Anybody Use Sun Star Office products?

[SHADOWFOX]

We're looking at looking at Sun's Star Office products because we are thinking of looking at them because of the astronomical cost to upgrade MS Office. We figured it would be worth looking at.

Anybody currently use Sun's Star Office products at work instead of the MS office? How was the switch? Was it painless or painful? Worth it or the problems outweigh the savings?

Greatly appreciate any feedback or info.

[MilDoc]

I've used Star Office for years, ever since MS kept adding totally unneeded features to Word etc and raising the price. For what I need it is GREAT! It does a pretty good job of importing MS files but not all formatting will come through. Really depends on what you may need to import. For my purposes it never misses.

Buy MS Office only if you need the fancy features it now has included. For basic functionality Star Office would suit 90% of users.

[tedkitch]

As stated here before, you can download OpenOffice.Org here and it is derived from Star Office and best of all it is free. There are many things that you can do with openoffice.org that you can't do with Star Office and vice versa, but before you spend any money on Star Office, I would give openoffice.org a try. It is free, so you have nothing to lose.

HTH,

[tbarn]

I use open office at home and I love it. Especially when I am typing a paper and it auto completes big words for me.

I am an IS tech and I use MS office 2000, 2003, 2007 at work. OO is very compatiable 2000 and 2003 as long as you save it as a .doc

[thrytis]

I've found the database application comes up a little short. It has been buggy for me even using just basic features.

[vanguard]

The database program does leave a lot to be desired. It's probably the most immature piece of Open Office, but if you working on spreadsheets, word processing or presentations. OO is hard to beat, especially for free.

[Tom Slick]

My previous employer used zero MS products. for the light duty stuff I used OO and SO for it was no different then MS Office.

[jziegler]

I use openoffice.org at home (and now Staroffice on one computer, Google has it for free as part of the google pack). It does everything that I need at home. I've exchanged files fir Office before, works pretty well (word processing and spreadsheets at least). I can't think of anything that would get me to buy MS office at home at this point. Give one of them a try and see how you like it. I've even found some tasks (mail merge, for example) to be easier in openoffice.

Jim

[gslyons]

I use OpenOffice exclusively at home (no MS Office for Linux!). My employer just upgraded to the latest MS Office and it's driving me nuts. They changed the whole **** thing and introduced a completely unnecessary learning curve.

There are some weak spots with OO, but for the most part it's great. I even round-trip files back between work (MS) and home (OO) on a regular basis without much difficulty.

~g

[LinuxRandal]

I first obtained Star Office when they decided to release it for free (5.1a if I remember correctly). When they decided to split the codebase I stayed with OpenOffice, due to not really needing the database function (one difference). Since signing the "patent protection" agreement with Microsoft, other "functionality" is only in Star Office to my knowledge (I think mainly fonts). If you need a database, I would consider one of the SQL based ones I think over the one in Star Office (more expansion and more capabilities).
I do agree since OpenOffice is free, get it. It will be great for the kids (at the very least) and the ability to make ones own pdf's. I never have seen it (prefer to preview a book before buying after a few duds), but there is one about going from Office to OpenOffice that may be useful.

[jackellis]

If you need a database, MYSQL will handle basic tasks. It doesn't have the fancy GUI that comes with MS Access nor does it have a built-in scripting language but it's more stable and reliable than Access (IMHO). I never had a problem with database corruption. I could write VB code to put data into it and use Excel to extract and manipulate data pretty easily. Oh yes, MYSQL was on a server that I accessed from my laptop.

I have not used it with OpenOffice or StarOffice but I imagine they could work together with a bit of research and effort.

[thrytis]

The short comings i've found with the open office database application was building some basic forms. The data storage and queries part of it may be fine, but i use mysql for the backend.

I haven't had problems with other parts of open office.