“SOT Office 2002 is a free productivity suite for Windows and Linux. At SOT, we’re committed to making sure that a free, commercial-quality office suite is available to all Windows and Linux users. Partly based on OpenOffice.org, SOT Office 2002 is the only office application you’ll ever need. A full-featured, high-quality software suite, SOT Office is fully compatible with other major office applications. You can open and save .doc, .xls and all your usual file formats with SOT Office, so sharing documents with friends and colleagues is a breeze.” SOT Office is an OpenOffice spin-off and it was released for both Windows & Linux recently. Update: On a similar note, Office NGO screenshots have been leaked.
SOT Office 2002 Available for Windows and Linux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Looks good!
How about a BeOS version?
ciao
yc
We had a team of 5-6 people at BeUnited, looking into porting Star Office (which the codebase is essentially the same as SOT and OpenOffice). The guys came back to me and Deej about a month later, saying that the code is not really “clean” or thread safe for BeOS requirements and that it would take way too much time to port it (it would almost need a rewrite at places…). They decided to not go with it, it was too much work. They even prefered to wait for the BeOS GTK+ port and then port the GTK+ version of SO, when that would have been available (which adds another overhead/layer to a native port – plus, GTK+ was never ported to BeOS completely).
And at the end of the day, spending money for such a huge project for a product that it won’t sell as much, is not a good investment for this company.
Geez…..
Between Star Office, Open Office, Hanscom Office, Applixware, KOffice, SOT office, Abiword, Gnumeric, the Crossover Plugin for MS Office, and Gobe Productive for Linux(eventually), you cannot say you can’t get the work done in Linux.
THe big problem is choosing one!
Looking at this site and OpenOffice.org it doesn’t look like anyone has anything comparable to MS Access. I’d love to replace MS Office at work but we do a ton of ODBC data reading with Access. Unfortunately ODBC is the only way we can communicate with the database so we need that functionality.
Anyone know of any office suites that include an ‘Access-like’ replacement?
“Looking at this site and OpenOffice.org it doesn’t look like anyone has anything comparable to MS Access. I’d love to replace MS Office at work but we do a ton of ODBC data reading with Access. Unfortunately ODBC is the only way we can communicate with the database so we need that functionality.
Anyone know of any office suites that include an ‘Access-like’ replacement?”
I don’t know of any, but I agree. A database that is accessible to the average user is the one major thing that is missing from the Linux Office scene. MySQL and PostgreSQL don’t fit the bill here as they are way overkill for just a personal database.
“Looking at this site and OpenOffice.org it doesn’t look like anyone has anything comparable to MS Access. I’d love to replace MS Office at work but we do a ton of ODBC data reading with Access. Unfortunately ODBC is the only way we can communicate with the database so we need that functionality.”
What exactly are you doing with Access? It would help to have a little more information to be able to formulate a proper response.
“Anyone know of any office suites that include an ‘Access-like’ replacement?”
StarOffice has Adabase with is pretty easy to use. My preference is to use MySQL though.
What are the benefits of running SOT as opposed to Open Office?
> MySQL and PostgreSQL don’t fit
> the bill here as they are
> way overkill for just a
> personal database
That’s true. But then again, most people don’t use db apps at all, even Access. If you need it for a small office, mysqlfront is pretty useful for common joe.
We use Access to get data through ODBC from a VMS RMS database. I can’t get access (pardon the pun) to it through other means that I’ve been able to find. MS Access and Excel are very nice for inputting and formatting the data…
Star Office from Sun, the commerical version of OpenOffice, includes a database component licensed from Adabas (http://www.softwareag.com/adabas/). The web site is a whole lot less friendly than I remember. I gues you’re expected to go through one of their resellers.
More useful information can be found at Sun’s StarOffice 5.2 site, http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/5.2/whatsnew/base.html…
Keep in mind that the StarBase included in 5.2, which uses the Adabas enginer, is being replaced by a full blown Adabas Personal in 6.0. But I think even StarBase would let you access a database using ODBC.
