I’ve been trying out a new freeware Office suite. Unlike Star Office, which I found awkward, this one has me most impressed.
The Word processor is excellent. There are full-featured equivalents of PowerPoint, Excel, and many, many other features.
You can download it at http://chaseandsam.com among many other places.
dale,
i’m sure you already know it, but openoffice is actually just the open source version of star office. when sun bought star office from its german developer, they released the source code to an outfit named: openoffice.org. openoffice is kind of a bleeding edge version of star office, and the latest versions are a big improvement over older versions of star office like 5.x. the new version of star office, 6.x, should be pretty much the same as openoffice, but you have to pay for it. the one big difference is that staroffice comes with a database module, and openoffice doesn’t. of course, you can probably just go with something like postgresql and pgadmin for database needs in open source.
incidentally, i just removed openoffice from my system. i have an older setup (amd k6, 233, only 4.3g hd, 128mb ram). on that kind of system openoffice starts very very slowly, although once started it’s excellent. on a more modern setup, like my son’s dell laptop, it flies. somewhere down the road, openoffice wants to break the separate modules out of the unitary arrangement they were stuck with from the old staroffice code. that should help on older systems. anyway, i installed another german wordprocessor called textmaker, put out by an outfit called softmaker. it’s very capable, multi-platform, and imports doc format easily and flawlessly. it’s a lot faster and smaller than openoffice on my box, and since i don’t use spread sheets, presentation software, etc. it’s all i need. but later this spring they’ll be coming out with a complete office suite. if it’s anything like the word processor, it should be very nice. the cost will be minimal, but right now there’s a free download of the word processor for linux.
y’know, the latest versions of abiword also look pretty capable, and kde 3.1, with koffice, just out, is supposed to be a major step forward. koffice, if you haven’t tried it, does need more import/export filters, but hopefully that’ll be coming soon enough.
Star Office 6.0/Open Office 1.0 is(are??) much better than Staroffice 5.1.or 5.2. The 5.X versions were memory pigs with a cumbersome UI. The newer versions are much nicer, plus you get that warm fuzzy feeling by sticking it to microsoft a little bit.
A laptop i bought in '97 had MS office on it, and I paid $199 to get it pre-loaded on the system when I bought it. The last 2 pc’s i’ve purchased have not had MS office on them, I used Star and then Open Office. I’ve saved somewhere between $400 and $600. That would pay for quite a few whistles.
Cheers,
jb
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REALLY? THAT’S INTERESTING. I ONCE HAD A BOSS WHO TOLD ME SOMETHING VERY SIMILAR. AT LEAST THAT’S WHERE I THOUGHT HER BRAIN WAS.
Perhaps that would make a good poll question. Where does all lower case typing hurt you the most? I also had a boss who objected when I typed in all caps–I seem to have a hard time pleasing people with my typing.