Re: OpenOffice v StarOffice?

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

Quoting "Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher5 -at- cox -dot- net>:

> My question -- how compatible are StarOffice and OpenOffice?
> I'm assuming, from what I've heard, that OO has some 
> significant improvements over SO. Can I use OO for these tasks
> and deliver to the folks up north without causing problems?
> 

Sun bought StarOffice from a German company. Several years ago, it released the 
code and the OpenOffice.org Project started. Since then, StarOffice has been a 
snapshot of the OpenOffice.org.

This relation means that OpenOffice.org has references to Staroffice scattered 
about. For example, "soffice" is the command to start OOo, and "spadmin" is the 
standalone tool for administering printers.

It also means that the latest version of OpenOffice.org is often in advance of 
StarOffice. I'm an OOo user myself, so I don't keep close track of SO unless 
I'm reviewing it, but I'm fairly sure that updates are released for it. 
However, as a boxed product, SO can't possibly keep up to date with OOo, which 
is primarily available on-line. So, it's not so much that OOo has significant 
improvements over SO, as it is that OOo is a more recent version of SO.

For the record, the current OOo version is 1.1, while the current SO version is 
7.0. These are based on roughly the same code base, but SO 7 was released 
before OOo 1.1, so it is probably based on a release candidate of 1.1, not the 
official release. Moreover, OOo 1.1.1 is probably coming out some time in the 
next month.

However, all these versions, from OOo 1.0 / SO 6 to OOo 1.1.x / SO 7 use the 
same file formats, so you shouldn't have any problems using any one of these to 
open files in any other.

All of which is probably more than you want to know.


-- 
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604-421.7177