Star Openoffice.org 1.0 Review - Review your Options
Linked by William Ku on Sun 16th Jun 2002 18:45 UTC
Features, Office 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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by rajan r on Tue 18th Jun 2002 06:41 UTC

Koffice is an office package. So is OpenOffice. I'm comparing those two.

Well, in case you didn't know, OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice codebase. And that makes it way older than KOffice. But there was so much more money going into OpenOffice.org and the pre-existing StarOffice. A very bad comparison, I might add.

I dont need MS compability(fileformats) but I need database access and a working scripting language.

Strangely, MS compatiblity is the only reason why I don't use KOffice. And OpenOffice.org doesn't have database access.

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.

Wow, comparing MS Office installation on Windows and OpenOffice.org installation of Linux. If MS Office was available on Linux, it would have the same problems as OpenOffice.org.

I have OfficeXP and I find it to have an excessive amount of bugs and do things in an undesired mannor more often than I like.

The only bug I have found was in Frontpage, that it would show a black image for PNG images outside Preview mode. Certainly a bug because this is one step worse compared to Frontpage 2000. Other than that, I haven't experience any bugs... Oh yeah, the voice dictating feature. It is terrible, for accents other than American ;) (But then, I found OpenOffice.org Writer terrible for HTML, and there isn't any voice dictating feature for OpenOffice.org)

On my Windows desktop machine I have uninstalled StarOffice 5.2 and am using the OpenOffice.org software.

Good, comparing the old with the new!

I am equally happy with Mozilla 1.0 BTW and Netscape 6.2 is gone, so is Opera 6.

And again!

I have needed to retain my copy of WordPerfect Suite 2002 to maintain compatibility with company documents.

Maybe if you hae just spend that money on StarOffice 6.0, which is essentially OpenOffice.org with some extra features; including WP Office compatiblity.

Otherwise, I wish a WordPerfect Suite 2002 license could legally substitute for a WordPerfect Suite 9 for Linux license.

Corel had already stopped sales and production of the Linux version, and there would be any support if you get it anyway. There is a free download of WordPerfect 8 or 9, but it doesn't come with the applications and extra features WP Office comes with.