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Performance of OpenOffice.org and MS Office
m85476585 writes "I have used Microsoft Office since I purchased it a year ago. I wrongly assumed that since I paid for it, it must be better, but recently I have noticed that it seems slow, so I decided to try OpenOffice.org to see if it is faster. I compared Writer and Word to see which one is faster and consumes less resources. The results are posted on my website."
You're comparing one of the *worst pieces of bloatware* to OpenOffice.org? How CRUEL of you!
Global warming is a cube.
OO.o is fast and quite nice. Just not 100% compatible, and thus not an option for some of us poor suckers who don't get to decide what software we must use in collaborative frameworks.
From TFA:
Nice that the author is admitting his bias up front...makes the obvious skewing in the rest of this 'test' marginally easier to swallow.
I'd love to see a good, objective comparison of M$ Office and Open Office...too bad this article ain't it.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I have used Open Office for the last semester (16 weeks for those non-students out there) ... and yes, Open Office is faster than MS Office... however... since Open Office isn't widely used, I wind up exporting to DOC, and the formatting has been screwed up in a couple of situations (often at inconvenient times, like when I need to turn a paper in and I find out in the lab, I learned quickly after the 1st one) ...
In speed and resources, Open Office comes out ahead, but the issues I have stem more from compatability (and exporting, mostly)
It is a good office suiteif you are going to be using it on your system and never sharing your files with, say, a company or professor (who will likely not be using Open Office)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
You probably microwave your pop tarts, too.
More
A slashdot post where you actually HAVE to read TFA?
This is a first, no information about the results or specifics were put in the post! We'll probably still have idiots who make posts without actually reading it though.
I did read TFA by the way and found the results to be the opposite of my experiences. I know what that means though, you'll understand if you RTFA! Muahahahahaha!
...and you don't make regular backups of your files?
From TFA:
My computer is slow (a 2.2 GHz Celeron with 512 MB RAM)
By that definition, my 500 MHz laptop positively crawls.
According to TFA, it took 8 seconds for the guy to close MS Word. Word may be slower than OO, but it's certainly time to get a new computer, buddy...
Writer made a smaller file than the original text document, so it must have compressed it. OpenOffice saves all documents in zipped xml. You can unzip the files and read the xml content if you want to.
So he got fired just for trying something different? For taking a chance that wasted a little bit of time? Damn, it's a good thing I don't work in a place like that.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
I don't think so.
"I haven't used MS Office in over a year, but last I knew it required a restart."
No it doesn't.
This 'analysis' has absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
I'm sitting here on a P4-M 2GHz laptop running Windows 2003 and every single Office application, including Visio, opens in less than two seconds.
I guess I should post that on a website to clearly demonstrate how superior Office is to OO.org.
I wonder what the performance is if Open Office was run on Linux and MS Office on Windows. How does Open Office perform on Windows? Is it slower or faster than on Linux on a similar configuration?
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Can you possibly benchmark two separate applications on two separate platforms and possibly expect to obtain results that are useful for anything other than starting a religious war?
Sigh, why do I come to slashdot anymore?
From TFA, opening office takes 12 seconds on average, with first startup being over 30 seconds.
I just rebooted my machine and Word 2000 opened in less than 2 seconds. Oh yea, I'm currently ripping a DVD. My machine is faster than the one tested, but not 15 times faster.
I don't know how the testing is done, but all the quoted speeds seem way, way too high for both apps.
I recently opened up a Microsoft Word document that a friend sent to me a couple of weeks ago. The original size was 19 kilobytes. I opened up in Open Office Writer, and then doubled the amount of text in it. I then saved it to the same filename (.doc), and the resulting file was only 11 kilobytes, even with DOUBLE the amount of text!
In the very rare case that I need to use MS Office, I still use the copy of Office Professional I got when I bought a 60MHz Pentium from Gateway 2000, 11 years ago. It fairly screams. As far as I can tell, they haven't added any useful features to either Excel or Word since.
...News at 11.
I wrongly assumed that since I paid for it, it must be better
Nope, it's just the same as the warez version. That's the whole point of warez!
...after he admitted to voluntarily using MS Works.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Well, he's not trying to run it on a Pentium 233 so I guess your [sic] the only idiot here.
You have to type VERY fast to even notice either doing anything. What I want to know is how you can type that fast without the keyboard melting???
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Microsoft currently is facing a problem with Microsoft Office. It has reached market saturation in the developed markets like the USA. The package already has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy an upgrade.
Worse, OpenOffice, even with its reduced functionality, has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy Microsoft Office.
Unless Microsoft can venture into new products for new markets, Microsoft will soon notice a rapid shrinking of its revenue. Of course, Microsoft management is not sitting still. Notice the billions of dollars being poured into Microsoft Labs, and the entry into the game box market. Microsoft management is smart -- if unethical.
Wow, so this isn't even a comparison on a clean formatted disk, but one that has had bloat crap build up on the computer over a year?
The dude says Microsoft Office, but isn't that a suite of tools? Will the program run slower and faster depending on how many were installed in the bundle? I don't know, but knowing how to take screen shots and knowing about CTRL-Alt-Del to look at processor usage time is pretty amateur. Let's see some statistical comparisons that are actually meaningful.
(sarcastic)Very interesting comment(/sarcastic)
//bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152413&cid=1279 0308
Btw, aren't you talking of OpenOffice on FreeBSD ?
Hint: I love good trolling, but it have to be a bit more imaginative...
Apple switches to x86.
Debian releases a new stable version.
OpenOffice.org is "fast".
So does anyone know any good "hell freezes over" jokes?
A year ago I purchased a "dog" from the pet store. Since I paid money for this, I assumed it would perform better. I decided to test it against my cat.
First, I chained the dog using a 5 foot leash. I then spent the next hour trying to get the cat into a leash. Then I tested "fetch" by throwing a stick 10 feet away. Funny, neither cat nor dog returned with the stick.
I'll post the rest of my results later.
Wow, does this make the following statement a little more real for that kid?
"I don't know anyone that was fired for using Microsoft"
Was he fired for the failure of the "evaluation"? I mean in your post you said it was an evaluation. I have a feeling if that is the norm where you are change does not happen often does it?
I must assume that the author was running these tests on a computer of the minimum specs because I find Word 2003 loads nearly instantaneously upon launch after it has been loaded into memory and NOWHERE near 30 seconds on first launch, maybe 5 (including antivirus scanning that it runs at launch).
... words. That said, who spell checks 2600 page documents, or writes them for that matter?
/." articles soon?
The closing time rating is just stupid. Including the time it takes for a human to tell it not to save normal.dot (I haven't seen this happen since a few versions of Word in the past) is... inept.
If you are going to load a 2600 page document into Word, it would be general practice to load something that contains words, rather than garbage. Word would not take nearly as long to spell check a document that was written in
Can we stop with the stupid "I don't know anything but I want to review something and get put on
You screwed up by not keeping proper backups and fired the guy that suggests trying something that could reasonably save the company lots of money? wow, you suck as a boss.
The overheating crap CPUs being pushed out by both Intel and AMD are, in fact, inferior in a number of ways to processors sold seven years ago. These fragile power hungry pieces of shit are misenginereed for one reason and one reason only --marketing. The magahertz myth you see.
So, you are quite simply wrong and your comment in imappropriate.
What the hell did you do to Word to make it so slow? Word2003 opens in a few seconds fresh, near instantly if loaded previously. It also closes in way under a second for me and does not spawn a random msworks.exe process. It also uses far less memory than your results suggest. Are you sure you didn't buy Works instead of Office? OpenOffice may well be a marvelous and free piece of software, but Office is still damn good and not that bloated.
I once swore off MS Office since it was so slow and bloated. It would sometimes crash and I'd lose all my work that was in memory and not saved to disk (unless it made it to the temp file). I converted to OpenOffice and adjusted to life without the paper clip (yay!).
However, after about a week, I was working on a spreadsheet, when it crashed. Just like MS Office I thought. But to my horror, not only did I lose my unsaved data, my data file was corrupted! I lost everything, and it was very important financial data.
So I swore off OpenOffice. I can tolerate loosing my unsaved data, but I don't want to have to remember to make a copy of the file every 10 minutes!
...which one improves your typing speed and accuracy?
His machine is a 2.2 GHz celeron. What you are quoting is the "minimum system requirements" according to MS, which he included as part of his comparison.
It may very well be true that only an idiot would try to run MS Office with a pentium 233; however, if so then it must also be true that MS thinks its customers are idiots, since that's what they recommend.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Get over your 'my linux will run on a 7 year old computer' mentality please.
Whatever does run on donated seven-year-old PCs will win in K-12 education, where buying used hardware lets a district afford better teaching staff, and in the so-called Third World.
You're completely right. People bash MS for being behind standards and slowing progression down when Linux zealots compare every piece of MS software to Linux software on OLD PCs.
Try running both pieces of software on a brand-new Dell, or, you know, a PC that REAL PEOPLE USE.
I don't get how that is because of Windows. In any O/S, the first load of any app would be slower if the app wasn't loaded into memory beforehand, if it wasn't preloaded in some manner, or if it was loaded before but is no longer in the O/S's disk cache.
I have installed and used OO.org many PCs,
and on all of them MS Office starts way faster than OO.org.
I love OO.org, but these "benchmarks" are simply fake or guys MS Office install is broken in some way.
Microsoft comes around the side, Sun accellerates to the front and SWOOOSH!! Takes down the evil empire. Score one for open source!
If you're really looking for fast you might want to try something like Gnome Office instead of OO.o. And yes Gnome Office has a windows port. From GOME Office AbiWord has a native Windows port (which is super speedy) and Gnumeric uses GTK+ and is therefore slightly slower.
How do you compare two different products anyways?
They would cache things diferently. One feature of Excel for example is that the first time you use it, it takes a while to load all the bloat, the next time you use it, it runs nice and quick because all the macros and doohickeys are loaded up.
It really is like comparing apples and oranges.
You are so incredibly biased towards Linux/Open Source and away from anything Microsoft that you simply haven't even a modicum of credibility when it comes to comparing these products. I can't take you seriously. Sorry.
http://www.busyweather.com/
It ran programs backwards!?! Sweet!
Something must be broken with his computer. Word 2003 takes 2 seconds to open for the first time on my computer. Granted, it's a little faster(athlon 64 3200+), but it's not 15x faster.
Also, the objectivity of the article astounds me:
"It has been over a year since I installed MS Office, but I know it had to be restarted and that it takes up 450MB (according to Windows)."
So why even mention the install time of OO.org if you're not going to bother measuring the install time of MS office?
Between the highly suspect startup and closing times, the lack of scientific rigor, and the blatant anti-MS bias("I don't like Microsoft"), this is not a comparison - just a thinly-veiled anti MS troll
RTFA, he said he's using a celeron 2.2 with 512megs of ram
I have a crappy machine too, but Word does not take anywhere close to 20 seconds to open, even for the first time after a reboot. Methinks it's just one more Microsoft hater trying to justify himself... neeeext!
and a few more...
Been there, done that ...
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=150 323&cid=12602399
OpenOffice Write being faster than Word isn't likely to encourage anyone to switch, because, when it comes to word processors, speed isn't really a big deal. So what if it takes three times as long to load up a document in Word - if I'm going to be working on that document for the next several hours, those extra seconds of load time are essentially meaningless.
