Re: Star Office

["Peter G. Martin" <peter -at- access -dot- com -dot- au>]

At 08:34 PM 7/1/00 -0700, Bruce Byfield wrote:
> Mark Dempsey <dempseys3 -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
>
>>I'm wondering whether anyone's been using Sun's Star
>>Office (old or recent release), particularly as their
>>word processor. Areas of concern:
>>1. Reliability with longer docs.
>>2. Use in collaborative work
>>3. Compatibility with others using Word..
>
>
>As you may know, StarOffice imitates MS Word fairly closely. On
>the one hand, its header and footer system is less cumbersome,
>but, on the other hand, it also buries style definitions far down
>in the menus.
>
>I have heard (but not personally confirmed) that it is only
>slightly better than MS Word with longer documents. I don't
>believe that it has any features that make it useful for
>collaborative work, but, if you're using it under Linux, you
>could easily use it with CSV or another versioning system.
>
>As might be expected, StarOffice's compatibility with Word isn't
>perfect. However, I have to say that its translation filters are
>better than almost any I've seen. If you're doing fairlly
>uncomplex documents, you shouldn't have much trouble, but you
>should also remember that the perfect filter simply doesn't
>exist, anywhere.

To add one interesting (for me) perspective to this,   a number of
us have seen situations where StarOffice succeeds in reading legacy
documents written by an earlier version of Word where the "up-to-date"
Word crashed out and couldn't handle them.

Like the man says, "the perfect filter simply doesn't exist..."

Hardly a day passes when I am not grateful for formats like FrameMaker
MIF, where you can generally rely on the compatibility downwards, or at
least can do something about it if something goes wrong.

viva XML.


--peter -at- access -dot- com -dot- au   -- Peter G. Martin,  Tech writer
mobile: 04 08 249 113   Home: peterm -at- zeta -dot- org -dot- au
Home page: http://www.zeta.org.au/~peterm
"Regexes::Text   as Numbers::Mathematics."