ConsultingTimes features an article regarding StarOffice 6, which is currently in beta, describing what’s new in the new version and also what’s missing. “The old StarOffice 5.2 provided integration with a vengeance, taking over your entire desktop in the process. StarOffice 6 follows the more conventional model with excellent cross-application integration. For example, it’s quite special that you can start a new spreadsheet or presentation while working on a text document. No other office suite offers such smooth, unobtrusively integration.” In related news, the company behind Hancom Office 2.0 released their final beta (107 MB) just a few days ago.
Introducing Star/Open Office 6
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“you can start a new spreadsheet or presentation while working on a text document. No other office suite offers such smooth, unobtrusively integration”
GOBE PRODUCTIVE makes Star Office look like swamp scum, and its seamless integration of tools is way ahead of the game. Nice try though.
Perfectly agreed, PapaSmurf. How can we get Gobe some attention?
107MB … i always wonder how they can do such big app. I might be dumb but why game full of music, 3d engine, hi-res texture etc… take rarely less space than this. Current productivity software offer only 5 time more option than old Mac or Amiga app but are 10 time bigger.
Gobe Productive is only 5-6 MB. Recommended.
Ability Office is about 12 MB I think (uses lots of MS ready-made, shared COM code though).
Hancom Office is 107 MB.
Star Office 6 I think it is about 170 MB.
WordPerfect Office, Lotus SmartSuite and Ms Office are 1 or more CDs long…
skill, time, board coders and flight sims.
“you can start a new spreadsheet or presentation while working on a text document. No other office suite offers such smooth, unobtrusively integration”
Ahem… Wouldn’t it be more integrated if you didn’t have to launch a separate application for that presentation or spreadsheet. What if you wanted all three as separate sheets in the same document – wouldn’t that be more integrated? Oh wait what if you wanted the spreadsheet and the text in your presentation…
Maybe when they defined the word “suite” they meant – collection of multiple applications trying to look and behave like one another, replicating code, to achieve maximum bloat….
To be fair I think there does exist a tremendous (huge even) amount of depth and bredth of features in Open Office/Star Office; but while I admit I’m VERY biased I don’t think StarOffice would have much of a chance fighting the “unobtrusively integrated” battle with gobeProductive.
-Tom
And all of those smaller office packages can’t open my legacy documents (I havne’t tried Hancom), though StarOffice can.
Now if they would only clean up their win32 bloated interface (not too many items, it’s just that the items look like they’re about to fall out of their edges – perhaps it’s the default font that just makes it look overwhelming)
Matthew, have you tried using Gobe Productive yet? It does a fairly good job of opening MS Office documents.
http://www.gobe.com
Of course, I don’t know what you really meant by “legacy documents”. I just assumed it was MS Office, so I apoligize in advance if you are an old Word Perfect or other office application user.
yeah and Appleworks 6.2.2(carbonized) is only 14 MB. People at GOBE and Apple know what they are doing
Too bad that this review doesn’t go into much detail, like most I’ve seen so far. I’d like to see a detailed feature comparison between MS Office, KOffice (yeah, I know it’s very early) and OpenOffice. BTW, OpenOffice is about 47 MB for Windows (75 MB for Linux). KOffice alone is about 9 MB, which is probably unfair.
Tom Hoke: “Ahem… Wouldn’t it be more integrated if you didn’t have to launch a separate application for that presentation or spreadsheet. What if you wanted all three as separate sheets in the same document – wouldn’t that be more integrated? Oh wait what if you wanted the spreadsheet and the text in your presentation…”
I like keeping the spreadsheet files separate from the text documents. My work involves write 50-70 page reports. That’s 50-70 pages of text and about 15 different tables. To top it off, a lot of the spreadsheets are tied together with different formulas and some spreadsheets are not meant for the final report, only for the workpapers file. Can you imagine dealing with such a gigantic mess of mixed text and spreadsheets? I can picture our support staff going postal dealing with that! Why should I have a bunch of text open when all I need to do at times is play with and tweak the spreadsheets? It’s a much cleaner and simpler approach to keep everything printed separate and then just quickly pop the final printed spreads into the final printed text.
This might be the one thing Microsoft did right…Even though MS Office is a bundle of several programs, it consists of separate, dedicated programs that just do one thing. It’s then up to the user to determine how integrated things are…kind of like the UNIX way of doing things.