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." 
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Member since: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.
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Member since:2005-06-29
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.
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Member since:2005-07-12
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.
Member since:2005-07-06
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.
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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.