This is an interesting comparison of OpenOffice 2.0 Calc and MS Office 2003 Excel. The author found that OOo is slow in some operations and takes a lot of RAM & CPU.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Ya know, OOo is written for mass appeal. I don't think anyone writing it was thinking "hey, what about the people who want to use spreadsheets for serious statistical work?" Well, someone probably did, and was probably told "we'll do that when we have time, these crazy users are harping us about releasing 
."
If you work with big spreadsheets, use the best spreadsheet program available: Microsoft Excel. If you need an office suite to write articles, school papers, or any number of other small tasks: You can probably safely save yourself $300 and just use OpenOffice.
Of course, if you've already bought MS Office, you might as well use it until it's not supported or you see a feature you want somewhere else.
Stop demanding perfection people. You'll never get it from anyone. No one has time to sit around and write algorithm proofs for your Office suite, and they usually don't even have time to redesign the unexpectedly slow parts.
I'd hate to work on the OOo team, they get so much guff for things... Probably because people have put OOo up on a pedestal it doesn't belong on.
Member since:2005-07-06
'Stop demanding perfection people' - I wasn't, if you were referring to me. I just pointed out that it really is slow sometimes (O.K., most of the time....). I mean, yeah, I own MS Office (academic edition) and I like some parts, hate other ones. E.g. in OO, it's really nice that you can do almost the same text formatting operations in Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw perhaps, whereas in Excel and Powerpoint, you can't do some useful stuff from Word. This is just my experience, I don't demand anything (although it would be nice if OO got faster, etc. ;]). I think if you don't need all the features Excel and Calc have, try gnumeric. I did, I love it for simpler tasks. It even opens some xls files faster than Excel itself 
. The best solution might be using all both Oo and MS Office, since they can actually nicely help each other sometimes.
'Probably because people have put OOo up on a pedestal it doesn't belong on.'
Dunno, seems to be the best open source suite in terms of features and stability (I don't think I remember it crash, could be wrong, though).
Duh, if only I had more time to learn C and C++ better ˘_˘.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I think the last version of the 1.1.x series I've used has been 1.1.3, and it was unusable with larger xls files. I have even tried to convert it to OO's native file format, but, to my surprise, that was even slower o.O. Unusable means opening a 3.6 MB (approximately) excel spreadsheet with about 10 worksheets in more than 10 minutes, whereas Excel opened it in cca 10 seconds. That was the point where I stared at it in disbelief, but it was that way all the time.