What OpenOffice really needs to beat Microsoft are:
1 - A better interface - Which IMHO OpenOffice does have, but without some usability studies to show managers it doesn't matter.
2 - Complete compatibility with Office documents and Office DRM, which will be essential for interacting with the large corporations and Governments of the world that will be using the DRM features of Office to control the dissemination of information.
If it takes you 31.1 seconds to open Word for the first time and 8.4 seconds to close Word with a machine like this, something is horribly wrong. Word on my 1.33ghz tbird took only 2-3 seconds to load and the closing time was less than a second. After Word has been cached in memory, it opens with the snap of your fingers.
Perhaps I can suggest scanning for spyware? :)
That's so weird that he's had so many problems happen lately!
I would go as far as to say that your company seems like a poor excuse for a company anyway. Have you heard of backup? What about version control systems? Losing a copule of hours work actually is nothing. Shit happens! A few hours?! You fired the other guy because this guy would not keep backup? Is your hair pointy by the way? This kind of management I've only seen the like of in http://www.dilbert.com/
Insert `fortune -o` here
Agreed.
However, OO.o still isn't 100% compatible with that. So, I'll keep using Word. Especially given that my company hands out the corporate key like candy. (and No)
............. This news just in ............. Microsoft products inefficient ... more at ten.
Am I the only person who notices that it's the Anonomous Cowards that post the flaimbait, the ass-backwards, and the plain annoying-as-hell comments the most?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
You stripped all the file's metadata (including revision history) and now it's smaller. Will the wonders never cease?
I'm really surprised because even though I love OpenOffice and hate Microsoft Office, I've always found OO to be significantly slower to load. Once loaded, it's fine, but Word is significantly quicker to load on the systems I've used.
"The number one reason being that I am tired of waiting 30 seconds for Word to load just to spellcheck a blog entry. My computer is slow (a 2.2 GHz Celeron with 512 MB RAM), so I wanted to make sure that OO.o is faster if I am going to use it."
It isn't the CPU or RAM which is making it slow. Apart from the software/OS/filesystem, it's your disk drive. Buy and install a 15K drive, or indeed a couple of them and separate OS/Swap and Apps.
Deleted
Seldom have my thoughts been verbalized so accurately by someone else!
If you're old enough to get screwed, you should be old enough to get hammered.
I've noticed that after I installed XP SP2 onto my machine, the 384MB wasn't adequate anymore and MS Office and everything else slowed down a bit. I wish I had the numbers.
P.S. Adobe Reader 7.0 just kills me sometimes. It seems like it locks up. Even if I'm just saving a file.
Well this troll is creative, isn't he...
Global warming is a cube.
I heard that MONO support got finally added to OOo this is great news for everyone.
Got an old rev of MS Office? OpenOffice is better than MS Office 95 and cheaper than upgrading.
Deleted
I have been using OO.org 2.0 beta and I have been very impressed with both its features and performance, especially in Calc (Excel equivalent).
Most delightful to me was the ability to use regular expression pattern matching when doing search and search & replace! For instance, I needed to remove all two digit US state names from a column that also contained country names, so I simply did a search on [A-Z][A-Z] and replace with "" (actually this didn't quite work as it also removed 'UK', but you get the idea). Microsoft seems to have a terrible aversion to regular expressions, preferring its users to learn BASIC and write their own macros to handle these simple tasks.
Calc 2.0's speed is also very impressive. Copying and moving huge (10,000+ row) columns is instantaneous, whereas Excel produces quite a bit of churning noises (I think it uses wooden gears).
Calc 2.0 has also saved my life on three occasions now, as it is miraculously able to open and repair xls documents that were corrupted by Excel (granted they were saved out by version 95 -- but Excel XP would fatally crash when I tried to open the same document!)
To test lagre files, I used a 4.8 MB text file. I opened the program and Notepad, copied the tect, saved it, closed the program, and opened the saved file and resaved it.
Ctrl+W. Next pointless article.
I mean, what is he comparing?
And what shit has else running to get his start times that slow, if he obviously ran the tests on his private machine that wasnt cleaned for more than a year?!
Also, i dont get what his problem with the msworks process is... And why it is running anyway, because i just started word to check and i dont have such a task running...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Summary: iCal look really nice, but SAP has "a few more features". Each gets 4 stars out of five.
The "fewer bugs" part is due to the fact that more people use [OpenOffice], since it is free.
Most people use a pirated copy of Microsoft Office because it is free, or an older version because it came "free" with their computer. OpenOffice is still a minority program.
If OpenOffice really does have fewer bugs, it is for different reasons.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Why the hell is this even on Slashdot in the first place? Who is this guy? Is he anyone I should know? Is he known to be an authority on anything?
Does any dumb fuck get Slashdot coverage if they write something that's anti-MS? FUCK.
People are forgetting, VI is far superior to openoffice.org, ms office, and emacs, it never loses your changes when your shell crashes, its much faster to do common operations (you try to yank 10 lines and move them without touching the mouse in office) VI RULES!!!
Please, pass the crack.
More people use OO.org than MS Word? you gotta be kidding me.
OOo 1.4: 22 sec MSWord 2003: 4 sec Outlook had been opened before (too lazy for a reboot). OOo 2nd: ~2 sec, MSW 2nd: 1 sec
Please Slashdot!
Do NOT plug stories submitted by their creator!
The signal to shit ratio is just to low...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
This guy should really try OO2 beta. It is a little more friendly, and works better too.
But then, Office wouldn't really stand a chance, would it?
The number one reason being that I am tired of waiting 30 seconds for Word to load just to spellcheck a blog entry.
Solution: Use any Linux distribution and Konqueror, a file and web browser with built in spell checking. Misspelled words are highlighted in red. Corrections are chosen from a right click pulldown operation. Bonus #1, it will install Open Office for you too and it's faster than it is on M$ junk. Bonus #2, you won't get malware and other crap slowing down your OS in time so you won't have to ever "check" you computer - or reload the OS - again unless you want to.
That was easy. The next problem will probably have the same answer.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
And don't tell us that being able to create pdf's and swf's make OpenOffice superiour to MS Office; Open Office has a hefty wodge of features that aren't suited to document editing and are out of place. You can't really compare Open Office's capabilities to MS Office since it does so many things that it shouldn't be doing; at the most they should be optional add-ons.
I've had the displeasure of using OpenOffice for some time now, and I yearn to return to MS Office which due to circumstances I can't. And no, I'm not trolling: this is months of hard labour talking.
Which reminds me: its time to re-visit AbiWord and see if its ready for prime-time yet....
Tell the author you don't!
I will say that Word opens nearly instantly on this platform. It's up in about a second -- perhaps a bit less -- and feels lighter than most of the "minimalist" word processor alternatives I've tried.
My Windows box isn't as muscular as the Mac, but I can't imagine it takes much longer to open Word there. A couple or three seconds, tops.
No doubt that MS Office is bloatware. My Office folder is 486 MB. Outrageous.
But I gotta wonder what is wrong with the reviewer's test computers.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
More people use OpenOffice than MS Office? I call BS. Let's see some numbers. I like OpenOffice a lot and recommend it to everyone who uses it for personal/casual use, but I doubt it's the more popular of the two.
This poo is cold.
However, the benefit is that OpenOffice runs faster and has fewer bugs. The "fewer bugs" part is due to the fact that more people use it, since it is free. More eyeballs means that more bugs are caught, and the volunteer developers can then fix the bugs.
I call BS. Openoffice.org is even worse than MSO at getting things to render correctly, and I've definitely have OO.o crash more times on me than word has. Not to mention..."more people use it"? Far more people use microsoft office than use OO.o.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
The reason I need Excel is not to open Excel documents or use Visual Basic or anything like that, it's to quickly and easily edit tab-delimited text documents. Opening these with Open Office on a Linux box is like pulling teeth. If only I could type something like
and get the expected result. Instead, I get filename opened in the Writer (the Word equivalent). If I type I get my tab-delimited text document opened with Excel, not Word. This is crucial for doing things like when I need to examine lots of data quickly. It's not like it's complicated things that hold Open Office back for me, it's simple little things that keep me using Excel.I've seen a lot of things, but I've never been a witness.
First rule of delivering documents to anyone in a electronic format, is using pdf.
It's only in explicit collaboration situations when it's expected for the recipient to edit or change anything, you should use anything else.
Phew, I thought we would get through today without 5 articles bashing Microsoft - what a relief!
Link
However, the benefit is that OpenOffice runs faster and has fewer bugs. The "fewer bugs" part is due to the fact that more people use it, since it is free.
I suggest you ask 100 randomly chosen people if they know Word/MS-Office. Then ask them if they know Writer/OpenOffice. I think you'll be surprised.
OpenOffice is a great piece of software (I am especially impressed with the new 2.0 beta; truly a great leap forward compared to 1.1), but hardly anyone who's not using linux/bsd/solaris/etc. even knows of its existance. Nor will they even care when somebody mentions it to them as long as places like Dell preinstall copies of Word on every consumer pc they sell.
I recently wrote two reporst, in in Word, one in OpenOffice; the main reason I used OpenOffice for the latter, was that I needed semi-visio-like functionaltiy, which Word/PowerPoint did not provide, and OpenOffice's Draw did.
In doing so, I found OpenOffice was the better experience overall. Crashes: Word 2, Open Office 2. Seems to be better functionality in OpenOffice as well, or at least things are more logically structured.
I think OpenOffice's time has come, or at least will be over the next few years.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
You're an MS astroturfer aren't you, tut tut.
It's just that OO does quite happily perform a save every few minutes and at the same time it can also perform a backup of the document just in case the working document gets destroyed.
The option is under Tools->Options->Load/Save
Deleted
What amazes me is that even the trivially superficial "accountability" of a Slashdot user ID is enough to make the difference. Our Slashdot experience shows it's not so much anonymity that lets people say irresponsible things, but the mass psychology of people anonymous as indistinguishable, in groups. It's not the identification of a person with anything else in their own life that keeps them more responsible. It's the ability to be confused with any one of many others that enables them. Just a mask doesn't necessarily embolden people, but a uniform, like identical white hoods, seems to do the trick.
--
make install -not war
Also, did he make sure that both programs were set to have the same background tasks running (like repagination, automatic spellcheck, automatic hyphenation, etc.)? In one of his tests Word takes a lot longer on a long text file because it's running various automatic tasks on it. Were those tasks run by OO.o as well? I'm pretty sure that all are available, but it may be that some are turned off by default, while with Word it seems that most everything is turned on by default.
I know that when I worked at a Co. that standardized on MS Office, when I got a new PC or they upgraded my version of MS Office, the first thing I had to do was go in and turn off a lot of automatic tasks.
Now that I'm self-employed, I use OO.o. Do I believe it's better than Word? No. Each of them does things the other doesn't and does some things better or worse than the other. Which one is best depends on what your needs are. Right now, my needs are such that OO.o meets them, and it's free.
Start a happiness pandemic
I'm sure you guys are tired about hearing of apple but I am very impressed with office 2004 for mac.
:D
.doc file that is of size 20mb takes about 15 seconds. I didn't have the patience to wait for spell+grammar checking to finish because it was taking forever. A full quit is is in the order of a second.
