Hrm. According to Slashdot, Sun''s no longer going to let everyone download StarOffice for free, starting with v. 6.0. Only Solaris users will be able to get it for free. Without knowing what their pricing will be, is anyone aware of any other office programs that have the built-in capability to read/write to MS Office files? rm -rf /bin/laden

OpenOffice, perhaps.

Isn''t that just the API stuff that StarOffice is based off of though? Or is it an actual office suite?

rm -rf /bin/laden

Well, suddenly the "shining gem of Open Source office applications" isn''t Open Source anymore. I never liked StarOffice anyway; it was bloated and ran slowly on my machine, and I heard reports it ran better under Windows.

Personally, I prefer KOffice.

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

The follow up comments at slashdot suggested that OpenOffice ran just as well if not better than StarOffice and that the difference between them involved mostly the frills - animated paper clips and such, useless junk.

StarOffice was never open source, as far as I know. Just free

Secondly, does KOffice have builtin support for MS Office apps? From the little I've used it, it is quite nice, but I just need the MSO support.

rm -rf /bin/laden

Edited by - CmndrM on February 25, 2002 9:13:10 PM

quote:

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Original post by CmndrM
Secondly, does KOffice have builtin support for MS Office apps? From the little I''ve used it, it is quite nice, but I just need the MSO support.

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AFAIK and IIRC, no. KOffice uses an XML-based format to store data for all its applications. Unless they''ve made recent advances, it doesn''t have much support for anything else (except text and RTF, and maybe PostScript/PDF via GhostScript/GhostView).

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

Yeah KOffice is pretty cool, lets me print to an Postscript file, so I''m quite happy with it.

Yeah, I''m pretty much liking KOffice, but I''ve got one question left then: Does anyone know of any converting programs that''ll convert MS Office files to some other format, such as KOffice format for example?

rm -rf /bin/laden

StarOffice was never open source thats true. But Sun started, after buying Star Division, an open source project called OpenOffice. The project is based on the star office 5.2 sources. As far as I heard verision 6 is really great, all star office formats are now zipped XML files. So you can easily create ''open'' documents with your software...
Furthermore the new starOffice is said to be faster and smaller, and they use the system built in windows sets for loading and saving files...
So we will have to get OpenOffice instead...