unfortunately most people just do what is simplest for them.
So your average joe will install OpenOffice.org in Linux in the home/{$HOME}/OpenOffice.org* directory, being ignorant of the benefits of installing it in /opt/OpenOffice.org* as superuser - for example, with only the config files and user file directories in /home/{$HOME}.OpenOffice.org* directory as self; the average joe will never think of going into the likes of kde's control center to improve the kde system menu so joe average can get into OpenOffice.org*; and last but hardly least, joe average will look at the ease of installation of MSOffice and the installation lacks of OpenOffice.org* and will say, "So what? Why change? Even if MSOffice costs more, at least I know how to get it up and running."
All of this is based on my personal experience in sorting out OpenOffice.org641d on Linux and Win2K and OpenOffice.org1.0 on Linux. On Win2k I found I had difficulty with OpenOffice641d as a multiuser office suite - I could install it as one user, but couldn't access it as the other, unless I installed it as the other, in which case, I couldn't access it as the original user. Very frustrating. Compare that with MSOffice's flawless multiuser setup right out of the box.
It was only after visiting the OpenOffice.org website recently that I found out that they had been working on it, and none too soon, either. I'm in favour of Open Source/Free Software - imagine how severe those who aren't are going to slam OpenOffice.org*.