Office alternatives

[Pwnbroker]

I've sort of used Openoffice, but I'm looking at StarOffice since it's "only" 70 bucks. How does Star Office compare to Openoffice and MS Office? I notice Star Office supports pdf creation.

 

[MedicBob]

StarOffice is the commercial port of OpenOffice. I like both of them. What are you looking for that OpenOffice doesn't do?

 

[Schadenfroh]

There are always Corel (word perfect suite) and IBM (Lotus) alternatives.

 

[stealth2009]

One open source which is also commonly used is AbiWord .

-------------------------
Free Software Downloads
Email Notifier with auto-login for Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail

 

[WildHorse]

Openoffice also supports pdf creation.

 

[clamum]

OpenOffice is pretty good from my experience.

 

[Pwnbroker]

Well, Star Office has to have something that Open Office doesn't, otherwise, everybody would be using Open Office and Star Office would never sell. Maybe it looks better, maybe it's better supported, I don't know.

And I've used Lotus' office suite, it came with the IBM Aptiva years ago. I don't know what kind of price they have, but I liked their DB program and used it a lot. But, if they are even half as expensive as MS Office, they are out of my price range. And, Wordperfect I've never quite understood...it must be Mac software.

Either way, I want the best suite for less than 100 bucks. I'll check Lotus' prices and see what they have to offer, otherwise, I may just download Open Office or even buy Star Office. Thanks for the input guys.

Edit: Just checked Lotus Smartsuite, nearly as bad as MS and don't include email software.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

From the staroffice wikipedia article:

"Proprietary components in StarOffice that are not in OpenOffice.org include:

* Several font metric compatible Unicode TrueType fonts containing bitmap representations for better appearance at smaller font sizes
* 12 Western fonts (including Andale Sans, Arial Narrow, Arial Black, Broadway, Garamond, Imprint MT Shadow, Kidprint, Palace Script, Sheffield) and 7 Asian language fonts (including support for the Hong Kong Supplementary character set)
* Adabas D database
* StarOffice-only templates and sample documents
* A large clip art gallery
* Sorting functionality for Asian versions
* File filters for additional older wordprocessing formats (including EBCDIC)
* A different spell checker (note that OpenOffice.org does include a spell checker as well) and thesaurus
* StarOffice Configuration Manager
* Macro Converter for converting Microsoft Office VBA-macros to StarBasic

There are also differences in the documentation, training and support options, and some minor differences in the look and icons between the two programs.

Other differences include: StarOffice only supports 10 languages (compared to over 25 for OpenOffice.org), and StarOffice is only available for the Windows, Linux, Solaris operating systems (while OpenOffice.org is available for 8 operating systems)."

OpenOffice does everything I need.