OpenOffice.org instructor Solveig Haugland explains why the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 is set to make her job a whole lot easier. She says, “As an OpenOffice.org and StarOffice trainer, I teach a lot of one-day classes on the core software features. As I introduce the program and then word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation maker (Impress), I teach students how to deal with the oddities of each application before we get into the primary lessons. My first half hour of each section is gone.”
today i noticed how the latest openoffice2 build is a bit faster …i’d say quite acceptable if compared to its m$ counterpart
that was on a freshly installed ubuntu breezy system (colony3), but i guess some improvements have been made. or maybe i was just convinced that openoffice2 was way slower than it really is?
any news about the neverending story about java code inside OOo?
It doesn’t seem immensely slower. But then again, that’s mainly because I haven’t use Word in a long time, replacing it with OpenOffice.org (I’m broke). However, for me, I place greater emphasis in how responsive it is during use, not how long it takes to start up (especially when the difference is measured in seconds).
With Word (XP, not too sure about the latest), which I use at church, have numerous slow-downs while using it. Especially when changing things like paragraph style, font style, adding headers and footers, etc. Those are the seconds that matter – giving Word sometime before it respond may just wreck your train of thought.
Still prefer PowerPoint to Impress, though.
Fedora Java development group has already made sure that Openoffice.org 2.0 milestone release works very well with GCJ 4.x branch, both of which is shipped as part of Fedora core 4. I also heard that the openoffice.org have agreed in principle not to use the internal Sun Java proprietary API and stick with what is published and documented in a open fashion so as to ensure that it works well with the Free Java stack.
The code in OO.org is such a huge mess that even the Solaris version has to be compiled as a 32bit app. Not much better than the proprietary piece of shit Microseft Office XP.
It takes an AGE to start up though, even the 2.0 pre-releases… About 10x longer than MS Word. And no, that’s without MS Word preloading (try it in WINE!).
This is a BIG problem. It may not be if you’ve got a 3 GHz monster box, but there are HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of 1 GHZ-ish boxes in businesses around the world, for whom switching to OOo would just be a laborious productivity drop. It’s not just slow, it’s horrible.
There seems to be some issue with open source and slow starting. Firefox takes much, much longer to start than Opera or IE too — again, even under WINE.
We need to give people incentives to switch. When they spend 45 seconds gazing at the OOo splash screen as the disk crunches away, they’re not impressed.
I’ve seen this first hand. People think it’s sloppy and sluggish.
It’s not slow at all. I’ve had a small denist office, a client of mine, running about 5 copies of OO.o 2.0 beta on Windows XP, for about 5 months. They haven’t once complained about it being slow. They’re very happy with it, in fact, and I can’t wait for the actual release.
> switching to OOo would just be a laborious productivity drop.
This is bullshit. You start it once in the morning, so it takes a few seconds a day. If you close and reopen the whole application for every single document, you should rethink your workflow.
Last OOo build I ran was I think 1.9.131 (it was 1.9.1##) anyhow it ran at an acceptable speed under Windows, and at an acceptable speed under most Linux distro’s, only under Vidalinux did it seem to run dog slow.
Compared to MS Office though, it was considerably slower, even when loading MS Office via Crossover Office in linux, OOo was still slower and it was a native app.
I personally think its the dependancy on Java that 2.0 has that slows it down, but in the end I think they’re aiming for compatibility rather than speed ATM.
the only app depending on Java in openoffice is the database app. no single other component depends on java
the only app depending on Java in openoffice is the database app. no single other component depends on java
I doubt that any aledged slowness have anything to do with java. The database part in OOo is built around hsqldb that is extremely fast even compared to competitors written in other languages.
Not sure I would call it comically slow but I do agree with your assertion that Firefox and OOo are perceived to be a bit slower than IE or MSOffice. I stress perceived because after they start, they seem to operate at comparable speeds. I think there prefetch tricks going on that makes it seem faster.
Have you used the OOo start utility? It seems to improve things a bunch in that regard.
We need to give people incentives to switch. When they spend 45 seconds gazing at the OOo splash screen as the disk crunches away, they’re not impressed.
