StarOffice 6.0

[poltr1]

Two weekends ago, I bought a copy of StarOffice 6.0. I had heard about it as an alternative to Microsoft Office. It was advertised as being Microsoft Office compatible, and the price was reasonable -- under $100.

Even though I already have Microsoft Office97, I had been trying to get another copy for a man in my statewide mens' group so that he could maintain a member roster for his community in Cleveland. We decided on Office97 as our group standard because it was easy to use, and almost everyone had it. Plus it was compatible with Offce98 for Macs, which another man in Indianapolis had and used. This was a critical requirement, along with ease of use.

I tried to find a copy of Office97 on EBay, but the copies that became available soon quickly disappeared. I finally placed a bid on a copy, only to be outbid several hours before the auction was supposed to end. A few hours after being outbid, I got a note from EBay saying that the the item was withdrawn from auction because it allegedly violated Microsoft's intellectual property rights. And I thought, "Great. Bill doesn't want anyone buying his old software. He wants everyone to buy the latest and greatest from him, and pay through the nose for the privilege. Feh." I'm cheap, and I'll be happy with an older version of the software. (I usually am.) Besides, this is for a non-profit organization.

And so I looked for StarOffice. Micro Center in Cincinnati had it, and so did the local CompUSA. When I was ready to buy it two weekends ago, CompUSA was out of stock. But a local Staples had it, and it went home with me.

Last Tuesday night, instead of watching the State of the Union address, I made the room for StarOffice on my applications drive/partition, and installed it. The installation went fairly smoothly. I also ended up installing the Java Virtual Machine, and replaced the Arial font files with newer versions. The only thing I regret was checking the box that changed the associations for the Office filetypes to run StarOffice instead of Office97. No biggie; I can change the associations back to what they were, but that's not a step I'd recommend for computer novices.

I also wanted to find out exactly how compatible StarOffice is with Microsoft Office. It can output files in Office97 format, which I understand is also the format for Office2000 and OfficeXP. But how robust is that compatibility?

Here's what I found when I read an Excel spreadsheet into StarOffice Calc, saved it as an Excel97 file, and compared it against the original.

• It removed spaces from sheet names
  
• It changed the formatting of dates with 4-digit years (MM/DD/YYYY) to 2-digit years (MM/DD/YY)
  
• It changed the formatting of dates in "Mon-YY" format to "MM/YY" format
  
• It changed the size of smaller fonts to make them appear larger
  

I plan to do more testing with StarOffice Calc, and the other components of StarOffice, as time permits.

I also like StarOffice's licensing policy; it makes sense. I can have the software on up to 5 personally-owned computers. Since I also have a laptop and a secondary computer, I can put it on those computers as well without having to cough up more money...unlike Some companies who want their pound of flesh for EVERY copy of software you put on a second or third machine.

For more information on StarOffice, visit Sun's web site at www.sun.com.

Comments

[gleepy.livejournal.com]

Even StarOffice 5.x is supposed to be able to read and write Word 97 files. I really can't test to be sure. We all know that words can be moved to preceeding or following pages on a whim when a document is opened on someone else's machine. (That's why we use Acrobat's PDF to exactly enforce a document's appearance, and I use AFPL GhostScript as a distiller.)

There do appear to be some infelicities when StarCalc opens an Excel document, but I never really worried about it.