StarOffice 8 (Beta)

[RideFree]

StarOffice 8 Beta and do the D/L for free trial/eval.
I assume this is timed to expire when the Beta goes Gold.

Most platforms (OS) available as are most of the important languages.

(See Scott McNealy punish Bill Gates!)

 

[emeraldsky]

Is StarOffice (which is cheap), better than OpenOffice (which is free)?

 

[TrentSteel]

StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org.

Originally posted by: emeraldsky
Is StarOffice (which is cheap), better than OpenOffice (which is free)?

 

[timswim78]

i believe that star office comes with a desktop database (Adabas), whereas Open office does not include a database app.

 

[woodscomp]

Well it originally started out as StarOffice, then Sun bought it out and gave up after a few years and it turned into OpenOffice, and now it looks like StarOffice is back.

I used to try and use this and it was fruitless, just could not get over the learning curve from using MS Office for so many years. So I stuck with what I knew.

Maybe time to give this a whirl again.

 

[kamranziadar]

thanx

 

[pxc]

Originally posted by: TrentSteel
StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org.

It was actually the other way around. Sun bought StarOffice in 1999 and released OpenOffice as the open source version in 2002.

StarOffice 6.0 was the first commercial release (5.2 and earlier were free) and it had more features than OpenOffice 1.0 (which lacked a database app, calendar app, email app, several fonts, support from Sun, etc).

 

[emeraldsky]

OpenOffice.org is going to release a new version 2.0 in the coming months.
A beta version is available. Apparently, the file formats are different in the new version, so it isn't backwards compatible. I'm using the current release to avoid bugs in the beta version.

So what's the relationship, if any, between StarOffice and OpenOffice now?

 

[egeekial]

Originally posted by: emeraldsky
So what's the relationship, if any, between StarOffice and OpenOffice now?

I believe StarOffice is just the commercial version, and OpenOffice is free... same as it's always been.

 

[pxc]

Originally posted by: emeraldsky
OpenOffice.org is going to release a new version 2.0 in the coming months.
A beta version is available.

Thanks. I didn't know the beta was out. Well, it's not really a beta which would be feature complete... this is more like an alpha in development. No one, even MS, likes to release what's really an alpha. Everyone calls prereleases "beta" now.

I'm downloading the Feb 17 version (1.9.m79) from here.

edit: Are staroffice 8 and openoffice 2.0 getting merged again or something? The betas for both look really similar. SO8 doesn't include the math component but the rest of the programs are the same. The Word XP compatibility is very good in both now, but slow. I can't use the calc component because it's *very* slow. I opened a simple spreadsheet I made with 18 bar graphs and it took over 5 minutes in openoffice and over 1 minute in staroffice. The same sheet takes 2 seconds to open in Excel 2002. Pretty sad performance despite running on a P4 3.4GHz system w/1GB of memory. Saving the doc and xls files to native formats (*.od*) gives performance only a little slower than MS Office.