Submitted by “As nice as Open Office Excel is for a free application, it doesn’t even come close to the performance and usability of Microsoft Office Excel. There is no shame in losing to a commercially funded application, but no one should make false statements that Microsoft Office is bloated and inferior. The only remaining question for businesses and homes is whether Excel is worth the money and most have apparently decided yes.” Update: OOo 1.1.5 has been released.
What’s with reviewers who can’t even get the name of a product right? It’s “OpenOffice Calc,” not “Open Office Excel!” Sheesh.
The correct name i not OpenOffice Calc but OpenOffice.org Calc. Please, do not forget the .org in the name!
if you took care to read the review, you would notice that throughout the whole article the Calc is called correctly many times, and only once in the closing part the name was incorrect , that seems to be an obvious typo.
shame on you
While I do agree that MS Excel is slightly better, OO.org Calc definitely has come a long way.
One more remark: the fact that most private and bussiness users use Excel, does not say anything, I repeat, ANYTHING, about the quality of a product. If quality was the only factor, and humans didn’t have a bounded rationality, he’d be correct. But unfortunately (for him) this is not the case.
And why’s Excel so superior? My guess is that because it can read crippled messed fucked-up .xls files so much better than Calc? I can’t say for home users, but I find Calc better and easier to understand than Excel. Oo’s offering is a superb product.
And why’s Excel so superior? My guess is that because it can read crippled messed fucked-up .xls files so much better than Calc?
Well, if you would measure the time Excel need to read an OpenOffice.org Calc’s document, then Calc would be the clear-cut winner.
A few seconds compared to infinity in Excel.
But the article was just about “hey, MS Excel does read MS-formats better”.
Read the review and the stats posted.
Among other things, it compares Excel reading/writing .XLS versus OO 1.1.4 and OO 1.9.125 reading/writing .SXC and .ODS.
The problem is that OO working with its own format is dog slow by 2 orders of magnitude!
Each platform is working with its own native format. OO is NOT running on an emulator or Java, it’s running on native Win32 code just like MS Office is.
George Ou
I agree that MS Office is a heck of a lot faster than Open Office, but I can also understand that in order for Open Office to reach their goal of being a cross platform (requires a whole gui toolkit) and free office suite, they will have to make some compromises such as speed.
I have tried the new OpenOffice 2.0 betas and they are much faster than the old 1.x versions, so clearly they are trying. I think that Open Office does a great job and I’m glad it’s around, but I’m going to continue to use Office 2003 at work thank you.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the new office interface looks pretty interesting (haven’t actually used it though). However…
For me it isn’t about the features and asthetics as much as it is about being usable and free from things like activation, “phone home” features, and product keys the length of my arm.
Sure, Word may take down your trousers, provide multiple couresty flushes, and swab your cheeks for you when you’re done (you know, all the classy stuff) but when all you are doing is typing letters and resumes, is it really worth the money and loss of freedom?
I agree that MS Office is a heck of a lot faster than Open Office
doesn’t is depent on the methodology and on how you count?
Let’s measure speed-per-buck for instance, ok?
Come on! What is interesting in this article? It just states the obvious! Where is the controversy and how will it fuel debate?
I know OpenOffice 2.0 is still considered Beta…..but the review would be a lot better if the reviewer would keep up to date instead of mis-matching versions. OpenOffice Calc 2.0 has many, many improvments over 1.1.4.
Firstly its Openoffice.org CALC. Calling it excel would be stupid, although to be fair, the article doesnt say that, just the comment.
However, I dont believe i have seen anyone running Windows XP in less than 128Mb, and that was horrendously painful and didnt last very long.
Running in 64Mb is not going to happen without some serious tinkering with the OS.
As for application loading times, ok, fair enough. because i cant compare them. As office is a large application, i assume it takes some shortcuts that i dont know about. IE, perhaps loading bits on the fly.
I remember doing the same sort of thing when programming on my old Spectrum+3. (Although the reason there was to give me the largest amount of memory available as possible rather than loading times, but the same principal applies)
This is perfectly valid. I have found Openoffice a bit on the slow side starting up. I assumed it was because it was firing up its JVM for Macros (Which always seems a bit like overkill to me, but again, its not really a problem for me)
As for openning documents, i havent found Office format documents much faster the OO.O documents, but every file format is a trade off, in this case, Openoffice trades speed for ease of readability by other applications. Also expandability, as its usually much easier to support new filetypes (Inline Holo-movies?) with a zip file and a pointer than in a binary file. (Although technically thats possible using OLE2, how many people really understand how that works? at a technical level).
However, the main reason i use openoffice is not these, it is because i can use a wordprocessor without either paying more than i did for the computer for it or being a pirate.
As a supporter of open source software myself, I find it vitally important not to just dismiss the intellectual property principles that OSS depends on (Copyright in this case)
Hi!
Maybe Excel may have a better usability concept – but only if you ignore that there are several other MS Office applications that are totally different (if you don’t look). Copy ‘n Paste, formatting styles, behaviour of Ctrl-Key when using the mouse, color palettes, Search & Replace… an endless story.
I know Excel very well, because I have to use it at work, but I prefer Calc for many reasons. Maily, when it comes to usability.
Christoph
>I know Excel very well, because I have to use it at >work, but I prefer Calc for many reasons. Maily, when >it comes to usability.
You obviously never tried to make some cool graphs with Calc. As compared to Excel, Calc is a piece of crap. Especially when it goes to make calculus on row, on excel you just ctrl+click the lower right border and you have the Sum to appear on the next Cell. It’s a pain to use Calc. It felt like using some java apps.
back on the day I was using applixware (motif version) 5.0 and it was far more better than calc. Really.
Agreed. I try to use Calc whenever possible, but I always dread having to make a usable chart. Excel (2000 even) is better in that regard, hands down.
One of the main reasons reading/writing XML is slow (disregarding overhead of parsing and redundancy) is the whole thing has to be processed at once and the results kept in memory because it is a stream-based format. I imaging Excel never even touches the parts of the XLS file that contain the other sheets, so the massive slowdown you see is probably due to disk speed more than anything.
Too often free software/standards people mistakenly believe that binary formats are automatically closed and unportable so we get abominations like the OpenOffice formats and SVG. I blame the web! 😉
Luke,
Very intelligent response. People are freaking out that this is an attack on open standards but they’ve completely missed the point in my article. JPG, MP3, GIF, PNG are fairly open binary standards. It would be stupid to convert them to “human-readable” XML. What the hell do they mean by human readable? Have they somehow acquired the ability of the characters in the movie Matrix to watch real time video in the form of vertically scrolling neon symbols representing machine language?
OOo could have come out with their own binary standard and simply publish the specifications and don’t encumber the format with any licenses. While MS jumps on XML for Office 12, OOo would have been in a position to laugh at Microsoft for their bloated file format. But they chose the absolutely slowest format available and can’t even optimize it anywhere near the Microsoft XML implementation.
George
Why read a review that can’t even get the name of the product right?
Because it is thoughtful, parts of it are backed up by hard data, and dismissing something that does not fit with your view of things because of a typo is childish.
