Colm Smyth's Weblog

Horse-based attack on Star Office!

It's not clear which end of the horse is coming to help in the Register's humourously titled article which highlights concerns raised by Microsoft partners at their conference in Europe about public sector losses to StarOffice.

Fortunately it's easy for those folks to compare for themselves by just looking at http://www.openoffice.org. I would think that the skills developed by a MS Office solutions provider could be readily extended to StarOffice or any other OpenOffice.org-based product, especially on Windows ;)

(2004-10-06 09:35:58.0) Permalink

The Secret's Out - OpenOffice.org rocks even long-standing FrameMaker users

OpenOffice.org users are well used to creating large high-quality documents and books, but the secret is starting to get out to more folks who live or die by the quality of their document creation.

Bruce Byfield over on NewsForge hits the nail on the head with his article Replacing FrameMaker with OOo Writer.

Key quotes:

I could find no features that FrameMaker had that Writer entirely lacked. By contrast, Writer has several that FrameMaker does not, including Autotext and AutoCorrect/Autoformat, and a chart mode.
At the end of the comparison, I had to conclude that the two products compare quite closely, depending on what features are more important to a given user. FrameMaker's superiority for sideheads, for instance, may sway some users, or Writer's in indexes and tables of contents. Nor are the advantages listed here equally decisive; Writer's victory in styles, for example, is narrower than FrameMaker's in cross-references and sideheads.
So long as [users] take the time to learn Writer, they can be in little doubt that they are using software that competes with FrameMaker on its own terms

Man, you just gotta love open-source! (2004-10-06 08:01:43.0) Permalink Comments [1]