| StarOffice 7 -- the best and worst of Office |
by Henry Kingman (Nov. 21, 2003)
The best thing about Sun's StarOffice 7 is that it's virtually a clone of Microsoft Office, the defacto standard business software today. The worst thing about Sun's StarOffice is that it's -- well, you get the idea -- virtually a clone of Microsoft's Office, the defacto standard business software today.
Every business desk today needs some kind of productivity suite, including word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Microsoft's Office products are highly entrenched in this category, to the point where here at LinuxDevices.com, we receive documents every day from Linux companies in Microsoft Office's proprietary binary formats. Usually, such documents are press releases, which are every bit as amenable to 7-bit ASCII as to Microsoft's *.doc format, a closed, binary format that essentially holds your information hostage.
But never mind -- it's kind of pointless to complain about things that aren't going to change. We should all just be grateful that there's a good, low-cost, fully functioning equivalent of Microsoft's Office product that lets us do an end-run around the data hostage takers in Redmond. That way, when the vice president of a prominent Linux company sends you a document locked inside a proprietary Word, Excel, or PowerPoint format, you can simply fire up StarOffice, convert the document to one of SO's open formats, and work with it from your Linux desktop.
WYGIWITYM
If there is a bad thing about having a fully functioning clone of Microsoft's Office, it's simply that one such program was perhaps too many to begin with. For StarOffice (SO) faithfully imitates many of Office's worst faults.
In its stock configuration, SO tries to outsmart you at every turn with WYGIWITYM: What You Get is What it Thinks You Mean. In order to cure it of all manner of meddlesome habits, you have to spend some quality time with several really complicated options and preferences dialog boxes. I never did manage to figure out how to cure it of "smart" quotes -- which slant in or out, according to which side of the string they surround. The manual's advice on this seems faulty, but it's probably my ignorance of word processing software that's to blame here.
Just like Office, SO is quick to offer unasked-for advice with a pop-up help wizard that tries to distract you from your work with irrelevant advice about what it thinks you may be trying to do. The SO wizard is a garish but non-animated star/exclamation point, possibly a mild improvement over the infamous leering "clippy" and successor "puppy" on the MS side.
Should you happen to want to work in HTML, there is no simple option to just display html tags inline. Instead, SO's browser engine will recognize and grab ahold of any html code you may try to put past it, rendering it onscreen in such a way that changes will not be possible without the navigation of several additional menus. To change the text of a hyperlink, for example, requires first precisely highlighting the whole link, without accidentally clicking on it! This is a tedious operation. Then, you have to go to the "hyperlinks" dialog box, where, provided you have not accidentally highlighted any of the spaces around the link, you'll be able to see that anchor href, name, or other attributes, and even change them, if you like.
Insatiable appetite
Another complaint I have about StarOffice: it is a huge mass that eats up 300MB of your hard drive; or even more, if you decide to use the Java Virtual Machine it comes with. It lumbers out of bed at a crawl, splashing a big advertisement for itself up against the front of your screen as it does so. But fortunately, it actually runs reasonably fast once it's loaded.
At one point -- when Sun first bought version 5.2 from a company in Germany -- StarOffice incorporated a file manager and Web browser, and basically took over your entire computer, window manager and all, when you started it. It was monolithic and enormous, with complex menus and split screens dripping from every square inch of screen real estate, leaving only a few precious lines to process your words in. Sun's work, and that of OpenOffice.org, in splitting up StarOffice into separate, standalone components, is something we should all be grateful for. As huge and slow as StarOffice is now, it was once much, much worse.
On the bright side
StarOffice is kind of a walled garden, by which I mean: even the least experienced Linux user can succeed in installing SO on the desktop computer and it will have pretty fonts (identical to MS ones, supposedly!), spell checking, and maybe even be able to print regardless of how badly mangled the rest of their system settings have become. OpenOffice, by contrast, relies on the font servers built into X, external spell-checkers, etc. (If you want to use X fonts in StarOffice, you have to first "import" them.)
Even better than SO's independence from system (mis)configuration is StarOffice's support for network installations. Resource-consicious Linux administrators may opt for a network install, which only requires about 20MB on each user's machine, instead of the 300-plus MB required by a full local install. I didn't test this, but I'll bet it works beautifully, especially on a fast network. This capability offers a welcome savings in both hardware and software costs!
OO or SO, 'tis the question
So, should you pay Sun $80 for StarOffice, or just content yourself with using OpenOffice? Here's my advice.
If you want to stay on top of the very latest new "features" in your office software by upgrading your software frequently, and you're a reasonably good system administrator, try out OpenOffice. It will have all the latest, up-to-the-minute cool features being developed by the OpenOffice.org developer community.
On the other hand, if you don't feel compelled to have bleeding-edge Office software features, and you just want something that works with minimal setup and administration, especially for converting data out of Microsoft Office formats, StarOffice at $80 can't be beat. Sun's hard push behind its "Sun Java Desktop System" means you'll be sure to get a well-tested, easily installed, and fully annoying office package, with enough bells and whistles to amuse the most boredom-ridden PHB/press release author almost indefinitely.
 About the author: Henry Kingman edits LinuxDevices.com, and has been a professional editor, writer, and journalist for 16 years. He says the last version of Microsoft Office he liked was version 5, before the unification of the Mac and Windows interfaces, in 1987.
(Click here for further information)
|
|
|
Approaching the Linux Desktop
The purpose of this paper is to help organizations evaluate the Linux desktop against their own enterprise needs and discover what benefits the Linux desktop might bring to their organizations.
Migrating To Linux: Application Challenges and Solutions
Several solutions exist to help organizations migrate in an orderly fashion from Windows to Linux desktops. This paper establishes the characteristics of an ideal cross-platform solution and reviews these alternatives in light of this ideal standard. The paper takes a closer look at the pros and cons of various solutions and outlines the business benefits that can be achieved.
Linux Advantages: Publicly Available Information on Linux Software
This paper offers a brief summary of readily-available Linux information to help businesses sort out this widely misunderstood operating system.
Top 5 Strategies for Managing Linux
Despite continuous evolution in the manageability of Linux, a 2006 survey cited manageability concerns as a top reason why organizations are hesitating to adopt Linux. Levanta believes Linux can be as manageable, if not more so, than other operating systems by following key strategies. These strategic recommendations were developed from experiences in numerous customer environments, both large and small.
Why Choose Novell for Linux?
This paper outlines the benefits of switching to the Linux platform and choosing Novell as a high-performance, enterprise solution.
Enterprise Linux Selection Guide
Considering moving your enterprise to the Linux operating system? Since there are so many similar versions, choosing the right one can be tough. This paper offers a clear process to help you make an informed decision and get the features, support, and cost that are right for your business and technical needs.
Overcoming Challenges in Managing Linux
Levanta has created a new administration model with innovative technology that breaks down the barriers to making the most of Linux systems. This paper will provide an in-depth look at the workings of Levanta’s product, the first Linux appliance of its kind.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 for Retail Businesses
Discover why major retailers have switched to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop in the back office. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is a low-cost desktop that offers a complete set of productivity applications and interoperates seamlessly with the other Windows, Macintosh and UNIX desktops in your store.
Moving to a Linux Desktop
Migrating from Windows to Linux on the desktop can be a substantial undertaking because it has the potential for touching -- and perhaps disrupting -- every user in your organization. Unlike a data center (server and infrastructure) migration that is largely transparent to users, the cultural and administrative transitions and environment readiness required to support a Linux desktop migration are extensive.
Seven Good Reasons to Exchange Exchange
This paper describes seven compelling reasons why you should switch from Exchange to Scalix.
|
|
|
|
|
news feed