Far better to be realistic, than have this idea that because OpenOffice is opensource it must be superior.
While OpenOffice is definitely slower to start than MS Office, I’m not sure it’s as slow as the review makes out. As for “hard” data, without an indepth explanation of what each benchmark measures, and what the start and stop criteria were, those figures a bit soft. I’m still not entirely sure what Calc creating native SXC/File Creation and Calc creating native SXC/File Load are meant to represent (how can a creation cause a file load?!).
I suspect of these benchmarks have to do with time taken to load/save complex files, which is not a common occurrance. While I’ve found the GUI to be a bit awkward, I’ve never noticed a significant performance issue with OOo.
As it is, on my Debian Linux system, running KDE, OOo starts in 5 seconds, and uses 67MB of physical memory, with 146MB total. That’s a lot of memory, but on a modern system, it’s fairly snappy. Further, the total amount of physical memory in use doesn’t go too far north of 67MB.
That’s fair enough. But the point of the article is that Office is not slow and bloated like people complain, especially compared to the best alternative out there.
Office has over 1200 commands. You wouldn’t call that bloat?
You stand here speculating and you’re saying my data is “soft” when you won’t even run the test yourself? If you think I got it wrong, download my sample and measure it yourself. Here I’ll make it easy. http://www.lanarchitect.net/Examples/200264-l.sxc
Get my sample and try it out yourself. This is a single sheet spreadsheet that I duplicated to 16-sheets. It is not “complex”. I will warn you that it will only run on a machine with at leat 384 MB RAM because OOo is so bloated. It will run on a 128 MB machine on Excel though in XLS or MS-XML format.
George Ou
Huh? I don’t have the idea that OpenOffice is superior.
It’s not “childish” to dismiss a review based on the fact that the author doesn’t know the name of the product being reviewed! Shall we waste time reading reviews of the Apple iRiver, Debian Windows XP or the Ford Civic? I think not.
However, I see that the typo was by the person who submitted the article, and not the reviewer. So I’ll read it if I have time.
Wrong. The typo was on the end of the article. OOo Calc was correctly stated on the rest of the article. It was just a slip.
“Because it is thoughtful”
What is thoughtful about the article? It shows performance data and benchmarking. It shows nothing of features and discuss’ options between various programs.
“dismissing something that does not fit with your view of things because of a typo is childish.”
Now you are associating someone not reading the article because they are childish and basing it on what you precieved to be their beliefs. Perhaps, a reviewer that doesn’t take attention to detail and makes errors in a review; it leaves other parts of the article suspect to other errors and omissions.
“Far better to be realistic, than have this idea that because OpenOffice is opensource it must be superior.”
Now your continuing to insinuate and placing words in peoples mouths. I suspect that many people would not read an article based your particular version of logic.
Because the review got it right. It is the osnews crew that got it wrong.
What struck me most was the orders of magnitude XML based file formats appear to be slower than machine readable ones. From a users perspective who lives in a world dominated by MS office they could care less if the format is open or not. They will just notice how slow the file format is.
Lastly I used Open Office exclusively at home and as a student. I much prefer Excel and Word to OpenOffice. Reasons.
– Excel has the Lotus 1-2-3 ‘/’ quick access keys.
– Charts are abismal in OpenOffice. Yes truly second rate compared with Excel.
– OLE is not very good in OpenOffice. When you ‘Paste Special’ in MS Office your options are much better.
– Open Office is just slow. The beta’s of version 2 are better but still slow.
There are other annoyances such as headers and footers for sections, formatting table of contents, etc, etc. OpenOffice is good, but realistically is no match for MS Office in my opinion.
What struck me most was the orders of magnitude XML based file formats appear to be slower than machine readable ones. From a users perspective who lives in a world dominated by MS office they could care less if the format is open or not. They will just notice how slow the file format is.
As a student, you should say “could not care less” instead of “could care less”
. “Could not care less” means “it would be impossible for me to care less than I do because I do not care at all”. “Could care less” means you still care some.
Lastly I used Open Office exclusively at home and as a student. I much prefer Excel and Word to OpenOffice. Reasons.
– Excel has the Lotus 1-2-3 ‘/’ quick access keys.
– Charts are abismal in OpenOffice. Yes truly second rate compared with Excel.
– OLE is not very good in OpenOffice. When you ‘Paste Special’ in MS Office your options are much better.
– Open Office is just slow. The beta’s of version 2 are better but still slow.
There are other annoyances such as headers and footers for sections, formatting table of contents, etc, etc. OpenOffice is good, but realistically is no match for MS Office in my opinion.
I agree, the only bloated part of Office is its price
. I like open source, but I like best application more if it saves my time. Especially with academic license, I can get cheaper. I bought WinXP OEM 11,000 Yen because I experienced myself “Linux is free only if your time is worthless”. I’m FreeBSD power user, and for me, WinXP is the best for desktop.
honest question here, if your a unix power user, what kind of difficulty did you have with linux? i learned in the other direction, but i found most of the knowledge was easily transferable.
KDE, GNOME, or other windows manager just doesn’t fit to me. Inconsistent font, strange mouse handling, and the most important is, double-byte character support is poor (Kanji is rendered uglily, typing the Kanji is quite difficult, etc). It was really wasting time trying to fix them.
*sigh*, fonts have been the thorn in the paw of desktop linux for years. thanks for the clarification, most people have trouble with linux because of the unix way of doing things isnt what they are used to, and i thought it was a little odd that a bsd user would have so much trouble.
Uh…fonts wouldn’t be any different on a BSD system, so the “clarification” shouldn’t change that fact.
That said, fonts are consistent on my KDE desktop…I’m not sure what the problem is. Kanji is rendered quite well with Unicode and other specialized fonts (I know, I have them installed because I like my Chinese spam to look like Chinese, not squares and strange accented characters).
As a student, you should say “could not care less” instead of “could care less”
. “Could not care less” means “it would be impossible for me to care less than I do because I do not care at all”. “Could care less” means you still care some.
Except that ‘could care less’ is a rightful idiom, based on irony (I could care a little bit less, but only that little bit, not more).
What kind of a sick review is this? OOo 2.0 is in its second beta ad why was he not trying that out?
If he only wanted to test the stable, than wy the hell does he mentions WindowsXP and Office2K3 versions but not OOo version inside the article
PS: Yes, OOo ver is mentioned somewhere in the spec table,….
I have used OOo 1.0, 1.1, and now 2.0b. The progression from 1.0 to 1.1 was pretty significant especially for a point release rather than a full version release. 2.0 seems to be setting a pretty high standard for what a full version upgrade actually means. 2.0b is a huge improvement over 1.1, and at this point any comparison to 1.1 seems to be a pretty big waste of time. 2.0b2 is extremely stable and is what most OOo users are now using. So, while I can already hear the arguments about only comparing stable releases, I don’t see the point of analyzing OOo 1.1 for anything anymore.
By far the best part of OOo is Writer. Impress is a decent basic presentation program that actually has some nice tools. Calc is acceptable for simple tasks, but nothing more. As far as Base goes, let’s just say that it seems to have a lot of potential.
