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I made an interesting discovery the other day in Star Office. I discovered it can automatically re-arrange the pages of a document for you when printing for binding booklet style. It can even handle the demands of duplex printing on a non-duplex printer. I was very impressed.
I had decided more well over a year ago that I would find a way to stop using Microsoft Office. This occurred when word processors under Linux were just starting to get wider coverage. I still have the ApplixWare CD-ROM and the WordPerfect CD-ROM. Then came along Star Office. Whilst I tried to use ApplixWare, it was too strange for someone used to Microsoft Word. And WordPerfect I could never get into. The prime disadvantage - to me - was the fact that for both of them I had only Linux licenses. Star Office, however, was available for the price of downloading it. Windows executables were also available, and although I wanted to eventually be completely Microsoft-free, being Office-free was a good interim step. I've been using Star Office 5.2 on my laptop, now, practically since I got it.
But breaking the Office habit completely is still a difficult thing to do. Many many people still use only Office and when you exchange documents, they tend to expect it in a Word format, for example. Star Office happens to import and export Word okay, but not 100% wonderfully. It galls me that this has become a "standard" format. So far, no-one has objected to the slightly funky output from Star Office's conversion. And I have kept using Star Office.
So when the opportunity came to produce a program for a local community theatre company's latest production, my natural choice was Star Office. I was by now familiar with it enough to be confident with it's approach to laying out a document. Naturally, it does a number of things differently than Word. The concept of definable styles is familiar, but the practical execution is, of course, rather different. Numbering seems to be more intuitive than under Word but tables I haven't really played with. More importantly, the unique characteristics of Word's paragraph marks require some un-learning for Star Office. I'm still trying to decide whether this is a good thing or not.
But the printing is very clever. With Word, if you wanted to print several pages to a sheet, you usually had to rely on your printer driver to do it - which may explain why so many printer drivers seem to do it nowadays. For the simpler documents you could get away with columns and making the text smaller, but that was not always possible. Star Office has a clever multi-page preview mode which you can print from. This caught me out once or twice because it's not a Print Preview, like in Word, but a Page Preview, where you can print several pages to a sheet. And then there's the brochure (booklet) mode which came in so very useful the other day.
I am missing Word less and less. It's still hanging around - mostly because I couldn't be bothered deleting it. Unfortunately, I still require PowerPoint and Access, but Word and Excel are now pretty much superfluous. I can only envisage Star Office 6 to be better.
Wade Bowmer, aka Static
Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.
