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."
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/
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!
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.
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.
I just finished my own analysis. Here is the setup:
a ss.exec es.exee xe
Dell Inspiron 8500
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
512 MB RAM
I did a completely clean install of Windows XP SP2 last weekend, and I spend most of my time in Linux, so I haven't really touched it. I installed OO.o 1.1.14 and Office 2003 Professional. Office and Windows are fully patched.
Services running at Windows startup:
Automatic Updates
COM+ Event System
Cryptographic Services
DCOM Server Process Launcher
DHCP Client
DNS Client
Event Log
Help and Support
HID Input Support
Logical Disk Manager
Network Connections
Network Location Awareness (NLA)
Plug and Play
Print Spooler
Protected Storage
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Security Accounts Manager
Shell Hardware Detection
System Event Notification
System Restore Service
Windows Audio
Windows Installer
Windows Management Instrumentation
Windows User Mode Driver Framework
Wireless Zero Configuration
Processes running at Windows startup:
crss.exe
EM_EXEC.EXE
explorer.exe
ls
mmc.exe
msiexec.exe
Panorama.exe
servi
smss.exe
spollsv.exe
svchost.exe (x5)
System
taskmgr.exe
TransText.exe
wdfmgr.
winlogon.exe
wuauclt.exe
Notice that neither Microsof Office or OO.o have their "quick launch" programs running.
Word 2003 starts up for me in 3.5 seconds after a fresh reboot.
OO.o Writer 1.1.14 starts up at 16 seconds after a fresh reboot.
Subsequent starts of the programs with components still in RAM have an immaterial time difference.
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater
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?
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.
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.
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