Perhaps OOo starts somewhat slower than MS-Office, but if you are staring at the splashscreen for 45 seconds you either need to check your machine for viruses or it is very old, probably from another century.
On my 500MHz Pentium III it starts in less than 10 seconds even if I have a lot of other rather hungry applications like Eclipse and some databases running at the same time. Once started, it opens new documents almost instantly.
Now, keep in mind that OOo is still in beta and you can expect there are some debug code still left and it is probably not compiled with all optimizations possible turned on.
A simple recompile of the OOo 1.1 with some more optimizations turned on changed the startup time from over 20s to about 6s. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was similar gains to be made from in version 2.0. I havn’t tried to do it yet, as frankly, 10s once a day isn’t that long time.
Once up and running it is significantly snappier than MS-Office, espesially when handling large documents The size of the produced documents is also much less than that of MS-Office. The handling of style sheets is also much better in OOo.
So, yes, I think I can stand waiting a few extra seconds on starting it each morning. Not a big deal. There is always some mail to read while I wait.
The fact that it is cross platform. That I can install it on as many machines as I like without spending any money on keeping track of licenses, or in fact even paying any license fees makes it a definitive best buy if you are shopping for an office suit.
OpenOffice takes a bit longer to start up than Microsoft Word but overall it seems snappier and more responsive.
Our entire company is using OpenOffice now and I have to admit I like it more than Microsoft Word.
Just to clear up, the only reason IE starts faster in Windows is because IE is technically “always running.” The only thing that has to “start” is creating a Window with an “IE control” in it.
I get the same behavior on Linux by running galeon -s when my X session starts. This runs galeon in “server mode,” which means it’s always in memory, and when I run Galeon (on my laptop, I press ALT+F1 to run my browser), it starts in < a half-second. If Firefox had a similar mode, it could offer you the same thing.
As for OpenOffice.org, it’s true that the start time is relatively slow. I’m sure they’ll get around to optimizing it.
Personally, I think the obsession people have with start times on Linux and Windows machines is due to a basic design flaw with most Window managers. Applications should really only start up once; if you start an application multiple times in a day, you’re essentially performing redundant computation. The program can sit in memory and if it really is not used in awhile, it will get paged out anyway due to our modern Virtual Memory implementations.
In OS X, for example, you can get the same effect as “galeon -s” or IE’s “preloading” simply by not quitting an application after all its windows are closed. This leaves the application running, and when you open a new window it will be nearly instantaneous. (Strangely enough, many old Windows/Linux freaks are sometimes “annoyed” by this aspect of OS X, since in the Linux/Windows world up to now, closing all windows of an application is equivalent to closing the application itself).
That’s not entirely true. You can see IE spring up very quickly even when running it through WINE (where it isn’t pre-loaded).
Does the galeon -s work now? It used to leak images (a year and a half ago?).
I think it’s bad in the Windows world because the taskbar fills up.. Some people do 10 different totally unrelated things on their PC.
In the *nix world there’s just no excuse, that’s what virtal desktops are for.
I much prefer apps closing when they have no window. Mac/X11 have systrays as the standard solution for applications that need to be open all the time; or want to be open all the time. It does get horribly abused on Windows, but that’s because the userbase accepts that sort of abuse and because the userbase is too incompetent to know what “service” and “preference utility in control panel” means.
Anyway, I like knowing when my programs close.
But this is a core difference between Mac and *nix. Mac users have historically trusted their programs. They didn’t even have a memory manager until 5 years ago! One bad app and kiss your OS stability goodbye. Others generally distrust their apps.
But maybe that just speaks to the general quality of Mac applications?
Startup times on my 800Mhz/256MB Duron box running RHEL 4:
Open Office 1.2: 22 seconds
Open Office 1.9.122: 16 seconds
It takes an AGE to start up though, even the 2.0 pre-releases… About 10x longer than MS Word. And no, that’s without MS Word preloading (try it in WINE!).