Install
Drag + Drop the folder to "Applications". Takes up 525 MB. Takes only a few minutes + 0 reboots. Everything is standalone. The way it should be! Only comes with writer/excel/ppt/entourage/msn messenger for mac. None of that "office toolbar" or other crap. Plays nicely with the system
Cold boot: On my G4 ibook (with its magical 133 fsb) takes about 2 to 4 seconds (4 seconds after fresh reboot,
Opening and closing large documents. 6mB txt file opens instantly. Copying and pasting all that data took some time (didn't measure but it was slow) Saving a new
The coolest part of all is the free floating transparent toolbars and toolboxes. I'm also more fond of the user interface. I think its clean, generally well laid out. Obviously microsoft has it in them to play nice and put out a great product. I must admit i prefer to use latex for engineering lab reports. (texshop is a great app for os x)
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Word 2003 opens in about 5 seconds on my 400mhz Pentium 2 box with 384mb ram... in under 2 on my Athlon 64 system.
I've always noticed that OpenOffice.org is even slower on both of those systems (under Fedora Core 2, I don't use it on Windows). Perhaps your computer could use a bit of maintenance?
Nonetheless, those results contradict common logic. Microsoft has the source code to Windows XP; they know *all* the methods to speed up applications in use on it. I certainly don't hate OpenOffice.org, I think it's awesome that an open source project is challenging Microsoft - competition is good for all of us. But, we must remember, OpenOffice.org is based on Sun's StarOffice which was often seen as bloated and slow.
I dunno, I have an old Celeron 600 laptop with 128 megs of ram. Office 2003 works just fine on it. I don't have any complaints. I run XP on that laptop too.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
You cannot justify your statements while using an OS that has whored itself to the internet... a freshly installed OS is the only way to compare start times.
If you are going to make bold statements please follow *some* basic scientific procedures to create a baseline.
RTFA. He's using a 2.2GHz Cel with 512M RAM.
But it just seems to be forever though. Funny to see that it is actually faster, now I don't have to apologize to my customers anymore about the slow start of OO.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Now there's been two reviews in a few days, from blogs. The first one was Acrylic, and now this. I think it is time that the /. editors review the reviews. Bad stuff like this will only come back to harm slashdot...
So please, do a sanity check. None of those two reviews has revealed anything new. It is common knowledge that OO.org makes smaller documents than MSOffice.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Anyone with a computer that takes 8 seconds to close word has major computer problems in the first place. A Celery 2.2 with 512mb of ram shouldnt take NEAR that long to do that sort of thing. I used it at work on a 1.6ghz p4 w/ 256mb of ram and it opens and closes literally almost instantly. i can guarantee that it definatley takes no more than 3-4 seconds to open OR close word. I regularly save words docs that are hundreds of pages long and it has never taken more than 1-2 seconds to save any of them.
While i don't favor MS over open source, this guy's story is utter bullcrap.
Some prat has a template and they insert $WHATEVER into it where WHATEVER is whichever bit of software is being talked about and post it on slashdot.
Deleted
Thx /.! Thx a LOT! Have all /.ers turned into trolls recently???
Here is a link to neoOffice, Open office for OS X
http://www.neooffice.org/
This is such a poor review... he didn't use any apps to actually test the speed or anything only like a timer watch... and he's testing a linux app. agaiant an windows app. ... at leat if he used OpenOffice on windows... anyways thats the second really bad review in 2 days... moderators please stop posting bs crap againt microsoft written by nobody's
thx.
You just got trolled by a bot, it's been going around Slashdot for quite some time.
You meant to say "many" instead of "more". Otherwise, your article is insightful.
I convinced my department to adopt OpenOffice Writer instead of illegally copying Microsoft Word. We have never regretted the decision.
And notepad is even faster. What's his point?
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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HTML
Please do not ask me to make any programs.
did he really mean Pearl there? looks like that should be Perl. what is Pearl
The totally unscientific nature of the tests does not really matter anyway since it's measures the most useless parameter ever used in benchmarks for desktop software. The measurement of startup time for this class of software are pure nonsens. Since the time actually spent doing real work with the application are gigantic compared to startup time, whether it's 1 s or 1 minute. It means nothing compare to spending 10 minutes or more writing a letter or the whole workday writing on a report.
OpenOffice runs faster and has fewer bugs
Sounds like someone hasn't actually ever used OpenOffice.
George, go back to the White House. Laura is calling you. Barbara has been found drunk again. This has to stop.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
To be fair, Microsoft recommend a Pentium III, not a Penitum 233, which is the minimum requirement. From the page you linked to:
Requirement: Personal computer with an Intel Pentium 233-MHz or faster processor (Pentium III recommended)
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Just becaue /. has linux zealots does not mean that you can claim anything. And since when has OpenOffice become snappy. I read a similar article in OSNEWS recently where they were praising java's speed(LMAO).
Bottomline I use Openoffice because it is free and MSWord does not run on linux natively.If Openoffice is so superior we would see StarOffice sales go up.
PS: How many drinks did you have before wrting this , Talk of Weekends.
He wins either way:
- Say OO.o is better than MSOffice, gets all the OO.o fanboys on side shouting down MS regardless of evidence
- Obviously show something is wrong with his MSOffice setup, so the MSOffice fanboys can shout about that
Either way, a good half million page views. The guy is a genius.... and not comments! Btw, who thinks that commenting comments is actually more useful than rating stories?
Too bad he didn't use the built in spell checker on either one of them when he wrote his review
Before I RTFA I am gonna make a prediction on the results: OO.org is slower. I like using it more than MS Office but I can't get it to run very fast, mainly on slower computers. Older MS Office versions can run with good speeds on them. Maybe OO.org should release a minimal version for this kind of comps?
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Here, Word was significantly slower bacause it had to "save changes to normal.dot". I didn't change normal.dot! I didn't even type anything!
This sounds like he has a virus infecting Word's default template. This is a perfect real world example! With such a high market concentration and Microsoft's historically lax security many people will experience the same thing. Yay for alternatives.
Have you tried the export to PDF option yet? It's quite excellent in my experience.
OpenOffice can open and save as pdf? If so then I think I'll download and install it today. I have a bunch of stuff I'd like to scan and save as pdf. I was thinking of getting Pagis Pro for this but if OpenOffice can do it forget the expense of Pagis.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm using slightly older versions than in the article, but I've found Word is faster (via Wine) than OOo on Linux.
Fedora Core 1, 2.2Ghz Celeron:
OpenOffice 1.1.3*:
Opening Time:
First: 22 seconds
Average: 11.6 seconds
Closing Time:
1 second
Word XP:
Opening Time:
First: 9 seconds
Average: 5 seconds
Closing Time:
3 seconds
*Note: 1.1.4 is supposedly quite a bit faster.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Some prat has a template and they insert $WHATEVER into it where WHATEVER is whichever bit of software is being talked about and post it on slashdot. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152483&thresho ld=0&commentsort=3&tid=185&tid=109&mode=thread&pid =12796664#12796779
Are you the prat?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Pages OO 2599 Word2683
In his comarision he notes the number of pages in what he copied in. I think that is a matter of format(font, font-size, margin-size) not application.
I'm fairly certain that if Open Office significantly eats into Office's market share that Microsoft will release a cut down version that is significantly cheaper or rmaybe even free. They've already done this with their cut down version of XP
I dunno how he made Word startup that slow, but Word 2003 start on first start in 5 secs on my Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 GB RAM, the next starts are faster than 1 second, OOWriter needs more than 3 secs even after the first time. Not to say the OO "keep it in memory" app needs over 70 MB RAM before it even started even one app if used!
Complete compatibility would be nice. I presented 4 papers at a major Complex Systems conference in Boston a year ago. As is the default protocol at conferences, I brought my papers on DVD for digital projection. Out of cheapness and laziness, I did not bring a laptop, knowing that everyone else would. A minute before my talk on how to build computers out of enzyme molecules, the laptop at the podium was repossessed by its owner, and another substituted. "Runs Open Office," said the owner of the new one. I approved. When I tried showing my equations and diagrams, they were weird, as vertical lines became rectangular boxes, and other differences. I found myself saying: "wherever you see a rectangular box, mentally replace it with a vertical line, and move it six screen-inches to the right. Hey, you're geeks, you can do this." The differential equations were also no longer proportionally spaced, so numerators and denominators didn't line up. Nonfatal, but mildly irksome. OTOH, 2 of the 4 presentations left me handwaving while someone nerdish restarted Windows at the beginning of my talk, delaying my first visual support. This is an uncomfortable transition between the era of transparency projectors (itself following 35 mm slides) and full web-based digital projection. C'mon, make an OO that allows me to continue being cheap and lazy while I present revolutionary papers at conferences, please!
-- Professor Jonathan Vos Post
Personaly, I think the lego robot was more interesting than his office comparison.
But, that may be just me.
My machine is an Athlon 2600+ with 512 MB RAM. MS Office 2003 opens in less than a second, the first time and every time. I would suggest that part of the problem might be that his computer has a corrupted install of Word, and/or spyware or other problems. There is no reason that it should take that long to open Word. Additionally, I am curious to know how he timed these to the hundredths of a second. /., and we should be taking this with a grain (or a pound) of salt.
I like OO.o just fine, but in my experience it always seemed to work slower than Word; granted, I haven't used OO.o in about 14 months.
I think this guy needs to start over with a clean install of both (and a clean OS install) before he posts this kind of stuff to
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress
I'm convinced that the biggest problem is that full compatibility goes well beyond file formats. It's also about application behaviour, for which there aren't any documented standards. We've gotten to the point where the file formats are understood, but behaviour compatibility is still incredibly tricky.
I use OpenOffice as much as possible these days, albeit mostly for word processing. Personally I've encountered a few less annoyances with OpenOffice, particularly with things like moderate table manipulation. Unless forced to, though, I still won't trust OpenOffice to save to .doc correctly without checking it... at least not with anything important.
In particular, I've noticed that at least some of the incompatibilities are semantic differences in the object model. I'm not sure how they can be fixed in 100% of cases.
One example that comes to mind is with paragraph spacing in tables. If a paragraph is empty, OpenOffice still includes the paragraph spacing, causing the table row height to be slightly higher. MS Word, on the other hand, ignores the paragraph spacing unless there's actually text in the paragraph.
The MS Word behaviour seems like a bug, or just another one of the little annoyances that I referred to before, but it's one that everyone in Word is used to. If you use OpenOffice.org to open an MS Word file that has tables, empty paragraphs in some of the cells, and paragraph spacing specified on those paragraphs, there's a very likely possibility that the pages won't line up.
Some people might think that the OpenOffice import filter could simply recognise that it's an MS Word file, and turn off paragraph spacing on the import -- causing the table cells to be the same height. It's not that simple, though, because if somebody decides to type in the document and send it back, it'll be messed up all over again.
The only way that OpenOffice.org can be truly compatible with MS Word is to keep track of whether the opened document was a Word document. Then it would need to either:
Personally I'd hate the second option. I've come to like the OpenOffice.org document model a lot more, simply because it seems more predictible and consistent, and doesn't have a lot of little annoyances that the MS Word model has, at least in the ways that I use it. It'd also mess up a whole lot of older OpenOffice documents that I have lying around if they suddenly opened with a different policy on things like paragraph spacing.
The first option seems very complicated, though. It's asking OpenOffice to not just simulate the document formats, but also the behaviour of another proprietary application. It's also asking the user to keep track of all the possible different ways that OpenOffice.org might act at any given time. That in itself could turn into a UI nightmare, because suddenly the user interface of the application is much less consistent. (Keep in mind that we're talking about regular users, here. It's not like Mozilla quirks mode, where the main people dealing with the differences are web developers.)
