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Project: Linux  Reviews
StarOffice 5.2: How good?
By Tito Dasgupta <tito@freeos.com>
Posted: ( 2001-01-02 09:33:55 EST by )
StarOffice is an alternative Office Suite with one very tantalizing
feature -- Zero cost! Beyond the price however, StarOffice is a
full-featured suite of programs that offer compatibility with various
file formats and good cross-platform capability. But, is the latest version
worth upgrading to or installing on your system?
Star Office 5.2 is an office suite similar to Microsoft Office for
Windows. It consists of Presentation software, Spreadsheets, Word
Processor, HTML editor, Database and can also be used as your e-mail
client! Lets look at the things you can do with StarOffice 5.2 beginning
with the installation procedure. You do need to install the software on
your PC to be able to use it!
Linux InstallationPlace the StarOffice 5.2 CDROM in the drive, then type mount /dev/cdrom. Change to /mnt/cdrom and press enter. cd /mnt/cdrom/linux/office52 Some distributions like SuSE will mount the CD under /cdrom instead. Then type ./setup and press enter. By doing this, the setup program
begins. If you have more than one user on the machine, we recommend you
use the workstation installation. To run this installation method, use
"./setup /net". Thereafter, all that each individual user needs to do is,
run the setup program from the program directory of their StarOffice
directory -- without the "/net" bit. Around 2MB of data will be copied
over to your home directory. This allows each user to maintain a unique
set of configuration files. Follow the instructions step by step and you won't have any problems. The
installation is a good change from the standard rpm based installations that
you so often encounter. Full marks to the StarOffice installation. Now that you have installed Star Office 5.2 on your PC, let us start with
the programs included. The first thing you will notice about Star Office
5.2 is that it integrates your desktop into its own window, giving your
desktop a different look and feel. It even has the same short-cut keys
like Microsoft Office 97. Having a standard desktop across various
platforms and OS' means that users can easily move from StarOffice on
Linux to StarOffice on Windows and work with the same familiar desktop. On
the other hand most people prefer distinct applications. Right now, if you
want to create a new text document, you have to start StarOffice and then
choose to edit a new Text document. This could have been a single step. The desktop browser in StarOffice 5.2 even comes with a start menu. When
one clicks on the start button, the start menu appears, which is divided
into two parts. The bottom half has the same options like the GUI start
menu of your Operating System. (Example: Program Files, Documents, and
Settings). Under Linux, it points to the KDE menu. The top half of the star menu has the following StarOffice functions: 1.Text Document
2.Spreadsheet
3.Mail
4.Presentation
5.Drawing
6.More -- Is further divided into:
1. HTML page
2. Frameset
3. Master Document
4. Database
5. Chart
6. Image
7. Formula
8. Labels
9. Business Cards To create a presentation, click on 'FILE' on the menu and select 'NEW'. Go
to 'PRESENTATION' or just click on start and then click on presentation.
Now select the type of template or create your own template and go on with
it. You can set the slides to change automatically (useful for corporate
presentations and training) and also set the duration for the display of
each slide. There are also different types of slide templates available
for the type of presentation you would like to create. Star0ffice 5.2
saves a presentation file with the extension of '.sdd'. For most
presentations, we found StarOffice to be very competent. To create a spreadsheet, do as above and go to 'SPREADSHEET'. The
spreadsheet feels very similar to Microsoft Excel -- same look and feel,
same features and functions. The extension saved is '.sdc'. One can also
create Graphs, Pie Charts and Statistics on spreadsheets. Documents are just like your Microsoft Word, it gets the extension of
'.sdw' and '.sgl' when you save a file. Page setup is the standard A4 that
can be modified as per requirements. The Font selection drop down bar
allows the user to preview the font style right there, instead of going to
Format > Character as in Microsoft Word 97. StarWrite does a very good job
for most editing jobs. People are not always looking for the range of
options that Microsoft Word provides. This review has been done on
StarWriter and we didn't face any problems. The lack of a good grammar
check takes a few points away but for the most part, this is a great
replacement for Microsoft Word. StarOffice 5.2 comes with an HTML editor that is quite similar to
Microsoft FrontPage 98. Like Front page, the HTML editor puts in a lot of
unnecessary tags, which clog up the HTML code. Creating Framesets is also
a possibility in Star Office 5.2. This application generates code and
creates a frame according to the user's specifications. The HTML editor
may be fine for basic home pages but most people will want to use a proper
HTML editor or any text editor like vi! Star Office 5.2 comes in with an Image creator, viewer/editor, quite
similar to Microsoft Photo Editor, but much superior to MS Photo Editor
since it comes with filters for images, which even MS-Office Photo Editor
does not support. Files with the extensions of JPG, GIF and PNG can be
edited in this application. This is a fairly good photo editor. There are
only a few filters available for use and the basic functions like resize,
flip, gamma correction, brightness/contrast etc. This is no PhotoShop but
it does support quite a few file formats and allows you to save among the
various formats. To create a Label in StarOffice 5.2, click on the start button, then on
Labels. After you have done this, a window appears where you can choose
your options for the label, add the text to it, and then start printing
them. The same procedure goes for creating Business cards too. The result
for both is quite good and one can take a print of the business cards
directly on an A4 card sheet on a good, high quality printer. We have an
Epson Stylus 670 here. The results on this printer were quite acceptable
with accurate color reproduction.
VerdictThe specs of the test machine for StarOffice 5.2 were, Intel Celeron 500
MHz, 64 Mb SDRAM with a 20 GB Seagate Ultra ATA hard drive, Matrox
Millennium G200 AGP 8 MB, running Mandrake 7.1. The performance on this
machine was quite bad. StarOffice takes a huge amount of time to load and
simply guzzles RAM once it starts up. More memory would help but why
should we need 128MB for Word Processing. This seems to be largely a
problem with StarOffice for Linux. StarOffice takes about 12 sec's to load
in the Windows Environment, while under Linux, it takes more than 25
seconds to load. It also seems to perform better and feels less of a hog
on Windows. StarOffice definitely is a very good office suit, but work needs to be
done to make it less of a resource hog. Good points with StarOffice 5.2
would be good support for Office 2000 file formats. Bad points would be
the unified desktop that we really could do without. Eventually it will
all depend on the user. This is definitely worth a try. You certainly
can't argue with the price -- Free!
Other articles by Tito Dasgupta
Current Rating: [ 7.42 / 10 ]
Number of Times Rated: [ 31 ]
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