[luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[W. Wayne Liauh]

When I was a student, I managed to buy a 2nd-hand Chevy Vega.  To me, 
that was the most car I could have dreamed of.  And Hello World, I am 
ready to conquer you!


Fast forward in time.  A friend of mine, who was smart to cash in his 
(now worthless) dot-com stocks, bought a pair of matching Lamborghini 
Diablos (@ $400,000 each).


Both cars will pretty much get you where you want to go, but it would be 
difficult, to say the least, for that Lamborghini friend of mine to 
dirve my Vega.


Again, it is very difficult for me to comment on StarOffice vis-a-vis 
WordPerfect, but you get what I mean.  :-)

Re: [luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[Joe Linux]

In a nutshell, WP gives mush more control over the document than SO.

Gary Sublett wrote:



Wayne,

I am somewhat familiar with your ongoing quest regarding WordPerfect and
your opinion of potential substitutes.  I find the included WSJ article
interesting but it does little to explain, in detail, specific
issues/problems with StarOffice/OpenOffice encountered by you or Mr.
Mossberg.  Do have a free cite to the acutal review by Mr. Mossberg?

I am interested in where the alternatives to WordPerfect fail, in your
or his opinion.  Is it  due to not performing as specified, don't have
the required features, don't work like WordPerfect, the user not being
familiar with the applications, or some other ___ (fill in the
blank)?  "Too complicated, quirky and buggy" does not provide much
insight. 

Re: [luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[Alvin Murphy]

W. Wayne Liauh wrote:

I have been frequently challenged as to why I am so stubborn about 
WordPerfect and "ignoring" StarOffice/OpenOffice. It is very difficult 
for me to explain the reason w/o further inviting the wraths. But 
there was an article in Wall Street Journal which may somewhat explain 
why:





The Wall Street Journal
MOSSBERG'S MAILBOX
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
July 25, 2002

Q: In your column last week, you complained that Microsoft charges
families too much for Office XP and doesn't allow families to install
a single copy of Office on multiple PCs. You made good points, but
instead of begging Microsoft to do the right thing, why didn't you
tell people to switch to the free office suite, OpenOffice, or Sun's
very similar $75 suite, StarOffice, or to the WordPerfect suite?

A: That's a good question, which I received in various forms from
dozens of readers. Here's my answer.

In the case of the WordPerfect Office suite, it's also fairly
expensive and also is licensed on the same one-copy-per-PC model
Microsoft follows. (You can put it on a second PC, but can't use it
on both machines simultaneously.) Corel , WordPerfect's maker,
doesn't enforce this license via "activation," the way Microsoft
does, but you are still violating the license if you buy one copy and
use it to upgrade an entire family's computers, unless there are only
two and you constantly police their running of WordPerfect, which is
absurd.

In the case of StarOffice, which is essentially identical to the free
OpenOffice, you are given a family license that covers five PCs. But
I reviewed the new 6.0 version of StarOffice (equivalent to the 1.0
version of OpenOffice) recently and found it too complicated, quirky
and buggy to be a reliable replacement for Microsoft Office for
mainstream, nontechnical users (read the review).

Believe me, if WordPerfect drastically cut its price, and/or offered
a family license, or if the OpenOffice/StarOffice product were
simpler and more reliable, I'd be glad to recommend them as
alternatives.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 


===

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Wayne, I agree with you. There is just no substitite for wordperfect. 
You have just scratched the surface. Wordperfect has a very simple, 
intuitive, macro language that is easy to learn and use. Moreover, it 
has a macro recorder that lets the beginner record keystrokes and then 
edit the results. VBA and all the variants are much more difficult to 
learn. OpenOffice seems to have an obscure language that is derived from 
StarBasic and has no similar recorder. There are a few examples macros 
to learn from and a few websites, but I think the process of replicating 
the abilities of my wordperfect macros will be very difficult indeed. It 
is true that the api is available but this helps only very good 
programmers. I think until they come out with a recorder, I will not be 
able to use it for serious work.

Re: [luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[Dan George]

 Why was it all downhill from there between 97 and 2K?
 I know 2K is far better than Office XP.
 Please comment on the major differences.


 Thanks

 Dan

Re: [luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[Gary Sublett]

On Sun, 28 Jul 2002 10:59:51 -1000
"W. Wayne Liauh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> That said, I wouldn't underestimate the power of oper source 
> development.  The difference (improvement)
> b/t StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice 6.0 is truly startling.
> 
> On the programming language stuff, I was wondering whether it would be
> 
> possible to do javascript w/i StarOffice?
>

Javascript is functional with OpenOffice 1.01 if you are creating a HTML
document, also check OpenOffice Help subjects; macro, scripts,
programming API and the following url:

http://api.openoffice.org/

-- 
 
Gary

 12:53pm  up 121 days, 11:20,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.04, 0.12

[luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[W. Wayne Liauh]

That said, I wouldn't underestimate the power of oper source 
development.  The difference (improvement)

b/t StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice 6.0 is truly startling.

On the programming language stuff, I was wondering whether it would be 
possible to do javascript w/i StarOffice?

[luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[W. Wayne Liauh]

Very interesting question.  OpenOffice 6.0 reminds me of MS Office 95; it shows 
something that looks good enough to be an office suite but
still lacks many of the features that will allow WordPerfect users to make the 
switch.