I prefer Writer over Word. I’m indifferent about whether I use Powerpoint or Impress. But, I’ll take Excel over Calc any day of the week. I occasionally use Calc for some simple tasks, but it is horrible when it comes to more complicated tasks or charts.
I like OOo very much, and I have tried to get more people to use it. Unfortunately, at this stage in the game if someone is a power-user of either Excel or Access, they won’t be very satisfied with OOo.
Also unfortunately, the group working on the Calc portion of OOo seems to be the least responsive to constructive criticism. Everyone else seems to be incredibly responsive.
For those wondering, OOo 1.1.5 is the only stable version that is able to read the new OASIS file format that 2.0b uses.
He talks about “performance and usability” – but all he tests are file load and creation times.
Ofcourse pure XML as opposed to MS pure binary and XML-wrapped binary formats is going to be slower to load, you’ve got to parse and interpret the DOM. But having an open format anyone can implement is worth it IMHO.
Uh, actually he’s using XML files for Excel.
Uh, actually he’s using XML files for Excel.
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/flosstoday/2004-July/000378.html
StarOffice product manager Laurie Wong says Microsoft’s file format is a binary file wrapped in some XML
tags. “It’s XML only as long as you use another Microsoft application, or one authorised by the company to read it, which is not in the spirit of XML,” he says.
In comparison, the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice binary file format is a zipped version of an XML file, allowing other software or users to see the file format in readable XML.
But you missed the point. It’s still XML, which the person claimed it was not. They claimed the author was using binary for Excel, thus giving it a speed advantage.
Actually I use all file formats in my test. I even added OOo Beta2. Go look at all the formats I test. It’s a fair and thorough comparison.
George Ou
> But having an open format anyone can implement is worth
> it IMHO.
The point is that “Open Format” and “binary” aren’t mutually exclusive. Are you ever going to open an xml OOo file with a text editor and fiddle with it? Don’t really think so.
Once there was this nice ‘IFF’ format…
The point is that “Open Format” and “binary” aren’t mutually exclusive. Are you ever going to open an xml OOo file with a text editor and fiddle with it? Don’t really think so.
Point taken, but binary formats have other problems – endian related problems whan moving files between different architectures comes to mind. Textual formats are generally easier to port, easier to validate, etc.
Also while you generally wouldn’t open an OOo file in a text-editor I would imagine it could be handy in debugging situations.
> Point taken, but binary formats have other problems –
> endian related problems whan moving files between
> different architectures comes to mind.
This is another mith that needs to be debunked. By using a textual representation of data you’re exchanging an endianess conversion for a text to whatever_is_the_inmemory_representation of the data.
Endianess conversion is one, at most 2 instructions on any architecture, compare it with the conversion of a number represented in text to its inmemory representation.
In other words, you still need a conversion, whether or not it concerns the endianess.
> Textual formats are generally easier to port, easier
> to validate, etc.
I beg to differ. It’s much easier to work with numbers directly than convert them forth and back from their textual representation. Not to mention much less reduntant and much more resource-friendly.
> Also while you generally wouldn’t open an OOo file in
> a text-editor I would imagine it could be handy in
> debugging situations.
You can always build a debug tool specific for the purpose. In case of a standardized binary format, like IFF, you could build such a tool once, and use it for any past and future IFF file.
It’s pretty apparently some of the commenters didn’t even read the article. They see “Open Office” or “Windows boots in 30 seconds” and foam at the mouth.
Animals that are rabid foam at the mouth, yet instead of discussing the article you make the implication that people are some sort of creature that will not discuss the article in a logical manner.
Feel free to reconsider your own particular insight.
Anyone here knows any program that will allow Window,Linux, Mac users to view my OpenOffice documents without installing entire OpenOffice if they dont have? I’m fade up of requesting OO people to write a small viewer for their file formats. Most of the people I interact are not ready install OO and not ready to give up MSOffice. So it will be handy to have viewer for them my files.
OO files saved in MS format are totally messing with the diagrams so I dont want to save it in MS format.
So save them as PDFs. Almost everyone has some PDF viewer installed and doesn’t need to install anything new.
Export them to PDF, they won’t get any more portable than that…
You can:
1) Export to PDF
2) Export to HTML
Option 1 is your best choice,
OpenOffice Writer needs the option of divisions, each showed in a tab … WordPro style (Could be coupled to the master document) – that would make it real great.
I have installed OO.O on all of my platforms including my girlfriends WinXP machine and it has only made trouble once (some fancy tables (nested I guess)).
The addition of a native OO.O 2 for eCS would be nice though :o)
It’s true that openoffice is pretty slow, and when I used 1.3 I got weird issues, like when opening an excel file, and modifying it, sometimes the program would get totally trying to save the file, the program would gobble up more and more ram until over a gig of memory was eaten up. And while that was happening the system would be almost unusable. Killing the app would be the only way out.
For word processing I don’t know why more people don’t use abiword. It loads in a fraction of the time as openoffice, and runs well. Open Office is just weak all around. I hope Koffice can one day include all of openoffice and microsoft office functions and features.
It’s nice to see that some people are so much supporting Microsoft products. However this anti-XML guy should notice that his beloved Microsoft is quite much pro-XML. All their server tehcnologies are using more and more XML.
What comes to OOo, I think he has some point. However checking memory usage from Windows Task Manager is just a joke. And he even tells the memory usage when application is minimized. Even a bigger joke. How does someone think the application uses less memory while minimized? Even Windows has proper tools to check memory usage for a process.
And the boot times.. My Windows XP boots in about 30 seconds, but my Linux distribution is not much slower (less than 40 seconds).
“And he even tells the memory usage when application is minimized. Even a bigger joke. How does someone think the application uses less memory while minimized?”
Programs *do* use less memory when minimized. See Firefox for a prime example. When the application is minimized you no longer need to hold display information in memory and this can be released as a simple measure to make things run better.
You not reading the numbers that prooves this effect, does not make it a joke.
Actually, a lot of the memory is flushed to page files. It’s kinda annoying.
Yeah, XP boots fast – but then you sit waiting another minute while the background stuff finishes booting. Trying to do much of anything during that minute is pretty much a waste of time.
Whereas once my Mandrake 10.1 gets to the actual desktop, you’re working. It takes about as long as the ENTIRE XP bootup, which makes it just as easy (or bad, depending on your perspective.)
What I don’t like about XP is the attempt to FOOL me into thinking it’s done booting just by loading the desktop faster.
And the interesting thing is that people tell me the security policies are in place early in the boot sequence on XP – but my AV and firewall are just about the last thing to come up (due to their being third party apps, of course.) Should I trust Windows not to do something near the Net BEFORE my firewall comes up?
Your av and firewall are already loaded and functioning. What “comes up” are the task bar icons for those programs, not the programs themselves! Even before you get to the login screen, Those programs should be loaded already as services (go to msconfig, and on the “services” tab you should see the av and firewall services).
Why would anyone still use Microsoft Office nowadays? OpenOffice offer much better functionality, is free, and has already become pretty much standard.