I don't know exactly what the best way is to fix this, but it's definitely not as easy as just writing decent import and export filters. Personally I'm just fortunate enough that I don't have to share my documents very often. When I do give someone a Word-format document, though, I make a point to at least check it in Word whenever possible before handing it over.
According to his results, re-saving a file takes the same amount of time as initially saving the file (whereas Word takes significantly less time). Seems like OOo might need to implement some sort of stepwise saving (save only what has changed). Maybe they already do something like this, please excuse my ignorance. I'm new to the linux world.
I applaud anyone taking the time to do this sort of thing and sharing it with the world. That said, this review is very limited and of little value in terms of weighing the two options against each other. Seconds here, kilobytes there... matters little for most users. Usability, familiarity, compatibility matters more, and there, I think, MS Office beats OO . I'm no big MS fan, and I've used OO extensively (and I think it's great there is an alternative), but I don't think this 'review' tells us much of anything in terms of picking one or the other.
There has never been a utility to keep Office in ram
I call BS.
From Microsoft's own site: "What Are the Advantages of Running the Osa.exe File?" "When you use the Osa.exe file to initialize shared code, the Office XP programs start faster."
Voila - that's why Word loads so fast, and you don't need to take my word for it.
That's true. Especially the Windows trolls.
/. consists of gutless feeble punks with no balls.
I, however, proudly post flamebait, ass-backwards, and plain annoying-as-hell comments directly under MY OWN NAME - not even a handle!
The rest of
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I love openoffice.org and I am currently using the stable version 1.1.4. I currently have problems with it when making powerpoint presentations that have animations and what not. I commonly run into "out of memory" errors with openoffice.org and frankly they look crappier when using the openoffice.org presentation program. Microsoft Powerpoint 2003 is much better for this purpose. I still use openoffice.org for the most part and recommend it to anyone in need of a really good office suite. Similarly the Gimp is fantastic for all my needs, but I am sure there are some great photoshop features that it can't come close to. The Gimp is far superior for general use and I think the intuitivity is far superior especially when it comes to managing layers (sorry for the digression.) Again openoffice.org works better for me especially with its autocompletion. Both the pay-for and free applications have something to learn from each other, but the free ones are way ahead of the game for all my uses.
http://www.sledgehammercomputers.com
Reading this article and checking out the main site gives me the impression the author's age is inidicated in the domain. It would be nice if the Slashdot editors would look at what their putting up. A renouned news site is posting a comparative review of OpenOffice written by a 13 year old, great.
You're just a stupid nigger faggot OSS zealot. WTF do you know about anything. Get fucked, NAMBLA-lover.
DISCLAIMER: I have no loyalty to software because blind loyalty to software makes them stop improving. I currently use these OS: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Debian Sarge, FreeBSD, and PalmOS. And I use Firefox 1.04 for my web browser.
I think for free software to thrive, we can't simply tell people it is better if it isn't (yet). Honesty and objectivity is important so we don't lose our credibility when recommending free solutions.
I find MS Office XP (2002) better than OpenOffice in terms of ease-of-use, features and productivity. I haven't tried Office 2003 yet.
One thing I like better in OpenOffice is the built-in support for saving to PDF format--but there are 3rd-party PDF pseudo-printer drivers that work well with Office.
Another thing I like better is the fact that unlike MS Office, OpenOffice doesn't "phone home". I think a law should be passed requiring all software to ask the user permission for each instance of phoning home along with the specific info it is about to transmit.
But overall, I still like MS Office better (for now) and I am eagerly trying each release of OpenOffice in hopes that it is good enough for me to switch.
For now, I just configure my firewalls (yes, plural) to block outgoing "phone home" attempts.
My gut feeling is that I'll probably switch to OpenOffice when it hits version 2.5 or so.
MS-Word is great for 2-3 page documents, but start adding graphics, charts, and including parts of contributed by other parties and MS-Word starts to destabilize.
I have have stayed up many a late night working on large reports or proposals because MS-Word decided to screw up a large file. I am so paranoid when working in MS-Word on large documents that I save multiple revisions of the same document, so I can revert back to them in the event that MS-Word eats or screws up a large document.
I haven't tried large documents in OpenOffice, but will give it a try soon.
funny, no foot icon.
Anyway, IMO this article describes a totally unscientific experiment and comparison. The results are weird. Times are suspiciously long.
My guess is that his computer suffers from other problems.
I would really like to see a real comparison with proper objective measurements on descent hardware (some standard entry-level PC)
In my opinion, the only thing OpenOffice and MS Word/Excel/etc are good for, is reading (and then maybe clipboarding for conversion purposes) someone else's documents that have been foolishly saved in MS's file formats. That's the only reason I keep OpenOffice around, and I grit my teeth whenever a new ebuild appears, because I know my machine is going to be at 100% all day (and maybe he next ;-).
Vim opens instantly.
It amazes me when I see some computer newbie who wants to type a paragraph of text and print it, start up a fucking word processor. And there are so many people like this. How do they stand it? Do they really have the patience of saints or am I some kind of meth-poisoned ADA-inflicted hummingbird? By the time your machine is ready for you start typing, I could have already had the damn thing typed and printed. Who the fuck decide that computers are supposed to get twice as slow every 18 months? I bet it was someone on the MS Word or OpenOffice teams.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Which is great, apart from the fact that Word is much faster than OO. It just is. This guy is smoking something. I just started Word XP on my box here, it was ready to type in under 2 seconds. OO is many many times slower. And before anyone spouts crap about Office being "preloaded", no, it isn't.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Actually, Dell preinstalls WordPerfect on every machine they sell and they charge you for MS Office.
Which is obviously why WordPerfect is taking over the universe. Or maybe not.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I'm using OOo since about 1.5 Years, and even though i have a (2003 legal university version) version of MS Office, i prefer using OOo. Predominantly, for the easy export features to PDF, and the possibility to fully customize the applications. One of the most severe bugs in MS Office is, that Word crashed when you try to edit documents that are larger than about 300 pages (A4 pages). I don't know why this occures, but this is easy to reproduce, so i guess it's a bug. So i'm using OOo for all of my Texts, and one of the buggiest features there, is the Autoformating. Especially, if you write texts in different languages. Another bug is, that apparently OOo Writer changes the Font to your default Font if you get to the line. Resetting the Font to what you had before is really a pain, because the font doesn't change back if you are at the end of your formated text and hit backspace. Those are maybe minor issues, but still, they keep you from concetrated work and when you're a little tired and overworked, this can trigger a massive outburst of fury. (I experienced it on my own). So how good OOo is, MS Office is better in detail. MS Office lacks a lot of features OOo has, but those features it /has/, are virtually bugless
EOF
They're making some pretty major changes in Office 12 to keep it going strong. The Office Server System and the XML file formats are just the tip of the iceberg.
Dupe! Please, posters, is it that hard to check if your comments have already been mentioned?
o ld=0&commentsort=0&tid=185&tid=109&mode=thread&cid =12796703
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152483&thresh
(sorry if I sounded harsh, it was meant as semi-satiric).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
The thing that's more amazing is that people think that clock frequency is the only factor of CPU speed. (The resulting overclocking religion is even more of a spectacle to me, yes, overclocking may be good, but not necessarily, hence, if you overclock, test the change in performance)
And the really scary thing is that I'm starting to see the size of cache used as a metric of a CPU's worth. Bigger doesn't automatically mean better, and depending on other factors, may make things worse.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I notice that FC3 now performs cache warming via readahead, using the /etc/readahead.files as a list to load into the buffer cache.
/etc/readahead.files list. That way stuff like OpenOffice, Mozilla should be quicker.
How about periodically listing the open files on the operating system and adding them to the
e.g.
lsof | cut -c70- | sort | uniq | grep ^\/
Deleted
While there are plenty of reasons to love OO.o Writer over MS-Word, this article is quite flawed. The reviewer obviously isn't that technical and looks to be comparing apples to Chevrolets.
...
(I was using Microsoft Works before)
Word takes up more memory total, but Writer uses more in the main process. It is not a big difference.
He bases his conclusion on the fact that soffice.exe uses a bit more RAM than winword.exe (the "main process") but when you include msworks.exe's memory usage, Writer is leaner. msworks.exe isn't even a part of Microsoft Word, it's part of Works which he even states he was using before. He obviously knows they're separate applications.
I thought the numbers seemed a little unusual given my experiences with Word , so I tried launching it on my PC (a little bit faster than his test box, but not by much). First launch took 7 seconds, subsequent close and re-opens of the app took ~1 second. If this were an article on how he got his PC infected with spyware, viruses and poorly-coded MS-Word plugins, all of which led to his Office installation taking 5 times longer than normal to start and function, I'd say kudos. But as a performance comparison between two products under dissimilar conditions, I declare shenanigans.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
*cough* Vi *cough*
Quack, quack.
does someone volunteerily have their site crash to a hault posting an article on /. about the relative speeds of programs.
have you ever tried creating a .doc file in Word and then in OO? the OO one is SO much smaller! yet they usually look exactly the same! there is the odd formatting issue, but anyway M$ are switching to XML so it shouldn't be as much of a problem in future. also there is a new version of OO in beta... i'm guessing it will be a little more bloaty than the current version but it looks more friendly to people familiar with M$ so maybe we'll get more people switching over :)
The first thing I did was to install OO.o It took only 7.5 minutes and took up 164MB (94.82 according to Windows). It did not require a restart. It has been over a year since I installed MS Office, but I know it had to be restarted and that it takes up 450MB (according to Windows).
Office does not require a restart. I just installed it yesterday.
Also, how much of office was installed? Just Word? I'm pretty sure that he also installed Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Office Tools at the minimum.
Using a 4.8 MB text file is a retarded test. How often is a very large text file like that manipulated?
The author doesn't really call attention to the fact that word actually owned writer in the basic document operations on the large text file FTFA:
Operation OO Writer MSO Word
Save 1:07.05 16.24*
Close 2.36 12.42``
Open Saved File 1:06.63 26.26
Resave 1:26.26 22.59
That's a pretty significant performance difference.
The asterisk was for the following comment: * it opened in just 43.04 seconds, but it spent the next 22 minutes automatically spellchecking, with the CPU usage at 100% most of the time. Sometime during this, it autosaved, putting the CPU into the red zone for about 30 seconds.
``Oops... It was still "repaginating"
Yeah, well - you can turn that auto spell check feature off. Also, auto save isn't a bad thing.
Word should not take 30 seconds to start up on a 2.2 ghz celeron machine. Something is wrong with that persons machine.
I tested word 2003 on my machine, a athlon xp 1.8 ghz with 768 ram and it took 3 seconds to start up, and I am not using the office startup loader as the parent suggested.
Do a fresh install of windows and office on your machine then you can do a scientific comparison properly.
I'll admit this story brings up some interesting MSOFFICE vs. OO discussion, but it seems awfully reminiscent of the story yesterday where a totally clueless guy tried to review Acrylic.
An employee suggested to me that we hire Contrarian Slashdot Poster to give us feedback on certain products. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it product evaluation. So I decided to let him write us some reports on operating systems/software/technology that might be fine. Besides, he seemed to be posting quite regularly on Slashdot, why not give him a try?
