[luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[W. Wayne Liauh]

<Wayne, I am interested in where the alternatives to WordPerfect fail, in your
or his opinion. Gary >

Very interesting question.  OpenOffice 6.0 reminds me of MS Office 95; it shows something that looks good enough to be an office suite but
still lacks many of the features that will allow WordPerfect users to make the switch.

For starters, it is not infrequent for lawyers to generate documents that take hundreds of pages (and we call it a "brief") with heavy
formatting.  I have not tried StarOffice yet, but OpenOffice (6.0) does not handle big documents well.  Even Microsoft Office has problems
in this regard.

"Automation" capability is a must-have item for business office suite. Microsoft Office has VBA, WordPerfect has its own build-in programming
language (PerfectScript) and VBA.  I don't know how much effoft Sun is putting into StarOffice, but lack of a very powerful macro language is,
for the present, the Achilles heel of StarOffice.

Then there are a bunch of other more or less miscellaneous things, such as directly copying headers/footers
from one document to another, counting words in footers, merging directly from a database or spreadsheet file, etc.  But reliability, or more specifically,
lack thereof, is a major concern.

In the past, everytime I mentioned StarOffice I always unnecessarily incurred a bunch of vulgar wraths.  Believe, because StarOffice is unicode-compatible, 
something Corel has taken the wrong direction with respect to WordPerfect, I will be more than happy (thrilled) to be able to use StarOffice for my office.