On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Neal Lippman wrote:
> Any users of StarOffice out there who can comment on it? I can really use
> something compatible with MS Word 2000; KWord just cannot cut it at this
> point and there really is no choice but to be compatible with the MS world
> from time to time, when I have to bring work home.
Neal--
I have been using SO for quite a while now, and can hopefully give you
some insight.
SO is bulky, and slow. On a 900MHz Athlon with 128MB of RAM, it can
take 15-20 seconds or more to get loaded up (depending on the system
load). I think that this is becuase it loads up the word processor,
spreadsheet, presentation, database and the whole nine yards.
It has some funny quirks with MS file formats. One thing that I have
noted is that if I do a spreadsheet with currency formatting in SO, it
will look like this: $ 600.00
However, when I open it up in Excel, Star Office shows you its ancestry by
displaying the currency as: DM 600.00!
As long as you make sure to save back a version (i.e. '95/'97, rather than
'97/2000 IIRC), you are generally OK. Headers and footers can be a little
tricky, and tend to disappear between one and the other. Also, the
document properties can kind of get munged when going back and forth.
Which may or may not be a big deal, but I was a little bit annoyed when a
document I was working on showed the title as the first line of the text
in SO, when I had set it to something different in Word.
Having said all that, I do find Star Office to be pretty useful, and I
can, for the most part do my work in it. There are just some things that
I need to do that are too tightly bound to other MS products, so I haven't
been able to get rid of that FAT32 partition on my machine -- yet!
I don't know for sure, but I have heard rumblings that the 6.x version of
SO will load the applications separately, so that will cut down the start
time, and amount of resources it consumes. At least in theory.
---
Craig Sprout
Network Administrator
Crown Parts and Machine, Inc.
http://www.crownpartsandmachine.com