Once we'd got him a desk and a PC, we sat him down to write some product reports. At first it seemed fine, with him producing reports and lots of content.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who found that his reports were basically dupes based on a template and that we weren't getting any value. The final straw came when someone switched on the Clue filter, and we realised we'd been completely hoodwinked by a troll.
Needless to say, I fired the guy, and let's just say that I'm no longer with the organisation.
Apart from the fact that his load times don't seem to mesh with anyone elses (2-5 seconds is typical load time for Word, even on slow hardware). Here are some other nifty things that make this article entirely pointless.
First, he doesn't really know how to measure the amount of memory a program is using. He combines virtual memory and In process memory, but they can't be combined. Virtual memory is a closer approximation to the total memory being used. In memory memory is just the part of Virtual memory that is current in memory (it's sitll in virtual memory even if it's in real memory).
He uses the size of the installation on disk as some kind of indicator about how "bloated" the application is. This ignores the fact that Office comes with a great deal of clip-art, templates, and other non-application files. The actual amount of diskspace used by the application code for Office on my machine is 298 MB, but that includes the full office suite (including programs that have no equivelent in OOo such as InfoPath, Access and OneNote).
I liked this quote:
"The first thing I did was to install OO.o It took only 7.5 minutes and took up 164MB (94.82 according to Windows)."
94.82? WTF? Did he mean 194.82? Even that seems a bit large.
He gives lots of indications that his system is borked. His comment about normal.dot is a sure sign that something is wrong.
22 minutes to load a 4.9MB text file? That's completely outside the range of believable.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Actually, Dell preinstalls WordPerfect on every machine they sell and they charge you for MS Office.
I was about to declare you a crackpot (my sincere apologies; too many years of slashdot), but a quick check proves us both partially right. Dell US indeed preinstalls WordPerfect. In other countries, including the Netherlands, they preinstall MS-Works.
Which is obviously why WordPerfect is taking over the universe. Or maybe not.
The essential difference is that Works maintains the status quo, while WordPerfect, well, doesn't. It's easy to give people a reason to keep doing things the way they always have, but quite hard to get them to try something new.
... has sufficiently little clue as to put up a page that can't be read without horizontally scrolling each line (or otherwise faffing about).
So, how can one reasonably assume that he isn't also so clueless that what he's written about office applications isn't worth reading?
Does install size matter if it starts faster and doesnt need more RAM than a "non-bloat" software?
Especially considering that 460MB ram is about the monetary equivaltent of a chewing gum?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
My machine is an Athlon 2600+ with 512 MB RAM. MS Office 2003 opens in less than a second, the first time and every time. I would suggest that part of the problem might be that his computer has a corrupted install of Word, and/or spyware or other problems.
Absolutely true, and my experience (both on my Athlon XP 2400+, and my wife's Celeron 1.7Ghz) is the same - Word 2003 loads in a split second, and closes in even less time (disappearing from the process list). These numbers are absolutely ludicrous, and worthless. What's with the recent slate of "my baseless 2 minute blog entry" Slashdot "articles"?
Of course if people want to talk about bloat, benchmark GIMP. Holy shit is that application a hog, taking about 20 seconds to load on the same PC that loads and initializes Word 2003 in about a quarter of a second.
I have trouble believing that Microsoft has slowed down the start-up time of MS Word 2003 by that great of a margin.
I run on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, 800MHz FSB, 80GB SATA drive, WIndows 2000SP4.
Ok, that's a bit offtopic, but the review reminded me a thing that happened a couple months ago at work.
Premitted that I use Windows and MS Office only at work, and that I'm there only from three months (so I don't know much of Word) a funny thing happened to me, and I would like to know who is the genius at MS that programmed the new autospellchecking and correction function.
I'm Italian, and hence the dictionary used by default is the Italian one. A pity that, in the official italian (intended as language), there is no word to properly translate to click. People usually use the verb cliccare, which is commonly recognized but, as I said, not considered an italian word. Anyway, my boss had to write down a little administrator manual for a site we designed (our customer ain't exactly a geek, quite the opposite). In this manual, every two line he was like "click here, click there" and so he wrote a paper which contained a fair amount of cliccare.
But Word 2003, without giving anyone some sort of advice (my boss said he hasn't activated the feature, and he ain't a geek himself, so I think this comes activated when you install Office) decided that cliccare was wrong, and corrected it automatically (with absolutely no warnings! Neither a lil flashy icon) with ciccare (in English, to spit).
My boss saved the doc and suddenly mailed them to our customer. I'll let the reader imagine what kind of phone call I received from our customer, who seemed pretty shocked that he had to humiliate his brand new 19'' inch monitor in order to use our site.
So, if uncle Bill reads this (yes, Mr William Gates III, I'm talking with you), I would like to ask him to fire the idiot that added such a function.
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
Submitting papers in DOC format is generally not a good idea, for many reasons. Anybody using DOC format should also be able to use RTF format. An even better choice is PDF; OpenOffice can export to PDF.
Not quite true. The feature set in OO.org in general is several years behind MS Office. OO does have nice features, like native PDF export, and the function typesetter in OO is really cool; however, in terms of polish, reliability, user-friendliness, and integration, MS Office is superior. You tend to get what you pay for (unless you happen to be a scurvy pirate).
That said, both suites tend to provide adequate basic functionality. However, OO has a little problem with not being able to display regression equations on OO Math graphs. This is what caused me to pony up for Office.
You're right, it's amazing. You know what's worse? Doom III: it takes a whole minute to load in the same computer that will launch winmine.exe in half a second!!
How useful is a comparison between a raster processing software and a word processor?
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
"no, it isn't" oh yes it is
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
A year ago when I used to work, I was coding one application that outputs data in CSV format. the data was 5 columns and the rows could be anywhere from 500 to 2500. I had to Line plot this data and analyze the data, make changes to the system (PID gains - Controls ) and get data again. OpenOffice(calc) was damn slow in plotting the data, If i remember correctly it took abt 10 - 30 seconds to plot, just for comparison I checked it in Excel, it could plot the same data in about 2 seconds.
Since then I used Excel for potting
I'm trying to figure out why I trust Slashdot to report unbiased news. This "article" is so atrocious that I'm amazed anybody can defend it or even link to it.
The author says "recently I have noticed that [Office] seems slow." So... did he reinstall it? Surely he didn't just install OpenOffice and run his tests... Oh wait. Yeah, he did. I thought we all knew that Windows speed tests are useless unless run on fresh installations...
Honestly, this test is completely meaningless. He didn't establish that Office's performance degrades over time (I'm not saying it doesn't, btw). And he didn't establish that OO's performance doesn't degrade. He would have had to do BOTH of these things for his comparison to be even remotely valid or useful.
Let me guess: he also used IE for a few years. He didn't maintain it and now he has a spyware-ridden computer. Then he thinks, "Gosh, IE seems slow." So he downloads FireFox and LJKSDF it's fast! Wow, IE is SO SLOW! *rolls eyes*
Honestly, I recognize that experiences will differ from computer to computer and I really don't care which you use. But don't go around spouting this pseudo-scientific crap as evidence that one is superior to the other. That goes for both OO/Office and FF/IE.
Except he was testing the time to open a 4.5MB file
How useful is a comparison between a raster processing software and a word processor?
Yes, because you'll notice that I said "compared to Word" when referencing GIMP, right? Oh, wait, no I didn't, and you're just an idiot that can't stop yourself from some lame, flaming response when someone offends on your cult.
GIMP is a f'n ridiculous pig (on Windows). Corel Photopaint, a more feature rich (and intuitive) application, loads and has a 8MP image up in about 1/2 of a second. GIMP can't even get a toolbox up in 30 times that.
"but I assumed that since I paid for MS Office, it must be better"
So, I should then assume you're an idiot? Crappy consumers like you are why companies can get away with charging outrageous prices. Price != Quality.
"It has been over a year since I installed MS Office, but I know it had to be restarted"
I installed MS Office 2003 YESTERDAY on a friends computer. It did not require a restart. You may have had an older version installed or some other application using a resource that the installer needed to replace.
"Opening time in seconds - First run 31.1"
I am assuming first run refers to the first INSTANCE not the first time the application is ever opened...
WHAT?!?! This is Word 2003? Running on a 2.2 GHz machine with 512 ram? You've got to be kidding me. Did you measure this with a sundial? With my AMD64 Mobile throttled to 40% (800mhz) with a gig of ram, I can start Word 2003 in less than a second.
Also, second instances of Word (I don't know about Writer) open and immediately close again. The second instance simply sends a message to the first instance to open another document window or whatever.
"Word takes up more memory total, but Writer uses more in the main process. It is not a big difference."
What the hell is msworks.exe? I don't have it running right now and Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are all open.
I'm really sick of these horrible comparisons that are performed by armatures. He states he hates Microsoft, goes on and on about how OO.o is better, but states he will continue to use Office. If you are going to perform a scientific experiment, please make it scientific. Leave opinion out of it. Show us exact procedures so we can attempt to reproduce your results. etc etc.
Does someone have an article describing proper construction of benchmarks or a guide to proper scientific analysis? We need some sort of rubric before we keep posting this horrible articles.
http://brandonbloom.name
For starters, let's look at what little data was given about the testing method: Hrrm, that doesn't sound like a very clean environment, speaking of, what is the overall state of their computer? Do they have background processes running that may skew results?
Second, the author doesn't tell us the individual results (save the first) and just averages them for us. At the very least, they should give a standard deviation. (note, there is a non-functional link at the bottom which may contain such things, I do not know at this time)
Third, wouldn't it be a nice idea to test on different computers? Not just a single one? I can understand that the author may have limited resources, but it does limit the scope of the "experiment" (Unless everyone has the same computer as the author)
Fourth, in the "closing time" section the author mentions they closed a specific file. What about closing no files at all?
Fifth, the graphs, at which times did things start and complete? I have no idea what is going on here. For all I've been told the ending trails of the graph (which are all pretty low) are where the "experiment" happens.
I can only hope that the results link (which isn't working at the time that this was posted) contains such data. In any event, I'll admit my bias, I dislike using empirical data. And when I am forced (kicking and screaming) to collect it, I try to minimize the number of variables that may vary. This author does not appear to have attempted that. Thus I don't think that the results can be taken seriously. (and to be honest, I can't believe they were posted on
I could be wrong on some of the points I made, or I could have missed something that is obvious, in any event, I just wanted to express my displeasure with calling this an "experiment" in the first place.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
at leat (sic) if he used OpenOffice on windows
He's not testing a linux app against a windows app. Both apps are running on Windows.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Congratulations, you just did exactly what he said you'd do. osa.exe IS the preloader. He has it disabled. How can you be so dense?
You may not have any clue about computers or anything, but i can ease your mind: you dont have a 4200 rpm drive in your celeron. :)
Be happy
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
of his site.He asks wich one is faster. He can write an article, publish it on slashdot and he can't say A is faster, B is faster or they are both equally fast in the same article?
Oh, I read the article and the answer he asked himself is also not answerd there. If you do a test with a clear question, give an answer.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The author probably wasn't using the symbiotic loader, which keeps Office in RAM at all times for the sole purpose of faster startup times.
That type of thing that needs to be specified if you want to have any semblence of a fair comparison between the two suites.
