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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, 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 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.
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
It was, no joke, 180mb
I got it home and opened in OOo writer (I was right, KOffice didn't get everything correct, so I thought I'd use that as a conversion step). I verified everything had imported correctly, added a few more graphs and things (finishing it off) and saved as rtf.
1.2mb. Over two orders of magnitude smaller.
The document is here if anyone wants to try and duplicate the result.
I am trolling
"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
No, people don't put up with that.
As has been pointed out by others word doesn't open anywhere near that slow. The author's either lying or a moron who's machine is borked up beyond belief.
It amazes that when people here go out of their way to criticize MS products they are basically saying, "I'm a total idiot that can't use a computer". MS has products that totally suck for joe-blow that doesn't know crap. But a power user can and *should* be keeping windows (since 2000 anyways) clean and stable. If you're not, you're a moron. Should MS make it easier to do so and better? Hell yes. But it doesn't take rocket science to keep it up and clean. People that apparently can admin linux boxes in 31 different flavors are too fucking stupid too keep windows up. Or they're lying.
I think I'll safely say the later is the correct choice.
Windows/Word has enough issues, we don't need to resort to FUD and lies though.
Huh? I've *NEVER* seen a case where a later version of Word couldn't open an older version of Word's documents identically to the original.
Then you've never had a Word document with tables or macros in it. My guess is that it is done deliberately to force all users in a company to upgrade. I could cut MS some slack if it were just that an older version couldn't open a doc from a newer version, but it fails both ways.