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Ubuntu vs. Windows In OpenOffice.org Benchmark
ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."
Who cares? OOo is still slow no matter what platform it's run on.
XP faster then vista/7? I'm shocked. I've been doing some general testing between XP and ubuntu 8.10 as well as dellbuntu 8.04. Ubuntu gets 25% longer battery life on my netbook, but cannot play youtube videos (on either version) without lurching video. XP on the same netbook does youtube just fine, but has a 3 hour batter life to ubuntu's 4 hour. On an old p4 i have xp scrolls smoothly and instantly in firefox, where 8.10 has a delay before anything happens. My conclusion: On a slow system, XP is faster.
Disclaimer: I'm already a proud Ubuntu 8.10 User, i love that Os, has its issues but i think is good for me and what i do with it, but common, i'm already tired of this benchmark fever slashdot is suffering lately...
How many benchmarks do we need? Really..
Are we gonna benchmark every single app out there to see our loved Ubuntu beats the shit out of Windows?
Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks
Java Performance On Ubuntu Vs. Windows Vista
Ubuntu 8.10 Outperforms Windows Vista
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
"Due to the efficiency of Visual Studio 9 over GCC"... I don't want to pick a compiler flamewar here, but I think it is fair to say that making blanket statements about one particular compiler producing faster code than another is pretty ignorant. There are some things VC does that GCC doesn't do, and vice versa, compiler switches can make a big difference, and you really would need to study the most commonly used code in OO under both compilers to see who is, in fact, generating better code, and, incidentally, for which processor.
This is my sig.
Is speed really the issue here? My LAPTOP was a bargain-barrel purchase 3 years ago and it has no problem running OpenOffice + FireFox + other standard software on either Ubuntu or XP.
What I care about is, "Which one is least likely to crash and make me lose my work?" That's always been my big complaint with the Windows versions of free software (GIMP comes to mind), not speed.
Who runs OO on Windows?
More people than who run it on Linux, that is for sure. We have it on all the computers here that didn't already have Office preinstalled (meaning most of them). I have both on my computer, although I use OO most of the time, as I like their spreadsheet app better than office.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You'd be suprised how many windows users are running Open Office. There are a lot of people, myself included who for one reason or other can't use Linux as their primary OS in some situations but still like to use Open Source Software wherever possible.
I wonder if the faster warmboot times under XP are due to its prefetching functionality. Another benchmark with prefetching disabled could determine this. Maybe Ubuntu or other distributions can try adding prefetch functionality to their distributions and put Windows where it belongs, (at) last.
I use OpenOffice on Windows all the time. Some software that I use for work requires Windows and I don't have a personal copy of Microsoft Office. Besides, Using OO.o in Windows lets me access all of my personal documents in their native odt format.
On my Mac desktop I used OpenOffice for a long time. I find MS Office on the Mac to be a train wreck. But OO's performance really sucks on the Mac, even with Java turned off. I switched to Apple's own iWork '09 and it's fantastic, far superior to any alternative on the same OS. I prefer open document formats, but I need to get my job done.
My point is I hope the OO teams can focus more on performance across the board. I realize the difficulty when it's built for multiple platforms, but once performance is improved it'll be a much better contender.
Developers: We can use your help.
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before 2001 at my employer all the machines used to run MS Works or MS Office. then we realized that Works and Office were teh totally suxx0rz so we started using Oo0, gradually at first. by O0o ver 2 or so all the machines were on 0Oo and we no longer have Works or Office. dont' need that garbage
We have four computer labs totaling 21 computes, soon to be bumped up to 27. These are all three or four year old Dells with OEM XP licenses, but even with educational pricing, I have little interest in spending my budget on any version of Office. OpenOffice.org 3.0 opens most of the major formats, is free (as in "no licensing headaches") and is a helluva lot more like Office 97/2000/2003 than the horror story known as Office 2007.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Who runs OO on Windows? The only point of this "test" is to see if Linux can keep up or not.
Anybody that doesn't want to shell out $400 dollars for an MS Office license once the "try it for 10 runs or 60 days, whichever happens first" demo expires.
