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Sun Microsystems Software IT

StarOffice 8 in July 34

McSpew writes "Sun Microsystems plans to release StarOffice 8 in July. Can this mean that OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be ready in the same timeframe?"
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StarOffice 8 in July

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2005 @11:55PM (#12416380)
    For those not in the know, OO.org/StarOffice are instrumental in unseating Microsoft's monopoly regarding Office. Microsoft Office literally costs hundreds of dollars, and for what? A so-so word processor, an often misused presentation program, an awful calendar program, a weak database, and probably the real star of Office is Excel.

    Given the expense of MS Office, OO.org and StarOffice offer a _real_ alternative for an insignificant faction of the cost. StarOffice is now integrated at no cost into Solaris 10. OO.org is the de facto office suite on Novell and Red Hat. Millions of people use OO.org. One by one whole companies are switching over.

    Everyone should at least try the next major versions of OO.org/StarOffice. I've found that they really are an adequate replacement for Office. I even use StarOffice to make simple web pages, resumes, mailing labels, etc. Odds are, if you haven't tried it, that you could start using it as a drop in replacement for Office right away.

    The sore losers in all this, of course, are the people who used Microsoft's proprietary automation system, Visual Basic. You should probably stick with Office, then, because that's what lock-in is all about.

    • Maybe I'm not up-to-date (to be honest, I don't really care about OOo), but I think they could go far having a decent (read: installable by idiots) MacOSX port.
      • they could go far having a decent (read: installable by idiots) MacOSX port.

        I installed OOo on my wife's iBook, and the process seemed no different to installing any other piece of software. The only things I don't like about it are that the menubars are a bit dark for my taste (anybody here know how to change that?) and the fact that the launcher insists on firing up an unnecessary xterm window.

        It would help, however, if the OS X port was kept a bit more current.

        • on osx, openoffice runs on x11 (xdarwin, or whatever magic you have going on). x11 fires up an xterm window by default when it starts.

          check out /Applications/OpenOffice.orgxxx/Documentation/Usin g X11/dot.xinitrc

          i'm not sure if that's what you want, but it looks promising

          and i don't know what to do about the too dark
          • check out /Applications/OpenOffice.orgxxx/Documentation/Usin g X11/dot.xinitrc

            Thanks for that, I'll give it a go next time I get an opportunity. Taking up my wife's time while I make geekish customisations on her machine is bad for marital karma points. :-)

  • Posted by timothy on 2005-05-02 20:13
    from the dept.

    Interesting... this post is from The Department. Or is that the '' (null) department? The HTML source does have two spaces between "the" and "department", so perhaps that's the case...

  • Adabase and Base? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by frankjr ( 591955 )
    Will Base replace Adabase in this release?
    • Will Base replace Adabase in this release?
      I doubt it. But then again, I'm not referencing this comment to anywhere, so don't quote me on that one :P
    • I don't need no stinkin' Base :D But seriously, it can help in the design, mostly for newbies, but what else would you need Base for when you have mysql and postrges, just to name the two major ones ? And besides, if somebody new to databases, they'd better learn p/mysql, great benefits in the long term.

      Ok, after the rant, I'd also very welcome Base, not for myself, and not for many others, but it would represent a significant point in convincing the great joe6pack masses about the usability of OpenOffice.

Byte your tongue.

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