Misc. Ramblings

I talked earlier (see Monday) about a few small problems StarOffice 7 a had in importing an MS Word document. Today I'll take a look at how StarOffice does with a Corel WordPerfect 9 sample.

But first, let me say I like alternatives. Having a choice in office suites is, I think, a Good Thing. But if your office uses WordPerfect and you want to switch to Sun's StarOffice 7, you are in for a world of hurt.

As a test document, I used a fairly typical, for us, report. It is a little over 10-pages long (including two charts at the end), uses bulleted lists, and indented paragraphs to indicated extended quoted material. What you have could vary so you have to take what follows in the context of how you usually format your documents.

All of the problems I found are related to formatting. Rather than go through a long narrative, I'll just create a list:

• Failed to display and print out the watermark.

• Changed the font from Univers to Thorndale (a Times Roman clone).

• Ignored tab settings, substituting its own on a seemingly random basis.

• Failed to display all bullets.

• Substituted some, but not all, bullets with Roman Numerals.

• Inserted the following string in random places: 600160.0160.0160)0160)0160)0160)0160)060.0160.0160)

• Converted the footnote type size from eight points to something that looked like two points (even though it said it was 8 pts).

• Altered page breaks.

In addition, StarOffice opened the document in read only mode. This means I could look at the document, but could not edit it. I read the on-line help and found you have to click on the "Edit File" button to enable editing mode. This is very curious behavior for any program. One can only wonder why they have this mode and what advantage(s) they think it has. As for me, I consider it nonsensical.

In a marketplace dominated by Microsoft Office, alternatives are to be supported and praised. Unless, of course, the alternatives can't inter-operate with the documents you already have. In our case, many offices still use various versions of WordPerfect. But given the list of problems StarOffice 7 has in importing WordPerfect 9 documents, I can't recommend its use in such environments.

I wonder if Sun isn't missing a market segment that they could serve (WordPerfect users) rather than going after Microsoft? I think they could make a good return on investment going after the millions of users who still use WordPerfect (who everyone seems to have forgotten, or at least ignored) rather than being yet another clone of MS. As it is, Sun is also competing against OpenOffice which, at a price point of zero, is impossible to beat. YMMV.