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StarOffice or OpenOffice vs MS Office XP

 
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Hi everyone,
I'm going to use linux for a desktop system when I can work with a nice officesuite.
The problem is, that I'm currently working with MS Office XP. Actually, only Word and Outlook. Which both work very intuitive for me. I've found a alternative for Outlook, XIMIAN Evolution.
I've installed StarOffice 5.x once. I thought it was too heavy for my desktop system. I found out they loaded an entirely complete environment. After working with StarOffice Write I found that it didn't intuitive for me. But that can be because of my experience with Word 2002.
My question is: Is StarOffice 6 and/or OpenOffice more intuitive than StarOffice 5.x was, and is it less heavy for my system?
Als I'd like to know if there are any books written for people who want to change to StarOffice or OpenOffice from MS Office. Just to help them out with (the less intuitive) new office suite.
Regards,
Mark Monster
 
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IMO, it is much easier to move from MS Office to Open Office than it was to move to Star Office 5.x. The features are in the places where you expect them and it doesn't have the desktop system that Star Office had. I haven't used Star Office 6 yet, but my understanding is that it is almost the same as Open Office.
 
sharp shooter, and author
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Perhaps this weeks giveaway author will be able to shed some light on this for us.
Simon
 
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I've been using OpenOffice.org for some time now and it works great. However, even though most things are in the same place as MS Office there is a small learning curve. If I were in a demanding environment I would identify the more involved MS Office features I use and focus on finding how to access them in OpenOffice.org.
A minor thing but the biggest annoyance I found was having to modify a file to increase the size of the MRU (most recently used files) list.
Ray
 
Ray Little
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I've never used Ximian Evolution but I hear it's a good replacement for MS Outlook. Unfurnately, the biggest thing that keeps me from using Linux more regularly is that I'm a heavy ACT! user and I don't believe there's a replacement yet for it on Linux.
If someone else doesn't address this issue soon I may try my hand at it.
Ray
 
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I used Ximian with Red Hat 8.1 and its as good as Outlook but less vulnerable to attacks.
 
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Does Open Office contain an spreadsheet that reads files in Excel format? Is Open Office open source?
I ask because I'm using two different Java libraries to read Excel files sent to me by customers:
JExcelAPI
http://www.andykhan.com/jexcelapi/index.html
Apache POI
http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/index.html
But neither of these libraries can handle some of the Excel files I receive. I have no idea why.
OpenOffice has complete documentation of the Excel file format, but what I need are Java libraries, so that my program can convert any Excel spreadsheet to CSV.
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf
Ideas?
 
Greenhorn
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What are the differences between Star 5 and 6. For that matter OpenOffice. I use Open and besides formatting issues it crosses very well with Word 2002.
 
Greenhorn
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When I tried OpenOffice I wasted too much time making my documents look decent in word format.
 
Greenhorn
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What are the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice, if any?
Thanks,
E.
 
Ashik Uzzaman
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AFAIK, StarOffice (probably from 6.0 version) has now been renamed as OpenOffice. But I am
 
Ashik Uzzaman
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AFAIK, StarOffice (probably from 6.0 version :confused has now been renamed as OpenOffice.
 
arch rival
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I have found Star/Open Office to be incredibly good at reading and writing all the MS Office formats. On occasions it has done a better job than moving from Office 97 to Office 2K. I have come accross truly complex tables that it did not render correctly, but I guess that was one document in 1,000.
Star/Open office 6 is very different to StarOffice 5.2. Its native files are much smaller than the MS Office files. If you are creating long documents (like My 270 page CertKey tutorial) it is no contest, StarOffice is just much better.
Marcus
 
