Slashdot Mirror
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.
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/
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!
From TFA:
My computer is slow (a 2.2 GHz Celeron with 512 MB RAM)
By that definition, my 500 MHz laptop positively crawls.
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 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.
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!
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.
The recent news of Microsoft going to an XML file format in Office in the next release is encouraging, however I don't expect it to be that simple. OO (and AbiWord, for that matter) would probably be considered a real threat to Office/Word if they could simply be on the same level playing ground when it comes to reading/writing compatible files. For all but the simplest docs, I've yet to see a third-party word processor that claims MS Word compatibility to function 100%
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
and a few more...
That's so weird that he's had so many problems happen lately!
............. This news just in ............. Microsoft products inefficient ... more at ten.
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!)
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...
I agree. I use OpenOffice exclusively now (for a year or so) but not because it's better or faster.... it's because I don't want to pay Microsoft's price for a word processor when OO.o does "good enough" for my purposes. (I almost never need a word processor but my wife uses one from time to time because she is in school.)
Anyway, my experience is that OO.o is slower to open, slower all around, and just slower to use than Word. It also doesn't have as many features and is just as buggy if not more so. However, it does have a few things that seem to work better than Word - I thought the bullet/lists were better at first but haven't been able to find the promote/demote hotkeys yet (which I used in Word a lot) but... at least it has the right price tag for my budget for word processors.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
And notepad is even faster. What's his point?
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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.
Too bad he didn't use the built in spell checker on either one of them when he wrote his review
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.
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.
AFAIK Open Office can save to PDF, but not open PDFs for editing.
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
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
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.
"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?
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
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.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
When will this stop. Is there that little news, or are the editors days too filled writing articles for better paying gigs and such?
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.
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.
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.