I tried using OpenOffice in college last year to save myself some money. I got tired of fighting problems with opening .Doc files that the rest of the people in my group projects were using. Formatting was always just a little bit off (extra line spaces inserted for no reason, screwed up bulleted lists, etc.).
Once I took statistics and we had to use a bunch of crazy functions that Calc didn’t even have. Once we started using some analysis plug-ins for Excel, I just gave up and went out and bought it.
I’ve never looked back at OpenOffice since then.
And OpenOffice is not “pretty much standard.” Try asking anyone in the real world (not in your linux message boards) and see how many people have even heard of it.
Free is great, but some things are worth paying for.
“Once I took statistics and we had to use a bunch of crazy functions that Calc didn’t even have.”
It sounds like the class was pushing excel to the limits. I’ve taken plenty of stats classes, and we tended to use real statistics software like SPSS. Now I tend to whip up something myself in a programming language, or else use R.
But if there are any functions that standard Excel has that Calc didn’t, I doubt that’s the case in Calc 2.0. Or else there should be places to download free addins with the functions such as these at http://www.richhillsoftware.com
Here comes the FUD. Paid shysters who set up a strawman, knock it down and claim a great victory. This article totally misses the point….. That you can run a government department or corportion of 200,000 employees without ever needing to pay a dime in office software licensing fees, still be as productive, never suffer a virus attack in 5 years and never have your computers slow down to a crawl after years of use and to top it all: The data you save can be exchanged with anybody else who has any thing that resembles a computer and can be accessed 30 years into the future
Heh.. if you think you can be as productive with OpenOffice in the workplace as MS Office, you are kidding yourself. Unless all that is required in that workplace is writing simple word documents with some bold text and different fonts here and there.
There are many advanced features that increase productivity that workplaces use in OFfice that OpenOffice doesn’t do.
—
I did a quick consulting job for the Operations Manager of a semi-small company a few years back. They had their customer database in access, with a complete list of all orders placed in the past 5 years.
What he asked me to do was filter out only the customers who had an order done in the past year, and trasnfer them over to word to be placed into a template for postcards, to be printed out.
What I did was use a quick and easy SQL statement to filter the results, saved the table result, loaded the template in word, quickly changed some positions of names, address, etc, and told word to use my saved table result as the source, then printed.
We put 1000 pre-made postcards in the printer, and out came the same postcards, each addressed to a different customer, the customers they had done business with in the past year.
How much did this all cost? $50 for my consulting and work on it, plus the cost of the postcards, which was < $100. It only took about an hour in all and Office did most of the work.
I recently tried to do this in OpenOffice, but it simply wasn’t possible.
“Heh.. if you think you can be as productive with Open Office in the workplace as MS Office, you are kidding yourself.”
Those of us a bit older can remember the bullshit and chaos when we had Wordperfect, Lotus, and Word.
Sorry Openoffice. Guys my age currently call the shots in the business world, and were not interested in havoc. Even if you gave us software and paid us to switch.
It’s NOT about the cost of the software. It’s about retraining costs, format compatibility, and unified producivity. We have all that already, and more. Microsoft all but gave us our last Office upgrade.
“Microsoft all but gave us our last Office upgrade.”
Because they were afraid you’d switch to OO.
Moron. You think Microsoft made $10-15 billion from Office – their cash cow – from them giving it away?
Format compatibility? Gimme a break. Each version of Office breaks the older ones to at least some degree.
Retraining? Since when does your – or any – company do training at all? I’ve never seen effective training done anywhere. Because it costs too much? No, because your company wants some OTHER company to bear the costs.
Unified productivity? Yeah, right – you use OLE and embedded videos and script everything in VBA all the time, right? Ruminant evacuation.
Anything Office can do, OO can do.
The real reason you stick with Microsoft is twofold:
1) You have no imagination.
2) You’re a slave who kowtows to rich bozos like Gates.
Meanwhile, your servers are fifty percent slower than Linux servers, less flexible, need more servers to handle more functions, are riddled with security holes, are so screwed up your sys admin is going nuts, etc., etc. ad infinitum.
In other words, you’re a moron like everybody else in the business world.
In other words, you’re a clueless, frothing Linux zealot, and your opinion doesn’t count worth shit.
Go eat your ice cream and compile a kernel or two.
anon: stop trolling
Simply because you probably didn’t know how to use OO to front-end MySQL or some other ODBC DB.
OO 2 has that covered more directly.
I’d be interested to know how you dealt with the inevitable situation for those people when Access inevitably CORRUPTS that database – and being morons with no backup – they lose five years worth of data.
Access corrupts if you breath on it. Using MySQL – and more importantly, dumping the database to plain text or CSV for backup – is much more robust. And you can still use Access as front-end to MySQL for reporting and data entry using ODBC.
Score one for open source. Proprietary data formats are bad news for anyone, regardless of performance gains.
The information wasn’t in access alone. He actually exported to an access database from a third-party application they use.
So your point is pretty moot.
I know how to use mySQL and the front-end, but that wasn’t even the problem. The other features I wanted to use simply didn’t exist. They’re not that often used, but powerful.
I wish there was an edit feature…
Anyway. I should have probably stated that I had and still have VERY LITTLE experience with any of the office applications. I’ve used word a few times to write documents for school, and that’s it (well recently ive used it, but i hadnt back then).
I was able to do all of this simply by playing around. With OpenOffice, I played around for almost 2 hours and couldn’t figure it out.
That’s nice, but Access and MySQL ain’t exactly in the same ballpark…
That’s nice, but Access and MySQL ain’t exactly in the same ballpark..
You are right on that, even though I don’t particularly like MySQL I surely prefer it to MS Accsss. In its production version MySQL lacks triggers, views and stored procedures. But at least it is much faster in multiuser situation One other difference is that access stores each datase in one single file. This can be both a curse and a blessing.
If you want a free database that uses single files you could try Firebird (the free successer of Borland Interbase).
If you want something more SQL server like you could try postgresql, Just like Firebird it supports stored procedures (several languages available among others perl and java), triggers, views achemas and domains. It also have some objectrelational features built in.
All of them could be connected to OOo thorough either JDBC or ODBC. OOo provide things like GUI query designers
I am not surprised to read an article like that by George Ou. Of course someone with Microsoft ties will write positive about their products. It’s always been like that but what really upsets me is when such studies or articles are trying to convey an “independent” or “neutral” image.
Microsoft does make good software, but i don’t trust them. They have a poor track record with security. and office is expensive. why get office when openoffice is free?
the only reason is if you are totally dependant on office, and other programs that require office.
or perhaps you want to pay tons of money to have a little bit more features in your software which is is prone to viruses, spyware, worms and who knows what else.
But I can speak for myself. Many here seem to think of an Office suite as something similar to MS Works. MS Office is a VERY powerful suite which can do a whole bunch of things (not to mention with Sharepoint portal). Let’s say OOo does 95% of what MSO does. Each and every user (as myself) use about 25% of it’s capabilities, just that one of those percentage things is in the 5% bracket where OOo just doesn’t reach.