M.K.A. Monster
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Wow, what a discussion I created.
For the people thinking that StarOffice is changed to OpenOffice. I'm sure that's not true. The thing is as I thought: StarOffice 5.x has released it source. OpenOffice has changed it, to create an own version and that will be OpenOffice. SUN has resently changed the idea of a free Office Suite (5.x was free I thought), StarOffice now is a commercial Office Suite. That will be from version 6.
I still have an important question open:
I'd like to know if there are any books written for people who want to change to StarOffice or OpenOffice from MS Office. Just to help them out with (the less intuitive) new office suite.
After just walking through my most used word-files. I found out I was nesting tables, which isn't supported by Office 97 (maybe 2000 also). I'd like to know if nesting tables is supported by OpenOffice or StarOffice 6.
Has there been any official test where MS Office XP and OpenOffice or StarOffice 6 are compared? I'd like to see the main differences.
Regards,
Mark Monster
 
Matthew Phillips
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The OpenOffice Rosetta Stone should answer some of your questions on compatability. According to it, graphic and tables created within tables in OpenOffice did not appear in Word. I didn't read the whole article, but I didn't see any mention of what happens the other way around.
 
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Hi Mark,
First, forget everything about StarOffice 5.2. SO 6 and OpenOffice.org (download free from www.openoffice.org) are slicker and faster and the file sizes are so small you can barely tell there's anything there.
Secondly, no two applications are alike, so you can't expect to just switch over to OOo without a few Challenges. ;> However, I honest to god swear that you can use my OpenOffice.org Resource Kit (for OOo and includes the CD!) or my StarOffice 6.0 Companion and it will tell you exactly how to do a whole lot of things. And you can look everything up in the index too, we tried to make that a good starting point.
I wrote the 5.2 book, updated it for 6.0, and updated it for OOo, and by now I've put a lot of tips and tricks in it. Also I was out training in Illinois last week using it and, because I didn't write some of the original chapters, my coauthor did them, I had to look up stuff to fgure out how to do it. And it was there.
OOo is kind of like living in a house where the furnace is in the bathroom and the stove is in the third bedroom down the hall. It's confusin at first, but once you know where everything is, it's pretty dandy.
Also conversion to OOo is pretty decent though bullets will be a little wonky.
Solveig
 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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Hi, yes OOo and SO read Excel spreadsheets. OOo is totally open source.
You could open Excel spreadsheets in OOo and save them as CSV, if that gets you where you want.
You might also take a look at unzipping the resulting OOo spreadsheets and see if that helps you do anything.
Formatting, aka borders and column width, can wonk out a bit when you bring spreadsheets in, but considering it's a very very closed proprietary format you're opening, it's not bad.

Solveig

Originally posted by Robert White:
Does Open Office contain an spreadsheet that reads files in Excel format? Is Open Office open source?
I ask because I'm using two different Java libraries to read Excel files sent to me by customers:
JExcelAPI
http://www.andykhan.com/jexcelapi/index.html
Apache POI
http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/index.html
But neither of these libraries can handle some of the Excel files I receive. I have no idea why.
OpenOffice has complete documentation of the Excel file format, but what I need are Java libraries, so that my program can convert any Excel spreadsheet to CSV.
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf
Ideas?

 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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Between 5 and 6 the key differences are:
- 6, and OOo 1.O are faster
- 6 = OpenOffice.org 1.0, and OOo is absolutely free, thus there is no reason for any individual to buy SO 6.0
- Tiny tiny file sizes in 6 and OOo 1. XML format. They're great for zipping open and doing unnatural things to.
- Schedule and Mail are gone, but they sucked anyway
- Easier connection to data sources, including standards like Oracle and mySQL
That's pretty much it. Not really a bunch of new features.
Oh, and you can open WordPerfect in Ooo but you need an external filter.
http://libwpd.sf.net
Solveig

Originally posted by Rex Ash:
What are the differences between Star 5 and 6. For that matter OpenOffice. I use Open and besides formatting issues it crosses very well with Word 2002.

 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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Originally posted by jo tay:
When I tried OpenOffice I wasted too much time making my documents look decent in word format.



This will vary a lot from one document to another. Bullets are the problem child most often.
You'll have more problems if on either end you're just hitting the object bar or formatting windows, i.e. just taking normal text and applying italics or red or whatever. You're better off if your W or OOo/SO documents have predefined styles applied to create the formatting, like Header1 or signature or textbody or bulleted.
Solveig
 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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Originally posted by Erik Thauvin:
What are the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice, if any?
Thanks,
E.


