[Leaplist] Sun releases StarOffice 9, drops price to under $35 ($25 and below in volume) ...

[Jason Boxman]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:
<snip>
> I'll gladly pay for community and developments I believe in.
> It's up to you if you agree or not and use what you wish.
> Although don't call for "boycotts" of the product if you
> don't want to look like a fool (especially if you use
> OpenOffice.org).  ;)

I keep trying OpenOffice (dot org, weee) and being almost thoroughly 
disappointed.  The latest version is certainly an improvement, though.

It's still incredibly slow compared to, say, WordPerfect.  (And since 
OOo is a huge monolithic binary, that's not necessarily a fair 
comparison, though that in itself is a strike against OOo.)

There are also some awful quirks.  For example, mail merges need to be 
done against even number of pages, or you end up with blank pages in 
your output.  In recent versions, you can suppress the extra page, but 
it's broken by design that such a option is even necessary.  Doing a 
merge of around 500 entries is also extremely slow and it crashed at 
least once.

A similar merge done with WordPerfect, using a Quattro Pro spreadsheet 
as a data source, worked flawlessly.

Obviously, there's some product familiarity in play, since OOo takes 
after Office heavily and thus it feels very little like Corel Office. 
Speed and stability are valid issues nonetheless.

Lest I meet with charges of productivity suite 'pissing', I do believe 
"basic functionality x" ought to work in an office productivity suite, 
where in this case it's a simple mail merge.

Obviously, OOo is completely free and it's Free, so I can take my ball 
and go home.  And for personal use, I certainly have done that.

ymmv


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