For starters, it is not infrequent for lawyers to generate documents that take hundreds 
of pages (and we call it a "brief") with heavy
formatting.  I have not tried StarOffice yet, but OpenOffice (6.0) does not 
handle big documents well.  Even Microsoft Office has problems
in this regard.

"Automation" capability is a must-have item for business office suite. 
Microsoft Office has VBA, WordPerfect has its own build-in programming
language (PerfectScript) and VBA.  I don't know how much effoft Sun is putting 
into StarOffice, but lack of a very powerful macro language is,
for the present, the Achilles heel of StarOffice.

Then there are a bunch of other more or less miscellaneous things, such as 
directly copying headers/footers
from one document to another, counting words in footers, merging directly from 
a database or spreadsheet file, etc.  But reliability, or more specifically,
lack thereof, is a major concern.

In the past, everytime I mentioned StarOffice I always unnecessarily incurred a bunch of vulgar wraths.  Believe, because StarOffice is unicode-compatible, 
something Corel has taken the wrong direction with respect to WordPerfect, I will be more than happy (thrilled) to be able to use StarOffice for my office.

Re: [luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[Gary Sublett]

On Sun, 28 Jul 2002 08:21:55 -1000
"W. Wayne Liauh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I have been frequently challenged as to why I am so stubborn about 
> WordPerfect and "ignoring" StarOffice/OpenOffice.  It is very
> difficult for me to explain the reason w/o further inviting the
> wraths.  But there was an article in Wall Street Journal which may
> somewhat explain why:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Wall Street Journal
> MOSSBERG'S MAILBOX
> By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
> July 25, 2002
> 
[snip]
> 
> In the case of StarOffice, which is essentially identical to the free
> OpenOffice, you are given a family license that covers five PCs. But
> I reviewed the new 6.0 version of StarOffice (equivalent to the 1.0
> version of OpenOffice) recently and found it too complicated, quirky
> and buggy to be a reliable replacement for Microsoft Office for
> mainstream, nontechnical users (read the review).
> 
[snip]

Wayne,

I am somewhat familiar with your ongoing quest regarding WordPerfect and
your opinion of potential substitutes.  I find the included WSJ article
interesting but it does little to explain, in detail, specific
issues/problems with StarOffice/OpenOffice encountered by you or Mr.
Mossberg.  Do have a free cite to the acutal review by Mr. Mossberg?

I am interested in where the alternatives to WordPerfect fail, in your
or his opinion.  Is it  due to not performing as specified, don't have
the required features, don't work like WordPerfect, the user not being
familiar with the applications, or some other ___ (fill in the
blank)?  "Too complicated, quirky and buggy" does not provide much
insight. 

-- 
 
Gary

  9:24am  up 121 days,  7:51,  6 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

Re: [luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[MonMotha]

W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
I have been frequently challenged as to why I am so stubborn about 
WordPerfect and "ignoring" StarOffice/OpenOffice.  It is very difficult 
for me to explain the reason w/o further inviting the wraths.  But there 
was an article in Wall Street Journal which may somewhat explain why:





Honestly, if there was a single app that I'd immediately buy for Linux, 
it would be MS Office97.  That was the last good office suite I used 
(and in fact I keep a Win98 PC around just to run it as win2k breaks it, 
probably intentionally).  I've considered crossover office just so that 
I can run Office97.  It was a good office suite.  Then Office2k came out 
and it was all downhill from there...



--MonMotha

[luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[W. Wayne Liauh]

I have been frequently challenged as to why I am so stubborn about 
WordPerfect and "ignoring" StarOffice/OpenOffice.  It is very difficult 
for me to explain the reason w/o further inviting the wraths.  But there 
was an article in Wall Street Journal which may somewhat explain why:





The Wall Street Journal
MOSSBERG'S MAILBOX
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
July 25, 2002

Q: In your column last week, you complained that Microsoft charges
families too much for Office XP and doesn't allow families to install
a single copy of Office on multiple PCs. You made good points, but
instead of begging Microsoft to do the right thing, why didn't you
tell people to switch to the free office suite, OpenOffice, or Sun's
very similar $75 suite, StarOffice, or to the WordPerfect suite?

A: That's a good question, which I received in various forms from
dozens of readers. Here's my answer.

In the case of the WordPerfect Office suite, it's also fairly
expensive and also is licensed on the same one-copy-per-PC model
Microsoft follows. (You can put it on a second PC, but can't use it
on both machines simultaneously.) Corel , WordPerfect's maker,
doesn't enforce this license via "activation," the way Microsoft
does, but you are still violating the license if you buy one copy and
use it to upgrade an entire family's computers, unless there are only
two and you constantly police their running of WordPerfect, which is
absurd.

In the case of StarOffice, which is essentially identical to the free
OpenOffice, you are given a family license that covers five PCs. But
I reviewed the new 6.0 version of StarOffice (equivalent to the 1.0
version of OpenOffice) recently and found it too complicated, quirky
and buggy to be a reliable replacement for Microsoft Office for
mainstream, nontechnical users (read the review).

Believe me, if WordPerfect drastically cut its price, and/or offered
a family license, or if the OpenOffice/StarOffice product were
simpler and more reliable, I'd be glad to recommend them as
alternatives.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at [EMAIL PROTECTED] 


===