$75, an unpopular database, templates, a little clip art, and a bunch of filters for Wordstar, WordPerfect, tc.
StarOffice is what enterprises buy because they don't believe anything free is good.
OpenOffice.org is the "farm team" for StarOffice, incorporating changes reasonably quickly, and every so often SO will take a particular build of OOo and release it as an SO release. That's the plan, anyway, last time I heard.
Short answer: Nobody on this list needs StarOffice.
Solveig
 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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SO 6 and OOo don't support nested tables, so there's that. You can create them by inserting a frame in one of the cells and putting a table inside that. But yeah, back and forth nested tables will eventually probably freak out.
.....
I just created a Word XP document with a regular table, opened it in OOo 1.0.1, and everything looks great. Exactly the same, in fact.
Solveig

Originally posted by Marcus Green:
I have found Star/Open Office to be incredibly good at reading and writing all the MS Office formats. On occasions it has done a better job than moving from Office 97 to Office 2K. I have come accross truly complex tables that it did not render correctly, but I guess that was one document in 1,000.

 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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Hi,
More on the experiment. I just created a table in Word, saved, opened in Writer, looked great.
Then created a table in Writer, saved *as a Word document,* opened in Word and it looked great.
Nesting tables isn't supported literally but you can achieve the effect by inserting a frame in a cell, then putting a table in the frame.
I don't know of any comparison tests. There's a lot of things where the features aren't the same but you can achieve similar goals in OOo and SO if you abstract out far enough.
Solveig

Originally posted by M.K.A. Monster:
Wow, what a discussion I created.
For the people thinking that StarOffice is changed to OpenOffice. I'm sure that's not true. The thing is as I thought: StarOffice 5.x has released it source. OpenOffice has changed it, to create an own version and that will be OpenOffice. SUN has resently changed the idea of a free Office Suite (5.x was free I thought), StarOffice now is a commercial Office Suite. That will be from version 6.
I still have an important question open:
I'd like to know if there are any books written for people who want to change to StarOffice or OpenOffice from MS Office. Just to help them out with (the less intuitive) new office suite.
After just walking through my most used word-files. I found out I was nesting tables, which isn't supported by Office 97 (maybe 2000 also). I'd like to know if nesting tables is supported by OpenOffice or StarOffice 6.
Has there been any official test where MS Office XP and OpenOffice or StarOffice 6 are compared? I'd like to see the main differences.
Regards,
Mark Monster

 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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Hmm. That Rosetta Stone must have been hacked by Microsoft because I just created a document with another table, then used the drawing tools, the bitmap background, and the insert graphics (embed, not link) and saved that document in OOo. Then saved as Word, and it opened in Word beautifully. Even kept the size of the inserted graphic, though I just shrank it after inserting.
The conversion keeps lookin' pretty good.
Solveig

Originally posted by Matthew Phillips:
The OpenOffice Rosetta Stone should answer some of your questions on compatability. According to it, graphic and tables created within tables in OpenOffice did not appear in Word. I didn't read the whole article, but I didn't see any mention of what happens the other way around.

 
M.K.A. Monster
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I think that saving and reading the new MS Office format will be done better, because MS Office will be using an open-format (for the change) XML. I hope that (not long after the new MS Office Release) a kind of plugin will be downloadable so that we can read and write for the new format.
 
Solveig Laura Haugland
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Yeah, well, Java was an open format too. ;> I think I've seen articles around about MS's version of Linux, and MS's version of XML, both of which I'm sure will only run on Windows (the latter at least) or some such nonsense.

Originally posted by M.K.A. Monster:
I think that saving and reading the new MS Office format will be done better, because MS Office will be using an open-format (for the change) XML. I hope that (not long after the new MS Office Release) a kind of plugin will be downloadable so that we can read and write for the new format.

 
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