Considering Switching to Star Office.... 2

[NumberCrunchingMonky]

Sorry to raise a non-technical question here, but I can't think of any better place to get the technical "skinny" on this topic:

I'm tire of my MS Windows OS (the security issues and having to download patches on a weekly basis) and I'm looking to switch to a Linux product. Even though Suse now offers software to allow MS Office compatibility, I am also interested in checking out Star Office.

I mainly work in Excel and Access--how does Calc and Base "add up" (no corny pun intended)?

I see there are people here currently making the switch to Star Office. What was the factor to made you switch, and how does it stack up to MS Office.

Thanks.

Monky

 

[dchristensen]

We are switching our office because of the cost to fix license issues with MS Office on our desktops. We are still going to run MS Windows 2000 & XP on our desktops, but will have Star Office as the primary productivity suite.

We've had mixed results from our users. People that we started early on version 5.2 really love the product, but folks we've converted to StarOffice 7 are resisting.

 

[Jonah86]

We use Star Office (5.2, ugh), and also some user have explicit needs for Office, so we have a few copies floating around. I do mostly programming work, some spreadsheets when my workload is light, but I've noticed that a lot of our users do a lot of complaining about SO. I don't have a problem with it, but then I'm more techincally oriented than our base user. I don't think SO is bad at all, but I can bet if you have users that are use to Office you're going to get some negative feeback. Every time something doesn't work EXACTLY like it does in Office, I hear about it...a lot. Just be sure that you yourself are familliar with the product before you try to roll it out to all of your users, because you'll have some explaining to do for sure.

Of course I'm using 5.2, and I certainly don't think poorly of SO...just beware the user

 

[TimRegester]

I have installed Staroffice 7 throughout a school, it is certainly cheaper than MS Office and so far has yielded no bugs at all.

There were issues with users not liking SO and prefferring Office but this is merely due to what they are used to. As for the original thread question, SO will replace Excel but not Access, Adabas is merely a database engine not a tool like Access. You could use Adabas via ODBC as the database behind an Access front end, but SO provides no semi-user friendly RAD tool for creating a GUI front end.

Interesting that many companies refuse to deploy Access as part of MS Office to stop the proliferation of single use databases which end up duplicating each other and produce a support headache.

Why not deploy SO and MS Access on it's own to those that need it.

 

[dchristensen]

Another replacement for Access would be to deploy the Rekall product for those people needing Access functionality.