Both MS Office and OpenOffice have utilities designed to improve the (apparent) launch time of the programs, and they both work well ime. Anyone that tries to do a comparison of the two suites using launch time as a metric absolutely needs to make sure both programs are equally [dis/]advantaged in the comparison.
In my experience, OpenOffice is both slower to load, and slower to use than MS Office (though v 2.0 looks to improve some of this). Anyone who tries to put up ridiculous numbers such as the author of TFA needs to have their head checked, as they are not helping the community in the slightest.
As it is, the article is a joke. This type of FUD does nothing but setback the success of the OSS community and programs like OpenOffice. The OSS community absolutely loves to overstate the benefits of OS software. Calling OpenOffice faster than MS Office, and Firefox more secure than IE are perfect examples of this. Look at what's happened in the past few months with Firefox: security holes and bugs left and right and left and right, catching the community with their proverbial pants down. To add insult to injury, the system that Firefox uses to update itself probably doesn't work in 50% of the Firefox installs out there.
How about we stick to actual strengths of OpenSource software (freedom - beer and speech, non-reliance on a single vendor) than try to market them with unsubstantiated and often rather untrue claims (such as "faster", "more secure").
There are a number of applications, such as WinFax and Dragon Naturally Speaking, which install add-on's to Microsoft Word that add to the startup time and can cause problems with other add-in's (I know, the article is about Word/OO on fresh installs, but this issue comes up often in real life). The WinFax plug-in in particular can cause problems with other add-on's. For better or for worse, there aren't similar issues yet with OO. Given it's tight ties in Java, though, I can't imagine it would take long once OO gets popular for a number of add-in's to spring up, add time to its startup as well.
Ok, now that you pulled your badass "insults" and pwned me completely, think about it for a second.
You *are* comparing the loading times of a Word processor and a raster processing software. You are implicitly saying that "gimp programs takes a lot of time to load, but word does not!".
If you can't read your own words, that's bad. If you can't refrain yourself from insulting people when you fail to realize (or maybe just accept) you made a mistake, that's worse.
You are the only one flaming here. Just because I don't agree with you that doesn't mean i am an OSS fan, let alone a fanatic.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
What isn't mentioned in The article is the options. While Microsoft Word may be slower than Open Office, much more important things like ease of use, extra functions (like macros) or file size of the files. In the end it's basically "I opened each one five times and saw Microsoft Office took longer to open and close."
They don't call them Anonomous Cowards for no reason, now do they?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Notepad nigger-kicks them both.
I used OpenOffice for over a year but eventually got frustrated and switched back to MS Office.
Note:
- My primary app was the word processor
- I needed doc file compatibility
Reasons I dumped OpenOffice:
- Big files! I had very large documents with graphics and all and I save very frequently.. those frequent saves were killing me.
- Switching to the native format did not make the save faster.
- Compatibilty issue with Word docs. Since I share files with others I had to be compatible
- Printing wasn't as good
- Diccionary support in Spanish was lacking
- Multi-lingual support.. I was missing it from MS Office 2000
- I PAID for Office so I should use it right?
On the other hand I liked the spreadsheet better than Excel. Still do actually, but why install two when you already get one with Office.
So I've stuck with the borg.
Exporting to PDF is cool, but it'd be even nicer if you could open them too. Damn, Koffice does it
I'm usually pretty thick skinned when it comes to getting mad about worthless stories on slashdot, this is too much. This story has exactly the same value (scientific and otherwise) as a story entitled "one guy thinks OO might be faster than Office" or even "kid says father is the strongest dad in the world". ITEM! Coming to a conclusion and then performing some nonsense experement you pulled out of your ass and finally marveling at your genius after your experement pads your conclusion just wastes everyone's time, including the author. Even more so since I'm sure anyone with 60 seconds could probably find a real side by side comparison online somewhere. But on a side note, if this guy thinks the problem is Office, and not his box, when his fairly modern computer takes 30+ seconds to load Office, he probably has a very bright future ahead of him selling whatever it is he's smoking.
exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis
What a f***ing ridiculous article. The editor who published this should be shot. Bias is an understatement.
You *are* comparing the loading times of a Word processor and a raster processing software.
OK, compare startup times of GIMP and Microsoft Paint, and Microsoft software still wins. I'm guessing that the comparison between Microsoft Word and GIMP was intended to refer to programs with similar install sizes.
The author also says he had planned to compare Word's HTML export with that of Dreamweaver. Of course he'll find that Word's exported HTML is far more bloated than that of Dreamweaver. Word makes no effort to optimise for file size - it's not intended to produce HTML that will be manually edited, and simply tries to preserve print layout as closely as possible, while Dreamweaver goes to great pains to produce tidy code. Apples and oranges!!
Isn't that like saying more people are running Linux than Windows because Linux is free?
Ever heard of logical fallacy? See http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/
Short and simple: Open Office is free... it does an *amazing* job for a free program. MS Office doesn't do many other useful things that are worth paying for.
I thought this was news for nerds, not Nigerians.
Who said it's not news for Nigerian nerds? Of course there are nerds in Nigeria; otherwise, why would most of the advance fee fraud scams nowadays be perpetrated through Internet e-mail (as seen here)?
My machine is an Athlon 2600+ with 512 MB RAM. MS Office 2003 opens in less than a second
Microsoft Office 2003 software comes with a preloader. Do you have that turned on?
I have Office 2003 on an Athlon 2600+ with 1GB of RAM. I just tested and every office app opened in under 5 seconds. Then I opened a 40 page document in Word and again it was under 5 seconds. Also, the 2003 version of winword.exe takes up 16 MB.
I've been doing SOE's lately using office 2003 and office 2000 and access 97. None of it in any combination has required a reboot ever. This idiots not running a clean machine for testing. Those times are terrible, I've got 667Mhz P3's that are quicker for every "test" he pointed out. These days if the "benchmarks" aren't done by tomshardware or anandtech they're just useless piles of bullshit rubbish.
Since you already have Firefox running, just install the SpellBound extension and spell check your blog entries as you submit them.
For MSIE users, get ieSpell.
-Richard L. Owens
...vi and emacs to see which one is faster and takes less resources, and declare a "winner" once and for all?
Best Buy can have you arrested
When will this stop. Is there that little news, or are the editors days too filled writing articles for better paying gigs and such?
I'm running WindowsXP with SP2 and all 'critical' Windows updates, on a Hyper-Threaded Pentium4 3.2. My main disk with both OO.o 1.1.4, JRE 1.5 and MS Office 2003 Professional is a 200gb Seagate SATA drive. I have 1 gig of RAM. Adaware yields 0 hits for spyware on a full system scan, and FProt Anti-Virus also gives me a clean bill of health.
.txt file and pasted it into a running MS Word session, it came out to 301 pages. I saved it producing a 1.43 meg .doc file. Neither the pasting or the saving took more then half a second. The same thing in OO.o Writer was basically as fast, with the saving taking slightly longer, but still less then 1.5 seconds. The .saw file produced however was only 200k. Not a *huge*
.saw version that is) spawned a process called soffice.exe which took 34 megs of RAM.
:)
I'm measing very approximatly (ie, counting aloud "one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two etc") but my results are drastically different from Mike's.
Starting OO.o for the first time after booting up took roughly 10 seconds. Starting Office 2003 took less then a second. I am not to my knowledge running any kind of pre-loader in the background. Each successive run of either program loads so fast the splash window doesn't show, substantially less then half a second. Both take roughly the same time to close.
I opened a 600K
difference but substantial if you're trying to fit your doc on a floppy disk or send it via email.
MS Word was able to open it's 1.4 meg document much faster then OO.o could, probably because the later involved heavier decompression. Again, we're talking about a fraction of a second for Word, and about 1.5 seconds for OO.o.
Word spawned one process called WINWORD.exe which, with the above-mentioned 300 page document open, reported 21 megs of RAM consumed. OO.o with the same document open (it's
Both apps showed no CPU usage while idle. Scrolling rapidly around caused Word to take up roughly 40% while OO.o took up only 25%.
Both closed in less time then I could measure.
Basically with a decently modern and spyware/virus-free machine both apps are perfectly responsive and so close in performance that it's just not a factor.
That said, if I had PAID for my copy of Office2003 I might have expected it to do a lot more
This speed thing is just rediculous. Nobody would turn off the autoloaders for either program unless they were low on ram, and if they were they could simply use a text editor.
Why not talk about things that really matter: like featured.
I use open office for myself and my home business. I have to use Word at work. I came from using word first for years before OPen office. That said, there are so many things that are so easy to do in open office or have no counter part in Word that MSWORD just plain sucks. Also the way windows works doesnt help anything either, at home I use Linux. There are several things about the way windows draws, well windows, that really slow productivity down.
Anyways, comparing memory usage and launch times seems trivial to me.
you tested a whopping four features
underwhelmed
Its a cut+paste troll, there is nobody to get fired.
Since when was a 2 GHz processor and half a gig of RAM considered slow? Maybe this kid should spend some time away from the computer business before he starts claiming that the system he's using is slow. He spellchecks blogs, that oughtta tell ya which end of the intelligence yardstick he's at.
Kids these days...
My system is higher end than what he has, but not a whole lot. I haven't loaded Word on the boot, so it's not cached in memory. When I click the button it takes about 3 seconds form click to fully loaded interface ready for input. Once it's cached in RAM it shaves about a second off of that.
If you have a 2+ghz system with 512MB or more of RAM and it's taking 30 seconds to load Office, you have a problem that you really should look in to. The most common ones I see that cause slow load times/performace:
1) Too much running in the background for the amount of RAM you have. We get this at work all the time. Someone will have 20 Firefox windows open, Thunderbird, RealPlayer, some weather monitoring program, and so on and then wonder why load times are slow. Well, you've exceeded physical RAM so you are swaping. That's always slow, you just need more RAM, which is veyr cheap these days.
2) Background programs that take up a lot of resrouces. There was a stupid desktop flag like that circulating for a while. It put an animated waving American flag in the lower right part of your screen. However it was very poorly programmed and used a ton of resources to do so.
3) Heavily fragmented harddrive. It amazes me how many people never perform this matenence. It's good to do on any system, but particularly if you add and remove files all teh time (like if you do a lot of download, delete what you get, downoad more, etc). Windows has a built in tool for it, however I recommend dropping $20 for Diskeeper, which will take care fo it automatically and never bother you.
4) Spyware. Lots of it really bogs the system down.
So if this guy has a system that's taking 30 seconds to load Word, he doesn't know what he's doing.
One of these isn't true, but yes, hell is freezing fast.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I have used (attempted) to use OpenOffice and Microsoft's Office 2000 on a particularly aged piece of hardware, and my results are that MS's product wins out greatly.
I have a Toshiba Laptop with a 486-DX2 66 processor and 28MB of RAM in it.
I installed Windows 95 and then Office 2000 on the system. It isn't what you'd call snappy, and it's in fact below what Microsoft recommends as the minimal platform. But it worked quite adequately for word processing and the typical spreadsheets that regular users need.
I've used Linux off and on with that same laptop for years now, since I bought it used in the mid 90's. It isn't pretty getting a 'modern' (read- all eye-candied up) Linux desktop running on it. I still don't know what OpenOffice runs like on it, because the times I tried to load it, I ended up giving up.
Linux used to, and can still be, about squeezing good use out of hardware that is no longer adequate for the latest Redmond eye-candy. Unfortunately, the drive to 'win' against Microsoft on the desktop has added layers and layers of bloat, to the point where it's impossible.