I think that the beta for StarOffice 6.0 is still available for free. The release version will not be. But $50 to $200 would be reasonable to pay if you needed that functionality, especially since people in your organization who didn’t could use the free OpenOffice.
Rob Campbell
[email protected]
The new Office .NET will use the .NET Common Language Runtime (but it will still be backward compatible with VBA also).
This means that in the future, after it comes out, everyone will finally be able to jettison doing any future development in Visual Basic entirely and use C#, J#, VB.NET, or whatever they want to write Excel or Word macros or Access applications.
This is a Good Thing.
I don’t get it.
VB.NET has little to do API-wise and a bit of language-wise with its predessesor VB.
This is why a lot of VB people were pissed off with Microsoft for changing VB.NET so much. They had to learn a whole lot of new things… ;D
talking to VB guys now, they brag that they can finally do things Java guys can do. Thing is, they don’t understand how
I am so glad I never learned VB. Thank god C# came out, so if I ever have to write for the MS platform, it should be a lot easier than it used to be. This, out of all of the .NET hooplah, is the only good thing I see coming from it. Finally a clean API to work with under Windows. All the other crap is just marketting.
hi!
can someone please please answer the folowing question:
what tool do they use to import formats such as microsoft office and wordperfect?? the original staroffice back whenit was owned by stardivision used Intranet solutions outside in viewer technology, which comes with a very very expensive license and is not open source at all. i would really appreciate help onthis subject. i can’t download the source and check because my connection is really bad. please mail me the answer if possibel. thanks a million.
“This means that in the future, after it comes out, everyone will finally be able to jettison doing any future development in Visual Basic entirely and use C#, J#, VB.NET, or whatever they want to write Excel or Word macros or Access applications.
This is a Good Thing.”
No kidding, writing macro viruses in VB sucked. It will be way better to do it using Java or C#.
It’s true that there’s no good free “desktop database” like Access for Linux. Adabas D had to be taken out of OO because it’s licensed from a third party. ApplixWare (commercial package) contains a graphical database client and a “builder” application for visual apps: http://www.vistasource.com/products/axware/ ; the outdated Corel Office package contains Paradox. TheKompany, which I hold in quite high regard, is working on “Rekall” (http://www.thekompany.com/products/rekall/), which is supposed to be a nice front end with form designer for any database backend. This is proprietary software, though. There are a few open source projects but I’ve seen none that would be worth mentioning. I’ve heard that Qt 3.0 contains database functionality, so this might change.
Much as I love open source, it should not be forgotten that many great projects have been mostly “donated” by large corporations (or, in another sense, by venture capitalists who funded Linux dotcoms). OpenOffice and Mozilla are both primarily the result of much work by well-paid developers. Abiword is a more traditional open source project (although developed by a company) but not really suitable for production (nor is KOffice). That’s why it pisses me off to read some of the remarks that have been made about StarOffice as a commercial product. OpenOffice would not be there without Sun, so a little gratitude would be in order.
I’ve done a fair amount of tweaking on all of the systems I mentioned in my prior post, and to be honest, none of them handle ALL OF THE FUNCTIONS OF WORD/EXCEL/etc. very well. (Let the flame fest begin! :-)).
THe fact is that even on Windows, there isn’t much compatibility between, say, Easy Office, WordPerfect, 602 Office, etc., and Word, because MSFT controls the data descriptions.
That said, so long as you aren’t using alot of graphics, macros, etc, Star Office 5.2 did a fair job, and Open Office is quite good for most daily applications. Nothing really works with Access, but trust me, from experience programming apps in the thing (required, not my decision), that you don’t want it anyway.
Gobe Productive rocks on BEOS, and so did the beta for windows, but opening GOBE docs in Word leads to alot of reformatting.
There still is a beta of Wordperfect for Linux that works fairly well, although it isn’t supported anymore by Corel, or anyone else for that matter, being proprietary code.
