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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."
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
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.
He truly simulated the experience of the average home user.
His machine is obviously riddled with spyware.
In my experience, OO always has taken a bit longer to open on any machine, however - when opening the App by double clicking a file, OO always seemed ready to edit sooner than the MS variants.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
The first rule of turning in papers writen in OpenOffice is: go pdf.
You stripped all the file's metadata (including revision history) and now it's smaller. Will the wonders never cease?
Got an old rev of MS Office? OpenOffice is better than MS Office 95 and cheaper than upgrading.
Deleted
It's amazing how performance of computers works. IIRC, Electric Pencil on a TRS-80 in ca. 1980 only took a few seconds to load. Now, 25 years later, people think it's normal to wait 31 seconds, on a CPU that's 1000 times faster?
Find free books.
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.
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.
In the exact same way that Word is not 100% Compatible, right? If Word 2003 cant open Word 2000, Word XP, Word 97, and Word documents reliably, why should OOo be able to? It even does BETTER in some cases.
By default office loads into memory everytime you boot your system thus making startup time APPEAR fast.
Bullshit. Complete and total bullshit.
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.
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.
Interesting then that Word launches in under 5 seconds on my 800Mhz G3 iBook. Certainly no "symbiotic loader" here.
So, we hve a review by someone with an announced bias and a b0rked system. Yup, that's definitely "stuff that matters"...
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
For my purposes, RTF would probably work, I think it retains bullet points and things like that... but RTF isn't always a good solution (versus DOC)
RTF will not retain complex formatting such as table information, graphic alignment and pagination or macros...
Obviously macros aren't a huge deal for most people... but export to PDF seems like a good option... (as long as you don't need to edit)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
The warezed version has more features:
-enters in some fake product key automatically
-has numerous addins included for optional install
-circumvents necessary phone call to Microsoft to ask permission to install
-untraceable product key with thousands of users for excellent anonymity
sad but true..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Personaly, I think the lego robot was more interesting than his office comparison.
But, that may be just me.
Whether or not OpenOffice uses COM for it's primary component model is irrelevant. It still uses COM, and therefore it still loads the DLL's into memory, thus it suffers the same "performance hit" that Office does or doesn't have.
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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.
You didn't read very carefully - GP saved the document as a .doc file from OOo, not in OOo's native gzipped XML format.
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.
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Without sounding like I'm jumping on one side or the other....
How can anyone take these numbers seriously when you have a) A fresh install of OO.o vs a year old install of MS Office. b) It's not even a clean install of MS Office. He had works installed previously. He's modified the install of MS Office at least once in the past.
And what version of MS Office is being used? What kind of options are installed with it? What kind of configuration options are enabled on either of them? I don't remember having to reboot my computer to install Office on XP...maybe I did at one point, but it would have been for the MS installer updates...which quite possibly could have been needed for a fresh OO.o install on a fresh XP install.
This article could have garnered SOOO much more validity if it was a fresh install of both on a fresh install of XP. I'm sure that OO.o will probably still come out faster, but just how much the difference is...that I don't know.
Zro . two
"I come from Canada...they say I'm slow....eh?"
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!!
That was most likely a different issue. Your printer drivers changed when you upgraded from Win 3.11 to Win95. This caused word to relayout the document.
I'll bet if you ran the exact same version of Word in Win95 you'd have seen the same results.
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When will this stop. Is there that little news, or are the editors days too filled writing articles for better paying gigs and such?