StarOffice
June 8th, 2004
Dan discusses how StarOffice is perceived in general. I assume "the word on the street" comes from the early years of StarOffice, when it wanted to take over your desktop, but required ten minutes to open a letter.
Nowadays, I use OpenOffice for all my personal use (that is, all "official" letters I have to write, and even some spreadsheets. And I can print envelopes with it!). I'm not pushing it to its limits, but it works for me. Never done a "document merge" or something of the kind, though.
So if you're in the market for a free office suite, give OpenOffice a fair chance at least.
April 21st, 2008 at 10:17 PM At Novell, we are now implementing an "Open Desktop Initiative". We have cut down (halved!) our MS licenses since december 2003, and will have the ENTIRE company running Linux desktops by the end of the year. Somewhat scary for people like myself, who try to shy away from command lines as much as I can ;-) ... Nevertheless, as part of this initiative, I have been using OO for the past 3 months - just to make life easier on myself as I migrate by the end of the year. My general experience has been good-to-very-good for the word processor and the spreadsheet, but bad-to-very-bad for the presentation machinery. And for a marketing/sales person like myself, that is just a nightmare. It takes me hours to compile a couple of nicely animated slides in OO, while I can do it in minutes in PPT. I find myself reverting to PPT all the time, simply because I don't have the time to spare to loose over a poor office productivity tool. But other than that: OO is more than most people need - it convinced me of the fact that I would never buy MS Office for personal use - that's for sure.