I feel OOo is slow both on Linux as well as Windows. Most likely this is due to the bloat and mindless copying of MS Office features. I have a question: Is it possible to weed out the redundant or useless features in OOo and make it sleek and quick? Since this is completely open source, theoretically this should be possible.
In similar vein, I'm also looking for pluck-outs from Firefox which is also bloated. Rather than running extensions called NoScript, AdBlock, FlashBlock etc.; why not remove these products from the installed version itself to make it lean, mean and less resource hungry?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
It's just me? I don't find very interesting a benchmark of office suites. Look, my suite can write bold text faster than yours! Boring...
People from 3rd world countries, we are having a big plan here to switch to OO.o here with the help from the government.
Right... people who care about not having illegal software but don't want to pay the MS tax.
I'd like to think that's a lot of people..
Because...well, I didn't read the article, but are we benchmarking Word Processing applications now? How fast a spreadsheet can calculate the sum of a column? Whether there's a pause between fade-in transitions in a presentation?
I'm trying to think of a good car analogy here...maybe how fast your passenger side door closes?
Nothing like testing on modern hardware! Wait, I've got a P4 sitting around here somewhere we can test with.......
For every new PC (w/ Vista) we buy I instruct their new owners to start getting used to OpenOffice and if necessary, use the Office trial they bundle with it again, only if necessary.
So far I've had 100% (2/2 yei!) success with converting co-workers from Office to OpenOffice. Perhaps the transition from XP to Vista helps with Office to OpenOffice at the same time.. At least the new ribbon interface is so strange to some people that it seems to scare people off.
Small print: these guys were not programmers or writers and only do simple tasks; they most likely had never even (nor will learn in the future) learned how to use styles with word processor.
the people that care are the one using open standards. If you use .xls, you better stay on ms office.
Who runs OO on Windows?
Any of my clients who came to me with a new computer recently.
Uninstall annoying McAfee/MS Office trial versions + Install AVG and OpenOffice = Happy client.
For others (like me) who are familiar with OOo but never heard of "Go-oo", Wikipedia says,
Go-oo is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Sun Microsystems, and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version, or will not be because of business or political reasons. Some of these changes or enhancements will eventually be part of the Sun version, too; the process of assessing patches, "upstreaming", just takes time.
It's a shame that even the Go-oo website does a poor job of explaining this on the front page (doesn't mention OpenOffice.org until nearly the very end) nor on the "about" page.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Not all of us use or want to use a linux dist clearly designed for the point-and-click brigade. Not to mention the daft name (no I don't care what it means in Zulu, to an English speaker it sounds idiotic), daft release names, moronic default restrictions (to a power user) such as a locked root account. Perhaps I'm just a crusty old git but anything with release names like "gutsy gibbon" and "intrepid ibex" to me sounds like something aimed at pre teens which makes me wonder what other "user friendly" cutesy rubbish they've hacked into the system itself.
How about some benchmarks of Suse or Fedora or even Slackware?
Oh wait. It was a rhetorical question. Sorry.
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I use xls on both Excel and Open Office and they are mostly compatable. If you are one of those accounting types with 100000 lines in an excel file then you you should stick with excel.
Open Office is a replacement for M$ office for 95% of the use cases. Still the proprietary formats of M$ Office made it difficult to port. Since those standards are now published I think cross program support will improve.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Speed? Fix the feature set first.
Until Open Office Writer gets a Track Changes that works reasonably and Mail Merge allows the most basic of custom fields (and maybe even integrates with email), then organizations like mine will continue to pony up to Microsoft. I keep trying it out, and it's still just not good enough to push onto my users.
the people that care are the one using open standards. If you use .xls, you better stay on ms office.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. I personally would love to have open formats all the time. Heaven knows that it would make my job easier. But, the fact of the matter is, most companies/people/etc use MS Office. You must have that compatibility. It's nice to hold to ideals, but you can't shoot yourself in the foot while doing so...
Who runs OO on anything? I use Ubuntu as my primary desktop/dev OS, but I don't use OO for anything.