I’m very hopeful though about OOo and think it might become the winner in the long run.
You also have to take into account that MS Office doesn’t do 100% of what OOo does. E.g it is much easier to create PdFs in OOo, The style sheets is more advanced, it have some neat database functions not available in MS Office
So it may be easier to make PDFs in an OOo default install. However, there is this something called plugins (which by the way is why I love firefox so much). And getting MSO enhanced to be able to produce PDFs is very simple. Me personally use PDF Machine, Free of charge, without spyware, and I love it =)
One: OpenOffice loads in 5 seconds. MS Office is ready to go in 2 seconds. I can wait 3 seconds.
Two: The article says Windows XP starts in 30 seconds. This is false: it appears to start in 30secs, but if you log in straight away and try to launch an icon immediately you’ll be waiting at least another 30secs for that program’s window to appear (if at all, during the initial post-login process events can occasionally get lost).
Linux desktops take longer to load, but when they’re loaded they’re loaded. In terms of total time, I think MS still has the lead, but it’s not as severe as the author makes out.
With regard to the figures, without any detail about what each item represents, what the start and stop criteria were, and what the contents of the file were, it’s hard to take them seriously. I’m still not entirely sure what “Calc creating native SXC / File Creation” and “Calc creating native SXC / File Load” are meant to represent (how can a creation cause a file load?!).
It’s a nastly little fluff piece. Linux takes longer to get going than MS Windows, and OOo is a bit slower and a bit more memory intensive than MS Office, but neither is substantially worse than their MS equivalents, contrary to the rather obtuse claims in this article.
Actually, Windows XP will boot from BIOS screen to desktop fully loaded in 30 seconds as just about any modern machine.
No, it will not.
It will LOAD the desktop, but it will NOT be fully booted on my AMD 2.0GHz machine for nearly a minute or more.
Trying to do anything during that minute is pretty much a waste of time. In fact, it can confuse the boot and result in applications being clicked on but never starting at all.
When Linux loads and you see the desktop, you’re good to go with no confusion.
XP’s fast desktop loading is a Microsoft TRICK, nothing more. A cosmetic trick to cover how long it boots.
And don’t even get me started on how long it takes XP to SHUT DOWN. At least with Linux you can SEE what it’s doing in both start up and shut down.
You can also modify Linux to speed up both boot and shut down.
Try that with Windows.
Uh. Wow.
Sorry buddy, but my AMD Athlon XP 2500+ system with 512mb of memory boots in 34 seconds.
I’m sorry that your system is apparently busted or that you let your system get bogged down.
Clean out some of the startup items you don’t need and the boot will go much faster.
Just to toss out a figure (excluding POST):
*bsd boots up in 12 seconds (console)
* 4 seconds total for xfree and flux
Now, boot times are pointless, I still use XP and it is 30 seconds to boot on the same machine, however; the boot process continues in the background. It shows the desktop in 30 seconds. And to be fair to the MS side of the house, the caching of apps does make a big difference. Under w2k the same box took over a minute with the majority of services disabled (running something like 12 services).
I will say one thing, on the same machine going from 98, 2000 to XP, no one makes the drivers for my controller, past w2k. So, under XP, I loose 2 controllers (aka 4 devices). The controller in question is HPT370.
Under Linux/*BSD my hardware is still supported.
PIII 800
… the best application is the one that suites your needs. Period.
ok, first off just to be clear, i hate both office and oo.o with a passion, and resent being forced to use them. rich text formatting is NOT a reason to use a word processor of their calibur. but im a programmer, so my needs arent those of the average joe, and i realise that.
that being said, let me try his research on my system… oh wait. office support linux. immediately, office being a viable option to oo.o goes flying out the window. not being able to test his results, i still question his finishing claim that office is 98% faster then oo.o. ive used both… oh wait. he was being dishonest in his implications, office loads and creates excel files, at most, 98% faster. i dont know about him, but to me spending 300$ more IS quite a hefty premium for speedy file loading and creation, which is all he was testing.
he seems to know very little about windows (just because you logged in, doesnt mean xp is done booting.) less about linux (linux can do it too, and he is comparing five year old software to something current), less about microsofts business strategy (the reason office performs so well on windows is that they have control over the platform.), and nothing about xml (which is not bloated, even if all his allegations about microsofts schema are correct). and since when is oo.o the best alternative? isnt star office, by definition, better then oo.o? why didnt he compare using that?
he is right, these are unfair comparisons. i do think he has a point, for him, office out performs oo.o in those tasks, and what he was responding to was fairly zealotous. but just because you say your doing a fair, methodical test of the two doesnt mean you are. i think he is right by talking about the knee jerk reaction of open source zealots, but i have problems with a great many of his claims, and because of the ignorance of everything but the functionality of a spreadsheet app, and his claims on everything from platform bloat to claiming xml is bloated because of his experiences on excel, i would say that i would be rather hesitant to consider him a reliable source of information without testing it myself.
which, as i mentioned, is impossible for me, and i quite honestly dont care enough to make the effort.
You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
My review loaded all native file formats for OOo Calc and Excel. I even added OOo Beta2 using its own native format. Read the freaking review before you shoot your mouth off. You just look like an idiot.
WinXP does boot in 30 seconds if you knew what the hell you’re doing. You don’t put a bunch of crap in the startup. You clean up to MS-only services and a few other critical things like anti-virus and leave the startup applications minimum.
Yes you’re too lazy to run the tests yourself but you’re not too lazy to shoot your big mouth off for a couple of long paragraphs.
George
Those of us a bit older can remember the bullshit and chaos when we had Wordperfect, Lotus, and Word.
Sorry Openoffice. Guys my age currently call the shots in the business world, and were not interested in havoc. Even if you gave us software and paid us to switch.
It’s NOT about the cost of the software. It’s about retraining costs, format compatibility, and unified producivity. We have all that already, and more. Microsoft all but gave us our last Office upgrade.
kind of like the lesser amount of bullshit thats around now with incompatible versions and crappy backwords compatibility in office formats? you know, the bullshit that will only be solved with open standards, the kind that oo.o is championing…
“kind of like the lesser amount of bullshit thats around now with incompatible versions and crappy backwords compatibility in office formats? you know, the bullshit that will only be solved with open standards, the kind that oo.o is championing…”
Way to little, and way too late.
Microsoft set the standard many years ago. You don’t have to like it, but you are not going to change it. Microsoft IS the standard.
What of the EU legislation?
microsoft is the standard, they have total control over it. but their own versions have limited compatibilty with each other, for no other reason then to get people upgrading. ive youve never had problems with different office versions, you should consider yourself lucky.
this came from an epolicy group about the tsunami relief effort (http://www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;1295540584;fp;4;fpid;21)
“Responding agencies and nongovernmental groups are unable to share information vital to the rescue effort,” the report recalls of the government in Thailand in the tsunami’s immediate aftermath. “Each uses different data and document formats. Relief is slowed; coordination is complicated. The need for common, open standards for disaster management was never more stark or compelling.”
the reason that open standards will fix this problem is because they will not be motivated by a single companys commercial interest. microsoft is currently in danger of losing Massachusetts because they believe that public records should be in a format that isnt controlled by a company, and can become obsolete at any time they wish.
you are right that we are in better shape then before, i remember the days before office became king. but stuff can still be improved quite a bit.
