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."

Comments

So much for objectivity...

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

I don't like Microsoft...

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.

Re:So much for objectivity...

[deacon]

Nice that the author is admitting his bias up front

It is, actually. I wish the MSM people were requiered to do the same. What's the problem with him admitting bias up front? Would he be a "better person" if he hid his bias, pretended it did not exist?

makes the obvious skewing in the rest of this 'test' marginally easier to swallow.

What obvious skewing? Are you just trying to poison the well or do you have any actual counter-argument to the results of his tests?

Re:We tried working with OO.org

[tuba_dude]

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.

Seven-year-old computers

[tepples]

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.

Re:a suspicious definition of "slow"

[bcrowell]

I was also amazed that on his system, which I would consider a very fast, high-end machine, Word took 31 seconds to load the first time. Do people really put up with that? Are they nuts?? I'd thought OOo was scandalously slow because it took that long to start on old hardware.

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?

Re:Microsoft: Bloat Versus Speed

[Gorath99]

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.

Re:the results are in

[Sparr0]

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.

Useless

[Klivian]

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.

Re:Useless

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Maybe you always keep things open a long time and work on them, but some of us don't. I frequently have sessions during some work days where I have to open and review and/or tweak on a couple dozen documents, or when I have to quickly open a document to get an answer for somebody on the phone. In those situations, waiting on Word (or any other app, for that matter) to leisurely haul itself and every document into memory is a pain.

Re:Useless

[havardi]

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. You might say one might as well leave the program open, but most people don't understand that concept-- which is probably one reason that the Macintosh UI often leaves programs running (unless you specifically quit), and why so many programs have obnoxious system startup items. To the end user, startup time is the first impression and probably the most important benchmark.

Re:Haha

[brxndxn]

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..

It's behaviour compatibility over file formats

[jesterzog]

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) ...

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:

1. Implement some kind of "MS Word quirks" mode for this entire time, or
2. Change the OpenOffice.org document model so that it's incompatible with earlier versions of itself, and instead incorporates the inconsistencies that Word does.

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.

This article is beyond pointless

[man_of_mr_e]

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.