Customer Review(s)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: About memory hogging accusations-not really
Comment: Mr./Ms. BM_NINADA said that StarOffice hoggs memory.
I am using OpenOffice 2.0.
I am looking at my consumption at this very momemnt having one machine running MS Word the other OpenOffice .
OpenOffice uses 60Meg, the MS Word uses 30Meg. In big scheme of things it is insignificant difference. I have 1G of memory so we talking about difference between one using 3 and the other 6 percent.
Customer Rating: Summary: One difference of note between OO and StarOffice
Comment: I suspect there are other minor differences not mentioned here or below, but I wanted to mention one difference for Japanese Speakers using OO or StarOffice.
The popular office package from Just Systems, in particular the word processing package "Ichitaro," remains a standard in Japan. In particular many official documents are drafted and circulated in this format. (The Courts and certain national and regional bureacratic offices come to mind.)
Unfortunately, there is no "free" import filter available in the current releases of OpenOffice. However, the StarOffice release includes a filter that was developed under contract and release by Sun. This provides an important incentive to purchase the StarOffice package for anyone doing commerical copywork or translation.
Development of a filter continues but as of January 2006, nothing is released (on the authors research).
As regards, the quality and usability of the product from this bilingual with significant professional experience in U.S. and Japanese business, my experience is dumping MS Office and using either StarOffice or Openoffice is unlikely to present significant problems.
I began using the product in the pre-release stage and has used it since alongside MS and other products. There have been occasional data corruption and other problems. However in the course of doing translation with different versions of Word documents and codesets, there have been more problems using MS products. I trust my professional work on the Sun products no less (or more) than the MS products.
Incidently, the Just System Ichitaro has never given me data corruption problems but I have never used it as heavily as the MS or Sun products.
Copyright 2006 James Miller
Customer Rating: Summary: A fan of open-source but still ...
Comment: I went through the reviews posted here and it's a like a mountain of praise to a sea of tears! Anyways, as a brief 'bout myself: I love to use open-source products, know quite a bit about software and applications, etc.
There's ONE CRITICAL aspect of Star Office/Open Office which has caused me to DUMP the software: Usage of available memory. I have verified in 3 machines running Pentium server-racks, notebook, Centrino and all having at least 256 Mb/512 Mb of RAM this product is definitely a memory hogger. Task manager continuously shows Star Office at top of the list in terms of Mem. consumption. ALL other applications - slow down.
Finally, let's admit 1 thing: You can NOT beat MS-Excel - period. I think that's the BEST EVER product of Microsoft other than MS-DOS. So, those having to work in Excel extensively - please stick to Microsoft.
Why I give 3? Any product hogging that much memory - is bad: period. It's NOT a server, don't tell me crap that there's Java and etc. - it's not doing OLTP : So? Esp. if this hogging affects ALL other applications I run: For ex.: Firefox/IE; Outlook;MS-Project, etc. ~ Then sorry!!