This article once again shows what a terrible software application openoffice is. Who ever decided to use Java to write it deserves to be in prison, seriously slow as hell. Why would anyone use it when you can download Microsoft office for free anyway. It is nothing more than a dreadful imitation of Microsoft Office.
For the open document format abiword and kword is the way forward.
Why would anyone use it when you can download Microsoft office for free anyway.
You mean pirated copy of Microsoft Office? Other than that, you need to pay Microsoft Office and you cannot gave it for free as vendor under EULA.
calc and writer in openoffice 2.0 simply blows microsoft away, and if people can not see that, they are simply stupid, even if openoffice 2.0 costed twice as much as microsoft office, it would be worth it compared to ms office.
This article once again shows what a terrible software application openoffice is.
how? because it doesnt handle microsofts formats well? how well does office handle oo.o formats?
Who ever decided to use Java to write it deserves to be in prison, seriously slow as hell.
java is only used for macros…
Why would anyone use it when you can download Microsoft office for free anyway.
because some people have a sense of honor and ethics.
It is nothing more than a dreadful imitation of Microsoft Office.
in the same way that microsoft is a dreadful imitation of corel? or windows is a dreadful imitation of the mac?
For the open document format abiword and kword is the way forward.
evidentily, you are one of the many people for whom an office suite of that calibur is completely unnessicary.
really? looks like a correct quote to me…
There is a little program called initng for linux that replaces sysvinit with a parallel boot… and its faster than XP… not to mention that xp isnt really fully booted when the desktop loads…..
We are talking a 15 second boot here on modern hardware (with initng)
OpenOffice.org is slow to your old computers ? Simple, install it on a new computer with linux and OO.org and use it as an “openoffice server”. If you have sufficient RAM on the server, you can start OO on 1 second (for the second run and so on because code is already in RAM) !
It is cheaper to buy RAM than M$ Office licenses nowadays. F*** if some dumb user prefer M$ Office when he doesn’t know 20% of its resources. OO.org dows the job perfectly for most (>95%) of people.
I use Pentium 1xxx with 32MB as X terminals and users can run the latest versions of OpenOffice in 1 second !
Corel Office maybe is better than M$ Office but people are so M$ addicted that refuses anything different.
Thank god nobody once did an comparison to an abacus and arabic mathematics. If people would have been arguing like this about such an comparison, someone would be dead by now (by an abacus thrown to the head, or a piece of paper suffed in his mouth with some math on it).
This author is going to open his nice 16-sheet XML sheet 50 times a day just to see how fast Office loads it. He saves it in all the formats he can find and checks if his theory is still right. Think of him with a big smile just by the way he thinks how fast it all works. And just remember that that was about a day of work and he’ll never progress any further than that.
Can we now stop arguing about offices and start worrying about os-es once more? (Wasn’t this OS-news? instead of Office-news? Or is this the office-discussionboard now a days?)
I’ll be the last person here to suck Microsoft’s d!ck. However, I have several Microsoft Word files dating back from 3.0 on the Mac.
Testing with:
OOo 1.1.4 (Debian Sarge)
Office XP (XP Pro)
Office 2004 (Tiger 10.4.2)
I discovered the following:
Nothing can read the Mac 3.0 Word files. Nothing.
Mac Word 4.0 files, sadly, read better on Office XP than Office 2004.
Past 4.x, import performance was the same in Office XP and Office 2004. These documents contain fairly complex style sheet formatting, so this isn’t trivial. In 1989 I was building the kind of formatting CSS2 uses, and with no tables. Create a manual with Word and you’ll start to see the complexities.
OOo failed to read any Mac files whatsoever.
Here’s the bottom line. The Office file formats changed several times in the last two decades, and the notion of internally versioning the files was late to Microsoft’s way of thinking. The Office apps have a serious amount of code devoted to examining a file and determining which version and platform it was developed on — the curly quotes and em dashes in Windows and MacOS Classic are completely different ASCII values in each platform, weren’t tokenized to a standard, and yet both platforms transparently translate these extended characters. As early as Word 4.0 apps were doing this.
Is it perfect? No. Are there a lot of old Office files which are garbage now? Yes. However, Microsoft has a product which does a better job of managing legacy files than an app which at best reads the last three years of Office documents provided it’s the same platform. And OOo has effectively canned OS X development, leaving it to a single developer to port to Aqua. Better there should be an X11 version of OOo 2.0 than no version.
This isn’t like iTunes where you can conquer a brand new market. Had Microsoft refused to import WordPerfect, 1-2-3, and the other legacy formats, I doubt Office would have caught fire as quickly as it did. But they knew what their customers needed and they supplied it rather than debate the merits of the idea, the same way OOo’s team consistently dicked around begged-for SVG clip art support in Write.
OOo’s team needs to get over its hubris, hunker down, and make stable import/export modules its priority for 2.0 before any business is likely to take the plunge. It’s no less than we’d ask of any other competitor. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts may be willing to batch-project export all their legacy documents to a more recent, translatable version of Microsoft Office formats to facilitate conversion to OOo, but no business should be expected to shoulder this kind of task (or worse, pay someone else to).
Fact is for Corporations…
The support for MS offic is huge.
It cost my company $250K per year in maintenance.
This also the true with others’ per industry press.
So now, companies are looking to migrate off MS due to huge on going costs.
As for Home, fact is im an accountant, You can use cheap spreadsheets and word processors. Im not writing the Next War and Peace you know.
I’m sorry, but OpenOffice easily gives Microsoft Office a run for its money in functionality and price, possibly this is one of the reasons for the new Microsoft Office look. They had to show something new, as everything else is old. The development of various OOo public API’s is a great development. The killer would be if there would be an OOo API for C#/.NET, particularly for Mono.
I use both Office XP (XP), Office 2K3 (Win2K3 Server), OO 1.4 (FC3) and OO 2.0b (FC4).
Being a developer, I mostly write design documents so I can only comment on Writer/winword.
First and foremost, Winword indeed starts faster then both versions of OO. (OO 1.4 eats around 10-12 seconds, OO 2.0 eats around 5 seconds, Winword eats around 3 seconds)
However, I doubt that a 2 seconds delay (between OO 2.0b and Winword) means anything to anyone.
Writer 2.0 beta is stable; I’ve yet to see it crash. (And I wrote a couple of 100 page long PDF documents with it.) Did I mention that OO’s PDF capability is a killer feature.
More-ever, even when reading non English doc/ppt/xls documents, beside some minor rendering problems, OO 2.0 never failed to open all the Office 2K3 files I throw at it.
In general, OO 2.0 handles Office XP/2K3 files *much* better then OO 1.4.
XML.
Two years ago I wrote a XML parser that ran on an 8bit CPU (with limited 16bit addressing) that took less then 4KB and ran inside a 4″ sensor. This guy is an idiot. Nuff said.
