We have been having a little discussion about StarOffice 5.2 vs
Microsoft Word. I was interested in whether it's possible to ditch
Word in favour of SO. I just thought I'd pass it on, as people here
may be interested.
Executive summary seems to be: you could, but it would cost you, maybe
more than you'd save.
Unquoted bits are me (`l>').
On 5 Sep, Andrew Dorrell wrote:
a> In short, everyone would have to change over to staroffice
a> if it were to work which I would not suggest for a moment.
l> Why not, just out of interest?
a> 1. It may work within the office... but then try sending a document to
a> someone outside...
I assume you'd ask them what they wanted, and then send text or rtf or
word, or an SO file (in that likely order).
> 2. Word/Excel are better products. They run more efficiently for
> example.
Though I've used it happily to edit Word documents that crash Word, and
save them back as Word, and then successfully use Word.
a> I didn't mean to imply that word/excel didn't suck ;)
a> Star office is still relatively imature and their future
a> development path / support is not clear IMO. SO is designed as a
a> monolith - just what unix doesn't like or want.
I think this is the killer issue. It uses too much memory.
And the same attitude carries over in the way it tries to become your
desktop, which I also dislike.
a> As the unix camp is not
a> in control of it I expect it will get some major architectural mods or
a> will go into decline (depending on source quality).
Agreed. Though since it is being GPL-ed this month or next month, the
Unix camp will be getting control.
a> 3. Everybody in the office has already some exposure and familiarity
a> with Word/Excel. Not such an issue for technical people like ourselves
a> - but it makes a big difference for many people.
It'd be interesting to see. My experience is that people who can use
Word can use SO. But you have to give a bit of a push because it is a
hog.
> NB I don't even use Star Office under linux here at work because I find
> it more effective (in terms of communicating with others) to either use
> plain text or use Word (via metaframe). I use start office at home -
> but that's different.
I prefer plain text, and at work I use FrameMaker, and at home I use
troff/mm. :-)
a> BTW - I use latex too and have submitted a number of documents to ISO
a> in pdf generated from latex. As things are shaping, pdf is a better
a> document delivery format than word (or postscript) as, in general,
a> the documents seem to be very portable and print predicatably - all
a> credit to Adobe for making this happen!
a> Also, playing with the image editor in Star office is pleasantly
a> surprising
luke
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