When I want Unix on a portable platform, I now install a clean simple base-install of NetBSD and add in essentials like fvwm for a window manager (or I use the Tab Window Manager- really, it works, people, and it's built right into the default set of binaries that come with X!). I don't pretend anymore to be impressed by the 'user friendly' installers of modern 'Desktop Linux' or the horrible dselect swamp that Debian drags the installer into.
The more I'm surprised that this article even was posted. It was a really poor review with really poor metrics and controls.
What the author fails to realise completely is that the vast majority of home Windows users that use MS Office do so because they can use it freely - either because they know someone with MSDN CDs or have access to pirated versions. After all, let's face it, very few Joe Sixpack users are going to go buy a software application that costs almost as much as their PC does, in many cases.
Whether we like it or not, MS Office is the de facto standard for Windows desktop use & the only time that is likely to change is if Linux displaces Windows from the desktop or if MS Office becomes much more protected from copying.
What the author should have done was a report on compatibility between MS Office and OpenOffice documents and maybe a comparison of how similar actions can be achieved in both packages.
OpenOffice is a more than adequate package for most users but if Joe Sixpack can still get MS Office for free, can run it relatively speedily & doesn't have to go through a large learning curve to migrate to OpenOffice, it will not displace MS Office whatsoever.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm all for OpenOffice, but I think OOo1 includes Quickstarter by default.
If not, those are fine numbers...
How does it compare to Photoshop?
What?
Is he including the time taken to boot windows? :)
With OpenOffice 2 being completely hosted on the Java platform, I suspect any semblance of speed over M$ Office will be lost.
Hmm none of the places I have worked on so far has used Office. Only OO. Computer companies though.
You have got ONE BIG set of b*lls to post your results like this.
A lot of what you figured out, and posted, falls under the category of "well, duh" when it comes to Microsoft software. Bloated is a fit and often used to describe their system. There is a, of course, a REASON that my office(s) are run on Linux/BSD with OS X on the desktops [today].
Well, duh.
Have you, OTOH, *READ* the Microsoft EULA? What you posted is in direct violation of it, btw... I would expect a CEASE AND DESIST order from their attorneys sometime between Wednesday and Friday of next week. I'll even bookmark your page and check back [it'll be down by Friday].
Good luck!
Look, all of these comparisons of XYZ Office versus Microsoft Office are rather pointless. Does MS Office do anything so amazingly special that it can't be done by Open Office? Nope. Does Microsoft charge a lot for it compared to Open Office? Yup. Can you get pretty much whatever you want done with Open Office? Yup. But none of that matters.
.DOC files. Same thing goes for .XLS, .MDB, and .PPT.
.DOC dynamic links for programs other than Word, etc.), Open Office is going to be only for the very brave, the very stupid, or the very solitary.
What matters is not whether the apps will let you compose documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. That's pedantic, and none of these suites could call themselves suites if they couldn't do that. What's lacking here is compatibility with the rest of the Microsoft world, and that's where Open Office falls down hard.
Can Open Office flawlessly open any Microsoft document? Well, that depends. Does the document contain macros or any of that other fancy shmancy crap that Microsoft has rammed into their documents for the last decade? If it does, you can bet Open Office will have trouble with it of some sort. Ditto for formatting. Ditto ditto for embedded linked data. Do many users use this functionality? No, but tons of third-party applications do, and they all break real good when you use something other than gen-you-wine Microsoft Word to open
To be sure, none of this is the fault of the guys at Open Office. They have created a fantastic program that can get everything done you might want to do...so long as you don't want to exchange files with the other 98% of the world that uses The Real Thing. It doesn't matter how good Open Office is, the first time you either (a) can't properly open a file sent to you by an MS Office user or (b) someone with MS Office can't open a file you sent to them, all of that open-source goodness is worthless. Like it or not, Microsoft has 98% of the productivity suite market, and their file formats remain stubbornly closed, preventing 100% compatibility.
Until someone gets 100% compatibility with all MS document formats (and until all popular third-party apps don't go batshit when trying to install
The nice thing here is, the day something comes out with 100% compatiblity (and MS is potentially going to help this out once Office switches to an XML format), MS Office is doomed. There would be no way in hell MS could sustain a $600 price point against a $50 (or free!) alternative that has all the same useful bells and whistles.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Let's try it with a similar computer:
- MS Office Word 2003
- OOo 1.1.4 Writer with J2RE1.4.1
- Athlon 2600+ 512MB Ram, Windows XP SP2, no other software running.
Each block of tests was proceeded by a reboot
Word:
4.5 seconds
1.5 seconds
0.8 seconds
0.8 seconds
OOo Writer w/quickstart enabled:
5.5 seconds
1.0 seconds
0.8 seconds
0.8 seconds
OOo Writer w/quickstart disabled:
17 seconds
1.5 seconds
1.5 seconds
1.5 seconds
These figures tell a different story from the article, I would say.
Note: I did have to turn off Macro security in word, otherwise it hung there for several MINUTES performing a 'virus scan'.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
XEmacs has 'em both beat!
My desktop is 500mhz p3 with 512mb of RAM. And MS word 2003 has just started in 2 secs. I agree with majority: the author is either helpless PC user or shameless liar. PS My hard disk is a 7200rpm 8mb one, but i don't think it makes that much difference.
so i guess winamp really is better than itunes. seriously, if you have a recent (last 3 years) computer, startup speeds shouldn't be too much of a factor. let's see a non-partial, thorough review. M$ office isn't so great that we need biased pot-shots to bolster support for open office.
IDLMS: "I don't like Microsoft..."
ILL: "I love Linux..."
Definition: Dodgy disclaimer at the beginning of a paragraph of opinion about either product, more to turn down the temperature of flaming responses than to be any kind of heartfelt admission. Easily seen through.
Usage: "ILL, but Open Source software lags behind Windows, is more costly, less secure, comes from the devil, sponsors terrorism and communism..."
or: "IDLMS, but Bill Gates is the second coming of Christ, he's actually the hero of the information age, and I heard Linux gives you herpes..."
Can be shortened to "ILL, but FUD!" or "IDLMS, but FUD, YMMV!"
Either you are an idiot, with your "expectations", and therefore it isn't worth reading your little "discovery", or you are a liar, and therefore it isn't worth reading your little rant.
d'oh
would't = wouldn't
I forgot to proof read as well as run spell check...
http://brandonbloom.name
The perspective seems so irrelevant:
a) Bloat - how is a ~500 Mb footprint on a hard drive a matter of concern in a world where you can buy an 80 Gb hard drive for ~80 Canadian dollars?
b) Slowness - opining about waiting 30 sec for anything is just hilarious. The delays to which we are subjected off-line for meaningful things makes this very profoundly trivial e.g. a family member recently waiting 8 hours for attention in the emergency room of a hospital.
And how can there be a meaningful comparison in the first place? Open Office is not better than Word. Word is not perfect. BUT Word got out there first, dominates the workplace, and OO is just playing catch-up. Will it ever surpass Word? Not in any meaningful way.
One can only hope that the time spent by developers of OO will hone their skills so that they will eventually move on to worthwhile projects. The world does not need another word processor. It does need skilled programmers e.g. medical diagnostics.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I'd love to see a good, objective comparison of M$ Office and Open Office...too bad this article ain't it.
:)
Here's one.
"I like Microsoft, but..." then paste the info
In that case, you'll be using an application that acts differently in some very suttle ways depending on what type of file it opened. As I mentioned earlier, it has the potential to be a usability nightmare. That's something of a dilemma that I think OpenOffice.org may soon find itself in, if it hasn't already.
I'll focus on Word Processors with this comment because that's mostly what I care about, but I think it's applicable to most of what's in a typical office suite.
My point is really that an MS Word Document and the behaviour associated with it is something that simply can't be emulated without going all out and making an exact clone of Word. The document's just data that can be read and written once it's understood, but the way that an application treats that data during editing and interaction with the user is a whole lot more complicated, and perhaps not even solvable. I'm not sure if people are recognising this issue as being so much of a problem as it really is.
Even if a document looks similar or identical when it's opened, the expected behaviour of the editing (and therefore what's going to be sent back to someone with a different application) will be different depending on what application someone happens to be using. Unless people are only passing documents around without the intention of them being edited by other people, exact compatibility would be incredibly difficult. So is it worth bothering?
People really need to decide if an exact clone is what they want. If it is, then great, and perhaps that's what OpenOffice.org is destined to become. But I'm not sure I'd want to use that application. Being able to read and write MS Word documents is a great and often essential thing, but I'd still rather have the flexibility of being able to use a better Word Processor, as well as one that's consistent with how it behaves (rather than having different editing modes). An alternative would be using either MS Word, or a word processor that clones whatever behaviour Microsoft decides is "best for everyone". Otherwise, platform issues aside, there's little reason for many people to bother considering anything else, and there's little possibility that serious competition in Office suites will ever emerge.
The comparison was obviously unfair for Word: as you can see in the screenshots there was third party add-on loaded in Word ("TI Tools") and there could be another ones (not all add-ons add top level menus). Many third party add-ons for Word slow down it a lot, mostly because they are written in slow VBA (Microsoft kinda fixed it with support for C# add-ons, however most of developers did not moved to C# yet). And all slowness of Word in that test is easily explained by the presense of the add-on: 1. slow start up 2. slow shut down 3. slow spell check and repagination (if add-on dynamically accesses document text) So, for fair comparison it should be either clean installation of Word (or OpenOffice.org should have several Java add-ons installed). And don't get me started about Java performance... On my old Pentium 3 800 and XP SP1: Word - loads is about 3-5 seconds OpenOffice - loads in about 20-25 seconds And with some add-ons installed: Word - 15 seconds OpenOffice - about 1 minute In general - for me Word was always faster. Face it - OpenOffice is slow. And rant: OpenOffice is following global Open Source trend - it copies existing commercial software (and shareware). There are very few real innovations in OpenOffice. Damn, one of the main new thingies in OpenOffice 2 is GUI which is kinda similar to MS OfficeXP - not that it even completely similar! I mean, Microsoft already has Office 2003 with better GUI, so why copy old one? Why copy only parts? Why copy at all? One of the features of OO.org that is especially promoted by it's authors is PDF export. Ahem... Did anyone really tried it? I mean, did anyone who really needs PDF support tried it? I bet - no! It is so basic - it is useless for those who really need PDF support. Yes, there are no built-in support for PDF in MS Word, but there are third-party solutions (and these are better then built-in crap in OO). Thus Microsoft creates markets and OO loses... Argh. I definitely need to sleep.
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
I read these posts proclaiming the death of Microsoft Office. But at ground level:
Student-Teacher Office for Windows and the Mac rank #2 and #7 in Amazon software sales. Office upgrades and components remain consistent, reliable, performers at retail. Figure in OEM sales, academic distributions, corporate licensing, etc., and the numbers continue to look pretty damn good.
Local employers want MS Office skills. Period. End of story. Tired of welfare, SSI, flipping burgers, being a granny greeter at WalMart? Certification in Office is your ticket out.
Linux/Open Source engages no one beyond the university and college campus.
The article claims it took 22 minutes to load a text file.
A test on my system, with a formatted document
System: AMD 2800, 512 MB, Windows XP
Software: MS Word, 2003
File: 5.8 MB, with elementary formatting - a 3 level list with 3555 items.