Boot times:
I’ve got a number of Windows XP/2K3 development machines.
My XP2000/512MB/7200 takes around 50 seconds to do a full boot; In it’s defense, I have WindowBlinds, PowerStrip, A/V, F/W, and other stuff.
On the other hand, my Dell Inspiron 7000 Laptop, a PII/366/256MB/4500 running Slackware 10.1/2.6.9 with dropline gnome, does a full reboot (Bios to gnome desktop) in the same 50 seconds. (Actually, it’s a second reboot, the BIOS loads faster dropping this to ~40 seconds)
Does it mean anything? No it doesn’t.
While my XP machine is loaded with software, my Laptop has been optimized to death. (I even yanked udev to improve performance)
In short, poor article: a lot of misconceptions (Comparing boot times, etc) poor methodology (why did he supply the excel source?) coupled with little understanding on how Windows and Linux work.
If you mostly write documents and use Excel/Calc to calculate your paycheck, OO is a great product that will save you a lot of money. Plus, it opens close to every single file format in the world.
Even better, you get to screw Microsoft for using undocumented proprietary file formats.
As for Linux vs. Windows.
Gilboa
As for Linux vs. Windows…
If you like Windows, and it works for you. Good for you! (Actually, I envy you. I find MS products to be very annoying… but that’s me)
Never the less, I said before and I’ll say it again:
You, and all of your friends have vested interest in Linux’ success.
Why? Because lack of competition kills innovation.
Unless someone lights up a fire under MS’ ass, the next 10 years of OS and Office development will be more boring then the last 10 years.
Gilboa
As for Linux vs. Windows…
If you like Windows, and it works for you. Good for you! (Actually, I envy you. I find MS products to be very annoying… but that’s me)
Never the less, I said before and I’ll say it again:
You, and all of your friends have vested interest in Linux’ success.
Why? Because lack of competition kills innovation.
Unless someone lights up a fire under MS’ ass, the next 10 years of OS and Office development will be more boring then the last 10 years.
Indeed, thats what some of these fanboys cannot grasp.
If one system dies, then there will be less of a push from the developers of the other systems to innovate.
I don’t use Windows, but I am glad it still exists. Other than that, I would be using GNOME 2 / KDE 3.0 or if in the worse case scenario…. XFCE !
well. Whole Office 95 install package was about 15 MB IIRC and contained EXCELLENT
Excel. With powerful VBA, lot of add-ins and much more convinient and flexible graphs/charts that current one. I felt myself much more productive as spreedshet designer and professional VBA programmer (bussiness apps) with that old compact version.
One thing I cannot understand – why support Microsoft Office? It has one largest corporation to back it up. Why support Windows? They’ll do it for you. This is like supporting a grownup man who’s trying to steal a candy from a baby. No need. Final word: support alternatives, support diversity! Nobody’s going to win if there’ll be only one usable Office left that also costs so much at least 50% of the world cannot afford it.
OpenOffice might be a tiny bit slower but keep in mind that it is still a Beta. It already has quite a bit more features and I fail to see any reason to still use Microsoft’s proprietory Office.
OpenOffice.org needs to have improved useability. Hopefully Office 12 will provide incentive to drive it towards this.
Microsoft Office needs to have a standard, XML OASIS compliant default file format (without any proprietary extensions.)
I’m betting OO.org is the more likely of the two to meet this requirement.
So far, the only other office program that works well for me has been ThinkFree. It’s not free, but it’s a lot cheaper than MS office. It’s also cross platform and it displays MS documents correctly, unlike OO.
http://www.thinkfree.com/products/index.jsp
That’s interesting. The one time I tried ThinkFree the MSOffice Word Doc that I opened in ThinkFree was slightly off in formatting in EXACTLY the same way the it was in the OOo 1.0.x version I was using. Makes me wonder if they are using OOo’s import/export filters for Office formats.
Currently OOo works for all of the docs and spreadsheets I need so I’ll stick with it.
Maybe Microsoft Office is the one rendering it slightly off
Wouldn’t surprise me a bit!
83 comments as of this posting, there is no way i am going to read all those comments. but i will put my $00.02 in , OpenOffice is what i use exclusivly because it does what i want, has a good spread sheet for accounting, word prosssor that is good enough for my college age daughter to type up & print papers in, and i can make recipts for customers purchases, i see no reason to shovel bucket loads of money to msft for an office suite when OpenOffice does what i need for free…
Their choice of Excel vs Calc is interesting. Simply because Excel is probably the best product Microsoft’s ever shipped… The Excel team is almost famous for the ideas they’ve had, ahead of their time.
And also. Who cares how fast your spreadsheet loads files? I mean, if you’re actually using it for spreadsheets it’s no big deal. When you start doing unorthodoxed things like using it for tables you refer to a lot; then you might care…
The memory usage on Calc was a bit rediculous though wasn’t it? Does this have something to do with a Java VM?
the java vm is generally around 20 megs of overhead, and to my knowledge its only used for macros, and to run the db part of Base in oo.o, so i doubt thats where the issue is.
Calc doesn’t have Clippy.
Wow.
A hundred comments and not one mention of Gnumeric?
Thats one of the, mathematicly speaking, least buggy spreadsheets I’ve seen. Sure, it lacks a layout feature or two, but it still blows the socks of the competition if you ask me.
It all depends on what you expect from your applications; for home users, if it weren’t for the need to sometimes share documents with their local bank, friends, family and so forth, who may have Microsoft Office; OpenOffice.org would be a great product.
Most users don’t need many of the advanced features that come with Microsoft Office – heck, I’m sure if you put Bill Gates in a quiet room, he’ll quite readily admit that Office is an overkill for Joe Average, and that its main focus, when developing Office, is on the enterprise, small to large business market, not the home user.
As for me, I love Office 2004, and coupled with 4th Dimension for my database; I’m as happy as Larry, as pleased as punch.
It very much depends what you are using the thing for.
If you are writing books or very long articles, OO is probably better than MS Office, because its more stable with handling long documents. For the naive user, the ability to export a draft for discussion to PDF, without worrying about plug ins, and thus be relatively free from unauthorised amendments, is very nice.
The opennness of the format is still an issue however, as relatively few will find it useful to save files in OO native mode. I have my own customers set up to save in .doc files because they share enough that trying to get them to save as is irritating and impractical.
It is quite true that transferring files from Office for Mac is an issue. I wrote a simple Applescript to do it on a batch basis, but it is not very satisfactory. You only have to do it once though.
People writing books or long articles really are better off with a text editor or Lyx could they but know it. If you are writing at length, about the last thing you need is to worry about formatting and page layout while you are composing. You do need intelligent search and replace, but you will mostly get the page layout when it goes to publication anyway.
For shorter stuff, OO is indistinguishable from Office.
One thing no-one has written about is the effect on corporate culture of the enormously powerful feature set in MS Office. Unlike many people, my observation has been that it is almost totally negative.
