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Figure 63.4. StarCalc is the spreadsheet, offering Excel-like capabilities.
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StarCalc is the spreadsheet tool, shown in Figure 63.4. As with StarWriter, StarCalc takes a lot of its behavior from the Microsoft Office Excel tool. If you know Excel, you will feel familiar with StarCalc.
Figure 63.4. StarCalc is the spreadsheet, offering Excel-like capabilities.
One strong feature of StarCalc that many other spreadsheet packages lack (including those running under Windows 95) is the ability to use natural language for formulas. For example, if you want to create tables with names on both the first row and column, you can do it with a single command instead of several.
StarImpress can be used for a number of tasks, including producing presentation graphics. As Figure 63.5 shows, StarImpress is much like PowerPoint and behaves in the same way. StarImpress includes some fancy features such as the capability to produce 3-D effects. This capability to create fast 3-D effects rivals those of dedicated UNIX-based drawing packages such as CorelDraw! for UNIX, a much more expensive software tool.
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Figure 63.5. StarImpress is the StarOffice presentation graphics package.
Using StarImpress with other StarOffice applications such as StarWriter makes incorporating graphics into documents really easy. You can use an OLE-like method to import graphics from StarImpress into as many locations in a StarWriter or StarCalc document as you like.
A companion utility to StarImpress is StarImage, which allows for fast image conversion from one format to another, as well as manipulation of the image contents. StarImage works with .BMP, .JPEG, .GIF, .TIFF, and .XBM images. While many of these functions can be accomplished with other Linux tools such as XV, the integration of StarImage with StarOffice makes working across tools easy.
As you have seen, StarOffice looks a lot like the Microsoft Office suite of tools. This extends to file import and export capabilities. The native format that StarOffice uses to save documents, spreadsheets, and presentation graphics is not compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, although there is the option to save StarOffice documents in several other formats. One of those formats is always the Microsoft Windows-based format, which makes moving documents from StarOffice to Windows much easier.
In addition to Office tool formats, StarOffice lets you save documents in other formats, such as ASCII, RTF (Rich Text Format), and HTML. The last is useful for creating Web pages, of course.
You can import standard Microsoft format files from Windows, after moving them over to your Linux system. They can be stored under Linux in either the same Windows format or in the native StarOffice format. The capability to move files back and forth from Windows to Linux makes StarOffice a very useful tool.
You now know how to install and are familiar with the components of StarOffice 4.0, one of the most handy X-based Linux tools available. With StarOffice, you can make use of the superior power of Linux over Windows without losing compatibility with that “other” operating system. There are several other chapters that may be of interest to you after reading this one. To learn more about:
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