Word 2003: One one thousand, two one thousand. Done.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 (1.9.104): One one thousand, two one tousand, th. Done.
On the same system running Windows XP (512M, P4 3GHZ). From a cold reboot. Times for both are much lower if you exit and restart the app.
Now, on my maxed out Linux box (384M, PIII 500MHZ) — the one with only about 20M free ram and quite a bit in the swap partiton — I get 13 second start times.
seriously? when it is running, i notice _NO_ speed issues. I notice no productivity issues when I use OOo. It is a free as in speech program. That fact alone makes it priceless as it can be used by anyone, anytime for no cost whatsoever. For most peoples uses, it is more than fine. My wife uses it on old 98 boxes at her work(I hooked her up) and she loves it. I can’t imagine why people would pay money for Office, when OOo is just as good and it is free. Export to PDF takes care of doc compatability, because you remove the doc. I have had 0 issues with sending people resumes, documents as PDF files or .sxw files for that matter(some people use it remember?). It is already feature rich and a very apt program, who gives a damn about the startup speed, get some coffee or check your email….
For most peoples uses, it is more than fine.
Agreed. Though Abiword (as a Word alternative) and AppleWorks each are more than fine for most such usage as well.
I can’t imagine why people would pay money for Office, when OOo is just as good and it is free.
Unfortunately, OOo can’t handle the type of collaboration frequent in the business environment. And Impress really lags in features and usability compared to PowerPoint (and handles PPT conversion poorly). As I need that PowerPoint compatibility for working with slides made by others, I need Microsoft Office.
Collaboration using MS Office is a nightmare too. Merging documents, revision control, using official company templates, annotating etc. are all labourious, braindamaged processeses, and it is a miracle people put up with it. Imagine the productivity gain if everyone would learn LateX and a revision control system like DARCS. But that would only replace Word…
on a athlon 64 it takes:
8 seconds without the quickstarter running
1.2 seconds with the quickstarter running.
Hardly slow by any means..
For the general purpose stuff 99 percent of people use a word processor for it is pretty darn fast.
Solveig’s article is good for someone who may hesitate to look at OpenOffice 2.0 as she points out what it can do for the average user. Maybe a power user is concerned about macros in some cases, but the loadup time is a minor issue,or should be, for a power user or a more casual user. Once it’s loaded up, you should be good for the rest of the day.
Anyways, you can always shell out $300 for the Microsoft Office 2004 suite, if you are not happy with OpenOffice. For a free program, it does a lot for a lot of people.
ITS FREE and yet you are complaining at a gifthorse!
2.0 is da bong!
The only reason you have now to use MS Office is for highly automated apps that your enterprise uses today that dont work or its still has a licence policy to continue using MS Office.
Other than that, the arguments against using OO are GONE practically.
I switched over to 2.0 this year and Ill never look back.
If you want faster startup times invest in a nice fast SCSI drive for your OS partition and more memory.
Runs a charm on my laptop
There really isn’t a lot to complain about OpenOffice.org, but for those of you who say “it’s too ssslllooowww”…somewhere on the Web someone posted this:
“Think of how much money you’re saving every time the program is loading”. 😉
2.0 is teh w1n!!!
No, seriously!
Just because it says beta dont let that scare u, go look at the buglist and see if ur affected, most likely not unless ur big into automation scripting or some very weird issue or developer level.
YOU WILL SAVE BILLIONS AND THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
and the baby seals!
One argument against OOCalc is the autofill feature. It practically kills my productivity as I’m used to how MSExcel handles autofill.
In MSExcell if you use autofill on a single cell it is repeated. In OOCalc it is incremented. I’m not shure if this single feature is worth the $$$ of MSExcel, luckily I can run Gnumeric at home…
> In MSExcell if you use autofill on a single cell it is
> repeated. In OOCalc it is incremented. I’m not shure if
> this single feature is worth the $$$ of MSExcel, luckily
> I can run Gnumeric at home…
Umm… instead of spending $$$ on MSExcel, why don’t you spend 5 minutes on making a macro that does what you want?
Sun is going to run OpenOffice into the ground now that they are blowing Microsoft!
