StarOffice 7 is far faster and friendlier than SO 6 (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

Robin 'Roblimo' Miller reviews StarOffice 7 in this NewsForge article. "If you need to work fast, SO 7's speed certainly makes it worth the upgrade money from SO 6 or OOo, assuming you are using it as a work tool -- and don't mind spending money on software. If you would like to have a free office software package that does most of what SO 7 does, at the same speed, and don't mind waiting a little while to get it, OpenOffice.org 1.1 is almost ready for you, and the latest release candidate (RC4) looks usable enough that adventurous souls may be comfortable using it today instead of waiting for the final version."

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StarOffice 7 is the same speed as OO.o 11-rc4 (NoForge)

Posted Sep 22, 2003 23:45 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (6 responses)

"OpenOffice.org 1.1 is almost ready for you, and the latest release candidate (RC4) looks usable enough that adventurous souls may be comfortable using it today"

What a load of crap. This is such an obvious over exageration that I can only conclude that our journalist has a hidden agenda.

I've been using OpenOffice.org 1.1 heavily since the -rc2 series and I haven't had a single crash/hang/etc. It loads and saves M$.doc files without a glitch (in my experience), and the export-as-pdf feature impresses the pants of people.

StarOffice is for suckers, and that's okay because the world is full of them. I think Suns business plan is great, but "Roblimo", don't try selling imitation Free Software to the Free Software community.

Ciaran O'Riordan

(now, running Debian "testing" is really for the adventurous. GNOME 1.4, are you sure it's stable?)

StarOffice 7 is the same speed as OO.o 11-rc4 (NoForge)

Posted Sep 23, 2003 1:05 UTC (Tue) by jarek (guest, #4105) [Link] (1 responses)

I can only agree. Rc4 is very nice indeed. Appart from icons, I can't tell the differencne between SO and OOo. Rc2 had bugs that prevented me from using it though.

StarOffice 7 is the same speed as OO.o 11-rc4 (NoForge)

Posted Sep 23, 2003 6:24 UTC (Tue) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

SO / OOo Differences listed in the article:
Spellchecker (for more languages?), thesaurus, templates, clip art, 3rd party fonts, Adabas DB, (paper) manuals, support, CD with SO for several different OSes.

Surely having those integrated / installed automatically are worth some money? :-)

StarOffice 7 is the same speed as OO.o 11-rc4 (NoForge)

Posted Sep 23, 2003 6:17 UTC (Tue) by libra (guest, #2515) [Link] (2 responses)

OpenOffice is quite good for sure, anyway I've tried to find a newsgroup where to go and ask for some tips and didn't find any. That annoys me because I have yet one quite annoying bug with OO-RC4 and printing pages containing transparent objects (which make either too big files for the printer or are very crappy).
Not having a newsgroup to discuss the problem, and not having time to harvest the OOo bugzilla to know if I must post a bug or not is then an annoyance that comes to prevent me from using OO-RC4. I still hope the problem to be solved for final release anyway, because I do need sometime to print my documents.
By the way PDF export is a dream, but there should be a PDF reader in the suite as well to be consistent.

StarOffice 7 is the same speed as OO.o 11-rc4 (NoForge)

Posted Sep 23, 2003 6:54 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

Try http://www.oooforum.org/

StarOffice 7 is the same speed as OO.o 11-rc4 (NoForge)

Posted Sep 23, 2003 15:03 UTC (Tue) by libra (guest, #2515) [Link]

I shall have mentionned that I did so, and nothing interesting came out.

1.1rc4 and mostly-final sometimes bleed graphics for me

Posted Oct 5, 2003 13:58 UTC (Sun) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link]

(in lay terms, don't always update the entire document window as it
should), but the glitches are always obvious. 1.0.3 had a nasty habit of
not scrolling properly, and that's gone.

For the curious this happened with RC4 on Mandrake 9.1, I've
URPMI-upgraded to 9.2 and RC4.2mdk (some of the patches for RC5==final
included) and it still happens. The video is NVidia nForce2 with NVidia's
binary-ish drivers. Still running on kernel 2.4.21-0.13mdk which is an
updated 9.1 kernel, XFree86 is 4.3 throughout.

As if in compensation for this occasional annoyance, spellchecking and the
like work flawlessly OOtB.

rc5 is out... and will probably wind up being final

Posted Sep 23, 2003 14:51 UTC (Tue) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link]

The rc5 source tarball appears to be broken. There are only 4 patches between rc4 to rc5.

The holy water (a unique blend of penguin and daemon pee plus some aqua, glass and a little light) will probably be poured over rc5 once the tarball is unbroken again.