Star Office Comments...

[Mark Dempsey <dempseys3 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

This recent correspondent complained about Star Office WYSI *not* WYG. A
Star Office fan (not me) answers...

  The reason for the documents not being WYSWYG is because several of
the fonts
in MS Office were, you guessed it proprietary and Microsoft will not
allow
anyone else to use them.  This is just one more example of how Microsoft
was
able to defeat Wordperfect, Quattro, Harvard Graphics, etc., all
powerful
applications which once Windows hit, were not given full compatibility
by MS.

  However, in StarOffice 5.2 (free also from sun.com), the developers
came up
with some tricks around the proprietary fonts.  The main focus on 5.2
was full
compatibility with MS Office.

  Two comments for this user, if they don't want to use it, don't.  It's
free.
But what's your choice given they use Unix desktops.  One solution would
be for
the entire company to convert to StarOffice.    I'm telling you, I'm not
an
expert desktop user, but I have had only a few problems with it, which
once
I searched for the answer was able to get what I wanted.  Nothing
different
that MS Office was for first time users.  It's painful for people to
learn
something new.  The pain for MS is that this is free......I'd be just as
happy
if MS made Office free, but will they?

  Keep sending the comments, and have them take the free web based
training
available and send the comments in for a StarOffice trouble ticket.

Paul

Mark Dempsey wrote:

> From: Anne Chenette <achenette -at- eintelligence-inc -dot- com>
>
> Developers at my company use Star Office 5.1 - not by choice, but
> because they're on UNIX/Solaris systems and are required to read (and
> write) Word documents.  They dislike Star Office very much.
>
> One reason is that they aren't PC users, so the Word-like interface is
> very foreign to them.  Star Office admirably recreates the True Office
> Experience, with all its glitches and usability problems (and adds a few
> of its own).  But mostly, it's because they must collaborate on
> documents with Microsoft Office users.
>
> Compatibility with Word?  It is to laugh.  OK, they can view a document,
> but it looks terrible - the fonts, indenting, spacing, bullets,
> numbering, and more are messed up.  (For example, a "normal" bullet in
> Star Office turns into a smiley face in Word...)  Anything they add
> looks equally bad when it's viewed in Word.  Worse, Star Office is a
> wysi*NOT*wyg system - the printed document doesn't resemble what you see
> on the screen.
--
-- Regards,
--
-- Mark Dempsey
--


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