I use oOo 1.1.4, Firefox and KDE, and I’ve got used to the delays. It is always a surprise when I go back to Windows, or run Excel under Wine (with no pre-loading), and find that launching a program and opening a file are instantaneous – and the app is immediately usable.
OSS apps seem to have a general problem with the speed of starting/stopping, opening/closing a file, or printing. Microsoft has invested a lot of effort into accelerating these things, and pre-loading is only one of the tricks they use.
Both firefox and openoffice fall under the curse of a large complex application trying to be platform independent. Microsoft doesn’t have to deal with this issue because it only needs to support one platform.
Maybe try KOffice and konqorer and compare them to Microsoft products.
Who cares if it’s slightly slower than MS Office? The thing that turns me off about it is how remarkably ugly it is to look at. I run Ubuntu Hoary, and OpenOffice’s interface uses different, squashed fonts, a darker widget color, and gradients and selection colors which completely mismatch with the theme I’m using (Clearlooks; the default).
Is there some particular reason that the OpenOffice people go out of their way to make their program look worse than any other application (save for GTK1 apps)? I use Abiword because it’s quicker, and it doesn’t clash so glaringly with the rest of my desktop that it makes me want to spoon my eyes out.
“Both firefox and openoffice fall under the curse of a large complex application trying to be platform independent. Microsoft doesn’t have to deal with this issue because it only needs to support one platform.”
I have Microsoft Office 2003 for x86 and Microsoft Office 2004 for PPC, so no, it does have to support more than one platform.
Not really a fair comparison: the Office:Mac codebase is more or less totally distinct from the Windows Office Suite codebase.
It’s not a multiplatform/architecture project: they are TWO distinct incompatible projects, and new features in the windows suite are ported one by one to the mac one. Sure, having sensibly written code helps, but it’s a totally different beast.
OOo and Firefox implement everything in a platform agnostic way, down to the virtualization of the widgets.
could prelinking help with start times in linux. on mac os x a prelinker is run everytime you install anything.
i have heard a few people saying that if you prelink and then a library changes then you may get in a mess. is there a work around?
sam
Try loading a really large document in Word and see how long it takes.
Load times are just a childish p*ssing contest.
The reason MS Word saves documents faster is quite simple. The DOC file format is essentially just a memory dump, whereas OOo has to convert the document to XML and then zip it. That is the cost of being open and multiplatform.
If you think it’s just a memory dump you’re wrong.
I’ve worked with this format (trying to make a converter to HTML) and I have failed.
DOC is a FAT-like filesystem-in-a-file (with clusters which can be lost and fragmented). It holds files, like the main document text, stylesheets, quicksaves etc.
But the main document text (being a file in a virtual filesystem) is a bit like a filesystem itself (not plaintext but a rather complex structure with blocks which look like clusters). So to read a DOC file, you have to decrypt a filesystem inside a filesystem (not to mention the quicksaves which are basically diff files in their own format)!
If you look at DOC reading libraries, just to extract plaintext you need about 400 kilobytes of zipped code (and more if extracted).
It is even rumoured tat Microsoft themselves don’t quite understand the format. If you think DOC is crap, it’s worse. So MS made a smart move abandoning and switching to XML/HTML.
Loading times, the reason lots of MS apps load fast is because they DLLs have already been loaded by LoadDll(..)
They are already resident ffs. IE i already resident in explorer.exe jeez. GET INFORMED!
I think the ability of cross platform availablilty, lack of initial cost and openness of the bug database are what sells OO 2.0 to me.
Without it there would be NO CHOICE, which is fundamental!
Would you rather there is just MSOffice and NOTHING ELSE? No , neither would I.
Its about choice, if you dont like it, dont run it and stop yer whining. I chose to run it.
So why does both still load faster on Wine?
Explorer.exe is open too?
Because, as said before, it is a non-crossplatform app that has practically no level of abstraction.
MS office is cross platform, MAC and Windows. It is a heavily WRAPPED application specifically for this reason in the code.
How else do you think they got windows and mac ports so easily.