Action: After a system reboot - open it, by double-clicking the desktop item. Move to the end of the file, with ctrl-end, and start typing text.
Total time: 7 seconds.
So, I opened word, and loaded a 5.8 mb formatted document, and started editing it, in 7 seconds.
Second test, with a text file: Save the document as a text file, close Word, open Word, load the text file, move to the end, and start typing.
Total time (to save and reopen): 44 seconds. Most of this was spent in the dialogs. Actually file operations were almost instanteneous.
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
For your information, I and my wife have been using Fedora Core 3 with full GNOME environment on my now six-year old P3-450 until just this week. It is not even possible to install the current Windows XP Home/Pro on this box. Yet I expect this new CeleronD 2.8GHz to run the current Linux version five years from now.
No one said an old machine was the best set up, but most of the world does not have shiny new computer hardware at the top of their paycheck priority list. Having Linux will run comfortably on old hardware is a huge bonus, one the proprietary software business models will not support.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
I used OpenOffice 1.0 and after the problems with formatting issues and the fact that it added minutes to the boot up time of my system, I chose to remove it and use office. I could not believe the numbers this guy came up with. I have a 2 ghz p4 w/ 1gb of ram, and I also have about 24 internet explorer windows open at the moment. Can't wait until IE 7 for the tabbed windows. Which, by the way, was innovated by Opera and not firefox or mozilla. I just opened word and it took about 4 seconds and it has been days since I last ran it. I reopened word and it was back up in the blink of an eye. On the other hand, I recall open office to be slow because of it heavy reliance on java. If you don't have a jvm installed, you do not even have spell check. I had my papers that I wrote for college in openoffice marked down several times because I listened to the grammar checks of openoffice. That alone was enough for me to switch back to office. Maybe openoffice has gotten better in the 1.1 release, but even though open source freaks believe they innovate and microsoft duplicates, it looks like openoffice is still chasing microsoft's tail on this one.
I have to wonder if the tester was even using office. Why would msworks.exe would be running? Isn't word included in newer version of works?
Is it the same as the one in office?
I am shocked.... SHOCKED.... that more than 500 of the world's brightest are putting so much thought - or typing at least - into a completely useless and irrelevant discussion.
Start up time and file size and stuff have squat to do with why one program is or should be chosen over the other. It may have mattered 10 years ago but who the hell cares how long it takes to start up or how big the file size is any more? Might as well sit around and discuss the color of the box. (the one that doesn't exist.)
There are exactly 3 significant issues in this battle: cost, functionality, useability. All the rest is background noise.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
Publishing such utter drivel is becoming a habit at /. and that ain't good.
/. is desperate or they just don't give a shit any more.
This sets a new record for amateurish, tendentious "journalism" and should fool nobody.
Either
I've never thought of "performance" as being an issue with office apps. I never even open a word processor or spreadsheet unless I have something to do that's going to take awhile. So startup time isn't even a consideration. If a document is so long I can out-type the word processor, I do it in a text editor anyway so Word doesn't fsck it up, then cut and paste it in later. :-)
The first paragraph says "I don't like Microsoft..." Then he decided OpenOffice is better. OMG!!!!!111
What a waste of time.
But ignoring the bias:
People don't care about the resource usage of their office suites. They care that their fancy line art and tables are fucked when their boss opens the .doc file in Word.
At one point the file size argument might have been relevant. But the lusers at work frequently use entire CD-Rs to take 3 or 4 files across the building. I'm talking about total size of maybe 145K. Unless the document is absolutely gigantic, file size doesn't matter.
I'm all for efficient software, but this is one of the places where it doesn't matter too much. 99+% of the people who actually use OpenOffice or Office on a regular basis couldn't care less, and the people who do care already know how to find out for themselves. It took about 15 seconds to find out that Word loaded fast enough, and was using 14 MB of RAM, just now. Unless you're running a very new version of Office/OpenOffice on an very old machine, it should be fast enough.
My experiences have always been the exact opposite.
When I try to close the OOo spreadsheet program, it takes like 10 seconds, then pops up a dialog asking if I'd like to save, then takes another 20 seconds before it finally closes. I've never had MS Office take very long to load, and OOo seems to take forever. Though I tend to disable things like autocorrect, clippy, and such, and I haven't used Office 2003, which is no doubt slower than its predecessors, as every new MS product is. Office 2000 is lightning fast.
with 2.13 Centrino, 2GB RAM on WinXP, Word (fresh after boot) starts in 1.5-2 seconds.
I don't care for OO Writer.
You can't handle the truth.
This article also only metions word vs. writer. Where I run into problem with OpenOffice is the spreadsheet. Excel just has better (or at least MORE) builtin features for data manipulation. The chart generation in OpenOffice (and gnumeric while we're at it) is, well, terrible. There are very few options available. I find when I'm compiling my la reports (engineering) I have to log onto other boxes to do my spreadsheet work. This is THE major beef I have with OpenOffice though it is decidedly faster, sleeker, etc.
800 MHz P-III. 384 MB RAM. New (less than 30 days old) installation of Windows 2000 Pro, with all SPs and patches. I just now installed Office 2003 on that machine, which otherwise has only Apache 1.3, PHP 5, Perl 5.8, Python 2.4, MySQL 5, Deer Park Alpha 1, and Acrobat 6 Pro (Acrobat preload disabled). (I normally use a Linux desktop, and only use the WIndows box for testing.)
1. Installating Office 2003 (Word, Excel, Visio) did not require a reboot. It required *3* reboots. One for the install, one each for 2 Office service packs.
2. Word 2003 startup (blank document) without being preloaded takes 13 seconds.
If this guy was some Microsoft shill who started out with "I really don't like Linux or OSS..." all you guys would be foaming at the mouth.
I don't know how this guy can be getting such slow results on his computer. On my computer, Word only takes 3.5 seconds to load from disk and 1 second to load from the cache. I have a Sempron2800 with 768 MB RAM and a 7200 RPM IDE HD. I also have virtual memory off because I'm smart like that. I just recently upgraded to the 2800 because my AthlonXP1800 and mobo broke. Theres a 500 MHz difference in clock speed between the two and 1000 AMD performance ratings but the 1800 wasnt any significantly slower in opening office (maybe a second or so). This guy just has something seriously screwed up with his system.
My guess is that the reason WP isn't taking over the universe is because the crappy ad-ware version of WP they ship on Dells isn't very stable. I recently got a laptop from them, and I decided not to pay the money to upgrade to MS Office because I remembered WP being a decent word processor, at least the last time I'd used it (geez, it might have been a decade ago). What I got was an annoying popup every time I started that asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the newest version (at significant cost), and random crashes in the middle of my writing. I was just about to bite the bullet and buy MS Office when I decided to try OO.o. I'm sold. It may not have every feature Word has, but it appears to have the ones I need on a daily basis, and it (v1.1.4) has been rock stable for me. Maybe Dell's switch to shipping WP by default will cause OO.o to take over the universe instead. At least if frustrated WP users find OO.o.
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
Also, I couldn't get my mom to switch to OOo - however, she loves AbiWord!
Bottom line is, if you're just typing in a lot of stuff, basic documents, use AbiWord. If you need a complete suite, then OOo is good.
R.
What I don't post window Trolls. Please, just cause MS makes damn good products and I have like a ton of cash to spend doesn't make me a troll. Can someone please tell this guy to get a life. Really I mean who posts on slashdot. Sure it may be 2am here I currently live but I have excellent reasons for posting.
"...and there is no need to buy an upgrade."
Well, there's one reason - because you need to share documents with someone else who has a newer version. This is M$'s main selling point for Office these days - your co-worker has Office 2003, you have Office 2000, and you wind up having to upgrade just to share documents. Disgusting.
I don't have OO installed though the installer is sitting in my temp folder. Word97 launches within 5 seconds on my 1.3Ghz AMD. And I run Win98 too. So this guy's system is just fucked. But that's no surprise, he's a windoze luser.
I don't like MS too, and that's the reason I use OOo, but I've tested opening files and memory consumptions and I've got the oposite results. OOo needs about 200% memory that MS Office is using. MS Office opens a document in a half or a third of the time that OOo opens the documents. Also, with crash recovery wizard of OOo (1.9 beta) I've lost very important (and large) document. The document now has zero length. With MS word, the last time I've lost some doc was in 1995. Anyway, I will continue using OOo because I hate MS so much ;)
I am a professor at a small University, and encourage my students to use open source options, such as OpenOffice.org. I have no problems with PDF, however it's not so easy to submit PDFs to TurnItIn.com -- but this objection can easily be overcome, by requiring the student him/herself to make their own submission to TurnItIn.com, and then attach the results to their paper.
.oot format. Naturally, I can unzip the file and use sed to edit the manifest in the XML, but it's a pain. I'd happily accept .rdf, .sxw, .sdw, .odt, .doc and even Word Perfect and LaTeX if the student wanted to put some effort into it!
The only problems I would have would be if a student used an early beta of OpenOffice.org (such as build SRC680), which introduced briefly the
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
It always amazes me what a big deal is made of "start up times." Who cares? If you spend more time starting up an application, than sitting there, effectively using it, then you're not a real user of the application, but just toying with it. In many cases, loading more stuff upon startup, will make operation of an application more peppy.
The same people that go on and on about start up times, don't seem to bitch too much (or maybe they do), about modern day games, where one seems to spend most of their time "Loading..." I find some of the best games today almost unusuable because of the loading delays; it really blows the ambiance for me.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This monkey's gone to heaven.
Actually, his borked system is probably pretty much like most mom 'n' pop's machines, which arguably makes this a much more valid test than any 'clean install' version!
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I looked on the MS Office box to see if the Linux 2.4 kernel was a supported configuration. It wasn't
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
That's what's being ethical is all about.
BTW having a bias doesn't mean one can't be objective. The thing to do is to disclose one's bias so the reader can take that into account.
For me, OOo (or, more specifically, NeoOffice/J on Mac OS X, though from what I've seen the same is true for pure OOo) cannot handle Word files with non-trivial templates/styles. The company I work for is predominately a MS shop in the office space, and I am constantly handed documents from our PMs in the corporate templates that I cannot use them in OO... the formatting is completely fscked.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
I very much doubt that even at Microsoft, anybody would purposely break an application. They just make mistakes, and they are also lazy, and often worried that they are "confusing" the user and thus pop up warnings.
This is not done with any intent to force lock-in, but the end result is the same: The program pops up scary warnings "WARNING! Some formatting may not be saved!", because the programmer was genuinely worried that they may not have back-translated everything correctly, and thinks, entirely out of benevolence, that the user should be warned. And when they do make mistakes and the program fails to load, the user remembers that scary warning, and decides to cough up the bucks to upgrade everybody. If it were not for the warning, the user would be more likely to assumme it was their fault and try again, or actually conclude that removing this table or whatever will fix the document.
I believe almost all of Microsoft's evil is actually caused by incompetence or just confusion by their programmers. In some ways the result is worse than if Microsoft actively tried to be evil.
Damn, I have been trolled! Oh well, the point still stands. I'm glad I don't work somewhere like that.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
Wrong again knucklescraper. Picking a computer at random, and drilling down to the included software. It's Microsoft Works that's included for free. Maybe some might have Wordperfect. But most certainly not every machine they sell.