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Need a Free StarOffice Killer

From Amil

Answered By Thomas Adam, Heather Stern

Hi,

I would like to know which is an alternative for staroffice5.2 . i need all word excel powerpoint in one package which acts as an substitute for star office . moreover the package should be freely available in net

Regards

Anil

[Thomas] Hi Anil,

I believe that the only package that would offer what you wanted would be the commercial product ApplixWare......

HTH,

Thomas Adam (The Linux Weekend Mechanic)

[Heather] Pretty tall order, looking for an MS clone and not Star Office. Try its source version, OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org). Thomas is right that Applix is the nearest competitor. You can try demos of that in several distros.

You mention MS' products by name so if you hope for file exchangeability, Siag Office won't be a usable substitute. If you don't care about that, don't limit yourself to a bundled office.

There are plenty of shots at word processors (some of them even pretty good, regardless of my editorial rants), more spreadsheets than I dare count, and a presentation package or two, available "unbundled" (the Gnome and K environments don't require you to get all of their apps) but again, their talents at handling MS' proprietary formats are severely limited.

Abiword is free and able to give Word files a half-decent shot at loading up. If you stick with RTF exports, a lot more things would work, but I know MS doesn't export everything useful when they do that. It doesn't export virii that way either

Xess looks to me to be the best Excel clone for Linux, but is also a commercial app. It will definitely read Excel files.

For Powerpoint, well... Magicpoint won't read it. Magicpoint is a decent presentation program, but designed to be much simpler, and let you embed cool effects by "swallowing" running app windows. It's very much designed for X rather than anything else. On the plus side, its files are tiny, since they're plaintext (albeit with a layout). I don't know any free source software offhand that I know loads Powerpoint slides.

If none of those are good enough, expect to pay commercial prices for commercial quality work. "Demo" does not mean "excuse to rip off the vendor" it means "chance to try the product before buying it if you like it". The "freedom" in open source work is about being able to use and improve tools long after their original vendors/authors have ditched them, not about putting the capitalist economic system on its ear.

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Published in issue 67 of Linux Gazette June 2001

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