Star Office

[TheJackal]

I've been thinking about picking up a copy of Star Office 6.0 and I was wondering if anyone could tell me what they think of it? How does it compare to MS Office? Or even to Corel's office suite?

[mairving]

I have used 5.1 in the past. It works okay but it just has some oddities. One is that to open Word, Excel documents, you have to either change the file association manually or open up Star Office, tell it what the file is and open it from there. So that makes it harder to use if you are used to clicking on the file to open it. The other thing that I didn't like is that it has it's own proprietary format that it tries to save documents in that Excel or Word can't open properly. I have used the Spreadsheet quite extensively. It would be slightly behind Excel 97 in usuability but works fine and similarly.

[TheJackal]

So would it be worth picking up just to see what it's like?

[TwoRails]

It's still free,isn't it??

[TheJackal]

Yes it's still free. But I was thinking of picking up a retail boxed version so that I would have all of the CDs and manuals.

[Tuf]

For Windows At least it's not free anymore. Open Office based on the same code is still free. Sun charges now even for the down load, $75.95. Still considerably cheaper than M$ Office.

I haven't used it much but it's a little tougher to get the same results. It still isn't as compatible with Office as I would like. I deal with two companies that are using it. A fair number of documents don't retain their formating very well when opened in Office Apps.

[TwoRails]

Ahhh

[TheJackal]

What's the differance between Star Office and Open Office?

[Tuf]

Star Office by Sun was originally open source code, the base code still is I believe. Starting with a fairly recent version the improvements Sun makes belong to them and will only be availalble in the for sale package. Open Office is still an open source project like Mozilla and the Linux kernel. Star Office is a considerably slicker package than Open Office. Neither one has the features of Office.

To me Star Office feature wise is in between Office 95 and Office 97 and not nealy as compatible as either one of those.

[TwoRails]

I've heard that Office 601 (or 602?) is supposed to be pretty good. I downloaded it once, but never used it...

[Tuf]

It's not bad at all. If you aren't trading files with people that use M$ Office frequently and aren't already accustomed to using M$ Office it's a decent choice. If Sun comtinues to work on it I'm confident it will be a good alternative. M$ Office continues to be come more feature rich all the time. If you use all the web integration it has no peer. I don't and I still like 2000 the best.

I haven't tried the last couple of versions of Word Perfect but it or was agood choice also. I don't like Quattro as well as Excel. but hte rest of it seems OK.

Lotus Notes is another suite you can pick up cheap. Tons of companies back east use it and it is pretty solid.

The main reasons I stick with Office is I can send a file anywhere and know that it can be read. Also I like the power of Outlook to keep track of my day.