Q: StarOffice similarity to Microsoft equivalents...
Paul Bennett
I'm helping my sister's family with deciding on whether to purchase
StarOffice or Microsoft Office (or, maybe EasyOffice instead of StarOffice).
My sister would be using StarOffice (mainly StarWriter and StarCalc) at home
but will be using Microsoft Office (i.e. Word and Excel) at work.
I understand that the file formats are compatible; my question is regarding
the *user interfaces* of StarWriter versus Word, and StarCalc versus Excel,
etc. etc.... Are they similar (hopefully, they would be identical!)
Will my sister have to learn "the StarOffice method" and "the Word method"
for many of her word processing and spreadsheeting tasks? If the user
interfaces are quite different, then do you know if EasyOffice might be the
better product for her to use?
If using StarOffice is quite different from using Microsoft Office, then I
am unfortunately going to recommend to them that they choose Microsoft
Office (which is really the last thing I want to do!)
Many thanks for your suggestions on this!
Sincerely,
Paul Bennett
Mike Kingston
>etc. etc.... Are they similar (hopefully, they would be identical!)
Similar -Yes, identical - No.
Differences seem to arise when using the finer points, for example
graphs, in my experience.
StarWriter might do some things better (e.g. text merged using Word from
various sources can cause havoc with controls), but I've not tested that
type of thing in StarWriter..
Had you thought about using OpenOffice.org (free) to test things out?
It's virtually identical to Star Writer 5.2.
--
Michael J Kingston - Researching Family History
News of surname DIGWEED always welcomed
< To reply, please remove my initials from address >