Is StarOffice any good?

[wjones]

http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/get.html

 

[DAM]

dude its free!!!! how bad can it be?????








dam()

 

[Poontos]

It's all good.

 

[Soybomb]

Yes, yes it is

 

[ForeverSilky]

I saw a review of it like a year ago on ZDTV, they liked it a lot.

 

[yllus]

It's got everything you could possibly want, save for the habdashery of MS Office's spell-check-on-the-fly and grammar checker. This is an excellent solution when looking to minimize costs at the office - installing a copy of this package on each PC costs you nothing. It even reads and writes to the latest Word/Excel 2000 file formats.

If you feel like going legit, try it out. You're not missing out on much by using this instead of the Office suite.

 

[Recneps]

It is ok not as good as office because it has a gay little desktop built in. The program doesn't save in office format right always.

 

[ViRGE]

If you can't afford Office, it's definately the way to go. It's only real weakness is that it's Java based, so it's a bit slow in comparison to Office.

PS It does support spell checking on the fly

 

[wjones]

Thanks for the feedback! I think i'll give it a try on my 2nd PC (don't feel like spending $$$ to buy Ms Office).

 

[yakko]

Use it myself. I really like it.

 

[nd]

Star Office is okay... a little bloated for my tastes.. but then again I'm not a fan of Microsoft Office either (I don't see why everyone praises it, I get annoyed with it at work).

But Star Office is Open Source software now, which mean it's only gonna get better, and will become a platform independant office suite...

 

[Praetor]

I downloaded it on a whim last week. It's not that bad, but I really, really hate the stupid desktop approach they took.

For a word processor, I'll stick with either Word or AbiWord.

 

[konichiwa]

/me remembers the good ol' days of AmiPro

Ahhh

 

[hendon]

Yeah, hate that stupid desktop.... no way to get rid of it...
seems they want to take over the Windows interface...

Loads pretty slowly too.. i'll stick with my MS Office.. no point learning something new...

 

[jonnyGURU]

1. You don't HAVE to use the desktop.

2. It's bloated because it loads EVERYTHING on start up instead of just the "task at hand". It does this so you can easily turn a DOC to a spread sheet and then turn that into a webpage and then edit some graphic for it all in the same shot.

Funny thing is that it's only slow because of this in Windows. On my 700 w/ Windows it's slow. On my 400 w/ Linux it's fine.

3. Try this once: Change your shell from EXPLORER.EXE to STAR OFFICE.EXE for a day or two. It's a laugh riot! WINDOWS BE DAMNED!

 

[ratkil]

How do you change which shell loads jonny?

I tried it for a little while, the only thing that kind of bugged me was if one part of it crashed, all the applications shut down and lost what they had open. Granted it probably doesn't crash as much under something different then windows, but that is what I use so.....

 

[nd]

I'm not sure about Windows Star Office, but since it's been open sourced, one of the first things they're doing under Linux/GNOME is breaking the components up into seperate applications (and Bonobo components actually, which is sorta like ActiveX to you guys).

 

[AndrewR]

Well, hey, if someone did manage to swipe the Office source code the other day, perhaps Office will become open source shortly.

 

[nd]

Open source office would be a nightmare. No open source programmer worth a $hit would go near it. It's probably a mess with tons of Windowsisms and OLE/proprietary dependencies.

I never did care for MS Office. The open source world already has KOffice, Star Office, many Gnome office components (Gnumeric, AbiWord), so MS Office really is quite useless to us.

 

[jonnyGURU]

ratkil: Edit your system.ini file where it says "SHELL=".

 

[DirkBelig]

I tried it and it crashed within minutes every time! Crap. Deleted it and "obtained" a copy of Office 2000 and called it a day.