Star Office V Open Office

Elmo

I am thinking about getting either of these products.

What one do you think I should get?

I am just researching them at the moment so would like to know how USERS feel about either product.

aidan_walsh

AFAIK they are both essentially the same thing, except Star is paid software, and as such you get a few extras, and official technical support.

Elmo

Any reason I should pay for Star Office other then the added extra's and offical help?

Would I be missing much without the extras?

L1011

Well, considering the cost of 'getting' OO.o is just whatever it costs you to download it, thats an instant advantage

Comparing the current offerings - StarOffice 6 wit OO.o 1.1.4, StarOffice has better default templates, clip art, a database engine, and customer care.

They both have an interface so ugly that it kills kittens, unless you're using the Ximian-ised GNOME interface for it on Linux.

The soon to be released OO.o 2.x and StarOffice 7 are much harder to seperate. OO.o 2 will have a full relational database with an Access-like front end, although Access import/export probably won't be provided; StarOffice will probably keep the clunky Adabas B that barely does Access import/export

OO.o runs on platforms Star doesn't officially support, such as OS/2, MacOS X (under X Windows), FreeBSD, IRIX and more.

They both have redesigned interfaces that no longer look like OS/2 on a bad day in 1991 - Windows XP styling on XP, GTK2 styles under GNOME, KDE styles under KDE, and so on.

And there should be more templates and clipart in OO.o 2

Which, in my opinion, makes the cost of StarOffice 7 over OO.o 2 not justifiable.

rsynnott

If you're going for OpenOffice, you might as well go for the new beta, really, it's fairly stable. I think you CAN use Abadas as the dbbackend in OpenOffice, if you like...

Syth

Speaking of clip art, http://www.openclipart.org/

Red Alert

I don't see how the comment that the OO.o interface is ugly is justified. It's just that MS Office has quite a lot of clutter which many people like myself turn off anyway.

One very annoying thing about the current OO.o stable version 1.1 is that you need to do a workstation or server installation, followed by a user installation on every account that's going to use the software.

The beta version is out now 1.7.9 for the 2.0 release, it's removed the installation issues - you now install just like MS Office. I use it quite regularly and only the database OO.o Base needs a bit of improvement in terms of stability.

You also get to export presentations as Flash files (great for putting on a website) and also export all documents as PDF (which you have to pay more for if you're using MS Office).

StarOffice does have some network-centric stuff like automatic configuration updating and a few other tricks, but unless you need those then OO.o is the way to go.

Elmo

Downloaded Open Office In college today, so isn't costing me anything in way of broadband or dial up charges.

So far so good. Have used it much yet but looks like a good alternative to Microsoft Office (especially since most PC don't come with an Office suite on them other then Microsoft Works).

The Power point application IMPRESS was a little slow in showing presentations but that could just be my PC.

MS Word = Writer
MS Access = Base (Needs Java Runtime Environment, Is difficult to install, Well I soon find out)
MS Excel = Calc
MS PowerPoint = Impress

Other programmes are Draw and Math which I have yet to use

Capt'n Midnight

Elmo wrote:

The Power point application IMPRESS was a little slow in showing presentations but that could just be my PC.

Yes it's slower than office on some things and is a memory hog. But you can but a lot of ram for the price of Office, and you can see improvements in each release. Oh and the one major speed difference I've noticed is when printing very large word documents, OO is about 20 times faster !

happydude13

I downloaded the open offoce 2.0 beta recently
and I was pleasantly suprised how nice it was to use

Although I haven't tried to run it on any not so new
machines, and I'm hardly a power user..

Elmo

I don't see how the comment that the OO.o interface is ugly is justified. It's just that MS Office has quite a lot of clutter which many people like myself turn off anyway.

I like they way in WRITE it turn on the toolbars when you need them and gets rid of them when you don't.

However when choosing colours you have to turn of the window after you have selected the colour, but its not a major issue.

nadir

openoffice-ximian is the shiznit
http://ooo.ximian.com

L1011

nadir wrote:

openoffice-ximian is the shiznit
http://ooo.ximian.com

If you're on Linux, using GTK2 based DE's, and don't want to use 2.0, maybe...

2.0 integrates a lot of Ximian's changes. Sun finally opened up a bit, making the reasoning behind ooo-ximian a bit pointless

That said, I still use it on my iBook (under Linux) because theres no 2.0 PPC RPM's yet.And I don't want to spend a week building from source...

Orion

Any idea when OO.o2 is going final?