StarOffice 8 and 9

Is anybody using StarOffice 9? As far as I can see from their website you can't trial the suite, without buying it. I'm using StarOffice 8 (product update 12) with Vista without any real problems except a few things: it's a huge download, almost 900 MB, when I use StarOffice Impress (presentations) it has a very annoying behavior, every 5 minutes or so it hangs for a minute (more or less) presumably automatically saving whatever you are doing, and therefore you have to stop your activity as everything hangs.

I was just curious if SO 9 had some improvements in the above mentioned behavior. I'm willing to buy it, (it is cheap) but only if there is a real improvement. Any info, real appreciated.

 

You are correct, you cannt trial StarOffice 9. Are you familar with Open Office? If you are then you might be interested to know that SO9 is built off of the OO 3.x branch. SO8 is based off of the OO 2.x codeline. As far as I can tell there are not that many differences between the two suites; OO 3 and SO 9.

From the Sun FAQ:

I see no reason to use SO 9 over the free, and more advanced OO 3.

I urge you to consider Go-oo; another project based on the OO 3 codeline. It offers better filters and numerous improvement. And, it's free as well.

 

Thanks, I might try out OO 3. I was under the impression that the big difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice was the compatibility with Microsoft Office suites (for my job this is essential, as a matter of fact I have Office XP 2002 with my XP computer).

StarOffice 9 at 35 $ is a real bargain, but no trial period?

 

That used to be the case with SO 8 versus OO 3, but no longer. But if compatability is a concern, try go-oo because it offers better import filters.

 

StarOffice 9 is pretty good, I use it with none of the hangup bugs you mentioned. So far I haven't had an update yet so I cannot comment on the sizes for the updates.

 

It's good news then, are you using it with Vista or XP?

 

I just went ahead and bought S09. From what I can tell there are a few differences other than what I mentioned.

1. It appears to be a little faster than even the version of G-oo 3 I was using.
2. The icons look more professional.
3. The dictionaries that come with it are more thorough.
4. More templates, good good ones too.

There are other things that are different from OO 3. I was having a repeating problem with setting a master template to one or more slides; OO 3 would crash every time. SO 9 does not. Also I had issues with the rendering of drawing elements in OO 3. S0 9 does not appear to have these issues.

Sun issue fixed more promply. However, they are 95% the same. But you'll need to gage whether or not the differences are worth $35.

 

I've downloaded GoOo-3 (2.5 hours lasted the download for 167 MB, normally with my connection something like this, is over and done in 3 minutes). It does exactly the same thing as StarOffice 8 update 12. So far I can see that it is faster and I haven't experienced the ridiculous behaviour I mentioned in my previous posts.

I think I know why there was this hanging pause. When I opened options with StarOffice and checked the memory allocated to it, there was a ridiculous 20 MB by default. I changed it straight away to 200 MB, and the program became suddenly very fast in its operations. Nevertheless I want to get rid of it as 900 MB of a download is nowadays a sign of bad coding.

I will eventually get StarOffice 9 paying for it as a donation(and keeping my fingers crossed that it will play well with Vista). In the meantime GoOo-3 looks good for a free office suite.

 

Wow.
Per Sun (Windows): 370 MB (multi-language version: 650 MB) available hard disk space.
Curious. I DL'd SO9 beta months back @ <200Mb.

 

Yes, that is not right. The main exe is 172 meg. When SO updates itself it renames the files that were there, keeping them on your drive, and replaces them with the updated ones; meaning that you would essentially have multiple installations on your disk. That is what accounts for the ballooned directory. I am not sure is SO 9 behaves that way.

 

Yes, you are right, I had the proper StarOffice8 download, something around 360 MB (unpacked), and then the update 12 around 500 MB. I tried to uninstall the original 360 thinking it might just be obsolete (a bit like Java's updates), but the program stops working completely, therefore the two installations are complementary.

 

To clarify if I may.
n8chavez's comments are correct, but updates should not be construed as yielding "multiple (program) installations".
The result is multiple redundant updated files.
I went through my SO8 directory recently and deleted literally thousands of redundant files / hundreds of Mbs. as a result of numerous updates.

 

Just for the record: I'm back to StarOffice 8 update 12, as GoOo -3 worked well for a while, but with presentations (impress) sometimes it crashed without recovering the slide I was working on. At least SO 8 never let me down in terms of recovery.

Another very fastidious thing about GoOo -3 was that when you insert an image from file it wouldn't automatically redirect you to that same file if you wanted more images ( one has to change the path in options every time).

I'm still with the original question: If I buy SO 9 will it work with Vista? 35$ is not much, but to spend it for something that might behave like GoOo-3 it is a waste.

 

I believe it will. The below is from the StarOffice 9 Getting Started Guide.

 

Thanks, I missed that, and after all being the follow up to SO 8 there is no reason to be suspicious. I still think not to offer a trial period is a marketing mistake.

 

I must agree there.
SO9 beta may (?) still be available for DL to registered users:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/2008-0716/index.jsp
Link appears still to be active.

 

Bob D, thanks a lot! I've just downloaded it (I am a registered user). It's too late here to try the program, but I'll do it first thing in the morning.

 

Caveats:
I assume there is a timeout date beyond which it will cease to function (?). It is still working here.

 

I'm quite pleased with it, and so far I had none of the negative things that I reported about version 8. It is exactly the same program, definitely faster than 8, the beta will work for 90 days, up to five licenses. I don't think I'll keep it for more than a week as I really wanted to be certain the final version worked with Vista. Thanks everyone for the info supplied.