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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."
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)
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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.
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!
(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...
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.
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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 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!)
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...
This is exactly what's wrong with the computer industry these days - everyone seems to assume that people are eager to upgrade their machines to the latest and greatest the second that they are released.
Every company i've ever worked for in IT has had less-than bleeding edge machines, often what would be considered 'antique' by computer/software manufactureres - but the truth is that these are the machines that the rest of the world ACTUALLY USES because they are what we have.
If my company could afford bleeding edge computers, sure we'd buy them, but at this point the machines we have are doing perfectly fine for what they are.
With that said, I'm typing this on a 333 Mhz machine with 188 Mb of Ram - and Open Office STILL loads faster than what this guy says in TFA. Not sure what he could have possibly done to slow his machine down so much. In fact I just tried opening Write in the background while I typed this and it still only took like 10 seconds (at most) to open.
Slow? Hell, we don't have a 2.2 Ghz machine in the office even - we just bought a brand-spanking new Dell laptop (our first new computer purchase in a while) and it's only a 2 Ghz machine.
Not sure what planet this author comes from, but the 'rest of the world' is using much slower machines than software and hardware companies seem to realize.
No one I know (even audio/video professionals, etc) has uber-fast machines, and the ones we have do the job we need perfectly fine.
Game companies are the worst for this - they whine about not being able to reach the 'mass market' and then they release games like the new BattleField 2 demo that ONLY runs on WinXP, has a minimum system spec of a 2.2+ Ghz machine, etc...
Hilarious...
Gekido's Lair
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)
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Why does this rumor persist? Office has never loaded any part of itself into memory at startup. Ever.
What you are referring to (and was removed from Office 2003 because it's no longer really useful) was the Office Startup Assistant (OSA). What this did was autoload the *COM* DLL's into memory (these are system DLL's that many applications use, not just Office) to improve startup. These DLL's, back in the Windows 3.1, 95, 98 era took a long time to load, but this isn't the case anymore.
This feature hasn't really effected startup times for at least 5 or 6 years (which is why I always removed it from the startup) because Windows already loads the COM subsystem into memory for other things.
While it's still true that this speeds up office load times, it also speeds up OOo load time because OOo also relies on COM for some things.
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IF the source text is formatted. If it's copied from Notepad, then it's plain text. Read the article. What took so long is that it spent 22 minutes spellchecking.
I dont think the reviewer has the mental capacity to actually take such things into account.
Its more likely because openoffice was freshly installed, but ms-office was "installed more than a year ago".
If he doesnt even do a clean install, he surely doesnt defrag his HD...
But even with no autoloader and a fragmented hd it shouldnt take that long, so i guess he just had his whole spyware|utility stuff running in the background.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
Well, that's overdoing it a little. I have a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM that I bought two years ago. It was mid-to-high range then. It's still more than enough for most work, but it's very low-end for gamers.
My times:
MS Word 2003 - 5 seconds OO Writer 1.9.100 - 17 seconds
LOAD "SIG",8,1
AFAIK Open Office can save to PDF, but not open PDFs for editing.
Windows prefetches some data on bootup. The list of what is prefetched is based partially on set settings and partially on learned user behaviour. What processes you have running after bootup don't reflect the prefetching optimizations windows makes. You can get a vague idea of what's being prefetched by browsing to C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch.
I also have Prefetching turned off and the C:\Windows\Prefetch directory is empty.
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater
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.
Exporting to PDF is cool, but it'd be even nicer if you could open them too. Damn, Koffice does it
One other thing I noticed from that incredibly poor "study" was the restart issue. I've installed Office 2003 *many* times and I've never once had to reboot the computer. I've always thought it's nice that MS didn't have you do this after installing Office.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Startup times don't matter for word processing programs? I find that hard to believe. If you open and close documents (such as email attachments) all day long, startup times are VERY important.
... possibly he should clean up whatever viruses he's got and try again.
Yes, but unfortunately the startup times in TFA were very far removed from normal experience. 30 seconds to start Word on a 2.2Ghz Celeron with a 5400 RPM HDD?!? I think not! The last version of Word I tested was that provided in Office XP, and that opened in sub 1 second times on my Athlon 1.6Ghz system. There's something botched with this guy's Word installation - he said himself in the write up that he's "recently noticed it seemed slow"
In the Real World (TM) OOo is a dinosaur compared to MS Office. It doesn't worry me - I use LyX for all my work - but it's saddening that OSS can be this bloated.
(Disclaimer: I dislike MS and I've been instrumental in getting my University to promote and provide OOo for students. However, if both MS Office and OOo were OSS and free, there's no way I could ever recommend OOo)
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
I've yet to see a MS Word processor that had MS Word compatbility to function 100% with the documents made in the previous version. So I guess OO.o aint too bad, considering it is definitely an improvement on MS Word.
He said he turned off the preloading. MS likes to do that to make Office seem faster, at the expense of slowing boot times and permanently occupying a slab of RAM. But if that's all you use all day, maybe you want that.
Yes it does, but this is not the reason Word loads fast. Try loading Word in Wine and compare it with OOo under Linux. Word would load almost instantly, while with OOo would wait... and wait... and wait. Unless Wine contains a hidden built-in Office preloader, I can conclude that Word loads fast by itself.
I only had WinXP and Office XP running for a couple of days on a small partition just to see how MS was getting along,/i>
If it was with a fresh, clean install of windows, of course it is going to be fast! I can remember when I first installed XP - it did everything lightning quick, and took nearly no time at all to boot. But then I installed games, apps and exposed my computer to the internet. Now I have time to go make a cup of tea while my PC boots...