Here’s my 2cents: use whatever works for you, and keep it simple if you want to use the docs cross-OS.
“That’s true. But then again, most people don’t use db apps at all, even Access. If you need it for a small office, mysqlfront is pretty useful for common joe.”
I pretty much need something to store my research data (I’m a behavioral ecologist). I want to be able to store observation data in one table, and demographic data about individual subjects in another and be able to cross reference between the two tables.
I know I could use MySQL for this, but the main problem is that I have enough to do with my research in general and would rather not have to learn a lot of SQL programming or how to design a frontend or administer an SQL server.
Ideally, what I would like to see is a Lotus Approach type product for Linux / FreeBSD. Lotus Approach is my favorite database for Windows. It’s powerful enough to do everything I need, and it doesn’t force me to learn SQL and such. I was able to set up a database in Approach 30 minutes after I first started using the product, and without reading any documentation. I would love to see something like that for Linux. (Maybe the K-Office people are listening. After all, that’s the only thing K-Office is really missing.)
BTW, some of you may remember one of my gripes awhile back that there were no good statistics packages available for Linux. A few people recommended GNU’s R, which I looked into. But R is actually a statistical programming language, and not a statistical analysis package. So it requires me to learn a great deal of programming, which is not exactly what I was looking for.
However, after some searching around, I found a really awesome program called Stata that has a Linux version. It’s Linux version runs in sync with its Windows and Mac versions so it isn’t one of those programs where the Linux version lags behind the Windows version.
It’s a commercial program, but its still a great deal. Cheaper than SAS and good student discounts for college students.
So for anyone who needs to do stats in Linux, you might want to check it out. The address is:
http://www.stata.com
Simba,
it is my understanding (someone correct me if I’m wrong) that the KOffice team decided not to include a desktop database in their package because they assumed that this would be developed by theKompany as open source. theKompany donated Kivio, a free flowcharting tool, but Rekall, the desktop database, is proprietary. As far as I know, the GNOME Office crowd has no desktop database in the works.
Since Lotus is IBM there might still be hopes for the Lotus desktop apps to get to Linux, although so far IBM doesn’t seem to have much (any?) interest in desktop/workstation Linux. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy with Microsoft 🙂
GNOME has GNOME-DB (http://www.gnome-db.org/), which is part of GNOME Office (http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/).
Could people format their links properly!!!!
Put the [/URL] BEFORE the ). please!!!
thanks for the answer, but the question was essentially the following?
is there an open source replacement for Intrannet Solutions Outside In viewer technology that was used in staroffice 5.2???
i need to use it in a document managment system, and outside in is extremely expensive.
thanks.
Rekall and GNOME-DB really aren’t what I am looking for though. Both of them are just frontends to MySQL or PostgreSQL. I’m looking for a self contained product like Approach or Access. (I like Approach better than Access).
Oh well…. Maybe it is an excuse for me to become more proficient with Python instead of just dabling. gadfly looks interesting, and i have thought about using it to write an Approach type product in Python/TKinter. But right now, my neither my Python skills or my TKinter skills are up to the task.
> Could people format their links properly!!!!
> Put the [/URL] BEFORE the ). please!!!
NO. You should NOT use [URL] with OSNews. No one actually reads our text just below the posting form?
ONLY [ B ] and [ I ] are used from the UBB codes.
The URLS will autoparse from our engine, but you have to make sure that you leave SPACES around the URL text, in order to parse them correctly.
Abiword is a more traditional open source project (although developed by a company) but not really suitable for production (nor is KOffice).
As it turns out, SourceGear has long since stopped actively supporting AbiWord; all of the devlopers at this point are volunteers. AbiWord is suitable for my needs; it is far more featureful than, say, WordPad or Microsoft Write. Roughly speaking, it is as featureful as Word for Windows 1.0.
Generally speaking, open source development works; it is, however, a much slower development process than that of proprietary software.