There is a deeply embedded trend in lots of large company service departments, HR and so on, to distribute forms using VB macros. Its a fact, but companies would do well to stop it. It does not, whatever the departments think, increase the productivity of the HR department to have them spend time being amateur programmers. The availability of VB in Excel has similarly corrupted business planning. Instead of having a few simple assumptions and arguing them through, people tend to write incredibly detailed macro dominated spreadsheets which cover one case, and then have no way of really assessing them properly. Similarly, presentations using PP tend to be full of idiotic visual effects which detract from getting the facts across. Decisions on the basis of position papers is far better. If adopting OO put a stop to all of these things, companies would be a lot better off!
If MS would just enforce their ‘rights’ a bit more, people would be jumping ship and using OOo in no time
How can a product be superior to a open source version if they are diferent in many ways ???. OpenOffice is not a copy of MS Office and for your stupid arguments i can say that MS office files are N times larger then the files created with OpenOffice no matter if they are .xls .doc ( which file format is Microsoft’s own ). This little thing can tell you how superior is your bloated Microsoft Product. I don;t even understand why such un article is posted in here ?????
OpenOffice is a product alternative to MS Office … It;s like saying that Windows is equal to Linux or Unix. This is very very stupid. OpenOffice is just un office alternative they are not trying to copy anything and i think in many ways they are much more better to work with then MS Office.
“ZDNet reader Yagotta B. Kidding”
lol
I agree that MS Office is a heck of a lot faster than Open Office
MS Excel can’t run natively on my Linux-Laptop.
Please choose speed for MS Excel on Linux?
( ) zero
( ) slow
( ) fast
( ) infinitely fast
LB06 wrote:
“While I do agree that MS Excel is slightly better, OO.org Calc definitely has come a long way.”
Keep in mind, OO.org is having to reach into the black pit of Office file formats and reverse engineer how they work.
Not the most enviable position to start from.
Sure I have MS Office 2000 Premium, but I use notepad for almost everything. Why? Because I want ASCII. “Hello World” in the latest MS file format is probably 40,000 to 60,000 bytes. It is 11 bytes (or 13 if you hit enter) in ASCII.
I have multi-column files that act as databases, can be sort by any column, fully searchable, etc etc — all done as ASCII text files. The (rare bits of) sorting I do with Word 5.0 for DOS, perhaps the finest program ever created. Loads so fast it ain’t worth finding out how many tenths of a second and takes no more memory than the DOS shell I leave open at all times.
Why use a sledgehammer, unless you are pounding an 800 pound gorilla named Ballmer?
– Everyone has notepad so portability is 100%
– Notepad takes 4 to 8MB of memory, so I can and do run a few sessions at once — generally 2 to 4.
– If I need a fair bit more power I fire up an oldie but goodie DOS app, using zero additional RAM, do my thing and quit.
– Once in a blue moon, usually when someone sends me a “You’ve just go to see this” email, I cautiously load WinWord.
My solution takes less than 10MB of RAM, offers maximum performance and portability and costs nothing (since my Word4DOS and WinWord licensed copies continue to work with new versions of Windows).
For what it is worth it would not be a stretch for me to use OOo instead of WinWord. But the main point is I don’t want to load an app, almost any app, that takes more to 50 or 60MB of RAM (or more!). I sure as heck won’t run it regularly.
Given my usage patterns, OOo offers as much as Office. Or as little.
Side point: OOo needs to make the macro/VM load optional. Most of us rarely use macros and the RAM/time hit is way too big.
Re: “Others like George Jay resorted to the knee jerk reaction that “Perhaps we should avoid using Windows because it too is bloated”. Not only is it not true, my Windows XP machine boots up in 30 seconds from a cold start to post login, and Microsoft Excel loads in under 2 seconds the first time without the office pre-loader cheat installed. I can even run Windows XP and Office 2003 on a PC with 64-MBs of RAM. This is less than some individual Java applications require and any modern Linux distribution takes nearly a full minute to boot on identical hardware using the default installation.”
Usability not boot time is the real issue. If people were really concerned over boot time then the real focus should be which OS is capable of running with less down time? This would result with Linux winning and I’ll state why unlike the comment quoted in the article. Unlike Windows, Linux can run 24/7 with out suffering fragmentation, virus/spyware attacks and most software even if updated doesn’t require a reboot. The only time a reboot instead of just logging off is necessary is either after updating the Linux Kernel or installing a graphics driver. When installing software whether as an update or new installation even the user doesn’t have to log off. SUSE Linux from Novell is a good example of this and those that use the distribution know what I’m referring to. Linux is also better at multitasking where the Windows NT kernel is not. This is tyipically the reason for Windows users suffering slow applications or crashing when using multiple applications. Coming from a former Windows background those that still use Windows should know what I’m referring to.
As for OpenOffice it suits my needs and most others due to it’s increased popularity while keeping cost low. As for those that bring up support issues Novell is one such company that offers support for OpenOffice due to including little enhancements for the software to help integrate it better with cross platform networks. From what I’ve seen of OpenOffice 2.0 over all when released as final to consumers it will be a very competitive product for those looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office.
People keep saying NT is bad at multi-tasking, but I simply don’t see it. Most days, at some point during the day, I have upwards of 15 programs running (on top of all the neccesary services) without ANY slowdown whatsoever. I can burn a cd, extract some archive and browse the web without a hitch.
I’ve been working on some 300-500pp documents over the last few years and use OO.Org writer exclusively. I use the spreadsheet for simple tasks from time to time and that’s about it.
I think it’s hilarious how people always argue extreme cases. It’s also a little scary how people will abuse a program “to save money” instead of using the proper software in the first place. I remember journalism school where people insisted on tabbing in each line and hitting hard return at the end of each line. I’ve seen databases and even manual calculations in word processors. Agh!
I’ve had wordprocessors crash and eat documents, sometimes on deadline. I’ve had to reconstruct documents and rewrite from scratch. But never with OO.org. I trust it and that’s worth everything.
Someone mentioned Abiword. The last time I tried it, it never finished “paginating” my 500pp document before I killed the program.
What extreme cases? Did you read my experience with doing a fairly simple but tedious task?
Everyone knows that OOo is a hog. That’s yesterday’s news. For a fast stand-alone full-featured spreadsheet, try gnumeric. I prefer it over OOo calc, for its speed but also because it is native to GNOME and because it is just cool.
OOo’s bloatedness is a legacy of its commercial ancestor StarOffice 4/5 which essentially attempted to replace the whole of the (Windows) desktop with its own workspace. Fortunately this was later reverted. But the whole concept of a monolithic all-in-one application remained unchallenged.
By contrast, free office apps such as Gnumeric and Abiword have always been speedy standalone apps. Unfortunately, Abiword hasn’t reached the same level of excellence and stability yet, and a free replacement for Powerpoint/Impress isn’t even in sight. So it turns out that the freeing of StarOffice was both a blessing and a curse for the community. A curse because it distracted attention and manpower from those office apps which had been free (and non-bloated) since their very birth.
Obviously you have not tried to use Oo.o 2 beta 2 which is marginally improved over current version. Now it is possible to install each applicationi separately.