It's slow, and it doesn't work for anything beyond a very trivial subset of Office functionality.
When I need Office, I go to my Windows laptop.
OO = total fail.
Who runs OO on Windows?
A lot of our home user and student clients use OO instead of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office isn't cheap. It's several hundred dollars depending on what kind of discounts you get and what version you need. It used to come preloaded on a lot of systems, but these days they frequently give you some kind of 30-day trial of Microsoft Office, instead of the full version.
Business folks don't generally care. Most of our business clients have some kind of volume license anyway, so they throw it on whatever new computer they get.
A lot of our home users have a hard time justifying spending $100 or more just so their kid can type up a paper at home.
So we point them at OO, and it generally does what they need it to. We've made a lot of people very happy by giving them a free alternative to Microsoft Office.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Seriously. ... Who cares if OpenOffice opens a .xls document 4 seconds faster, since it takes me a good 25 minutes to reconfigure all the graphs formating that it lost from MS Office??
Is that 25 minutes taken into factor? ... That's right, I didn't think so.
That's just silly.
If you need Excel, why would you be running OO? If you've got all kinds of graphs and formatting and whatever else that's going to take 25 minutes to fix in OO, why wouldn't you be running Excel? That time adds up pretty quickly and before long it becomes very easy to justify the cost of a license for Excel.
That's like the folks who switch to Linux or OS X and then load up their machine with some kind of VM and run everything in Windows anyway. If you need Windows, why not just run Windows?
Of course the best solution would be to get everyone working from some kind of open format, so it didn't matter what software you were using. So there was absolutely no vendor lock-in. But that won't be happening any time soon.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Not trying to be a troll, but I kind of laugh when I see the "OOo benchmarks on various OS" reports. I use openSUSE for the most part and the Go OO version of OpenOffice on both Vista and openSUSE. What I've found interesting is how much faster and more responsive Office 2003 is running either natively or under Crossover Office (which I posted before in the openSUSE mailing lists).
I really like OOo - and especially Go-OO - for it's user interface and nice clean setup, when working in Calc or Text. However, I would like to see some serious speed improvements in starting time, especially for the bundled versions coming with the distros.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Why are benchmarks considered important here? How about real consumer acceptance that goes beyond the Ubuntu and Open Office hobby community? Wake me up when desktop Linux hits 5% of consumer desktops.
Weird.. everything that i've heard from Office 2007 from my relatives is that is better tan previous versions, once the shock of the new UI is dissipated.
It's by no means a perfect benchmark, but for usability, I tend to believe them more than some random website
Get Crossover Office, it's defiantly worth the money. I use Microsoft Office 2007 of my Linux laptop. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. Symphony is also a nice, Linux compatible, alternative to OO.
I own a small web development company. The company is basically 3 members and the occassional contractor. I run Ubuntu and the other two run vista and OSX on out development machines. We use Open Office so we can be platform agnostic.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
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My experience from the various people I have to deal with as their IT manager is that they loathe Office 2007. Maybe, all things being equal, it is superior, much as the Dvorak keyboard is probably superior to the Qwerty keyboard, but things are not equal. I deal with a staff, some of which have over a decade of experience using Word versions starting with Word 95 (and some earlier versions than that), where each new version wasn't really that big a leap, and suddenly they're plunged into the world of ribbons, and take five minutes just to figure out how to print a document.
There's this thing called a learning curve, and OpenOffice, while hardly perfect and certainly not a clone of Office 97-2003, is significantly closer in layout than Office 2007. So bravo to your Aunt Nancy for catching on, but I have to manage systems in a real live workplace, where retraining means loss of productivity until the learning curve has been matched. Taking the path of least resistance seems for many of the people I work with to be the way to go.
Microsoft should have, at every least, put in a "Looks Kinda LIke Office 2003" mode, much as they have done over the years with Windows itself.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Anyone who wants documents readable in 10 years?
I would rate you at +10 insightful if I could...
I have better reasons for choosing Ubuntu than how fast a given application runs on it.
> It's slow, and it doesn't work for anything beyond a very trivial subset of Office functionality.
SURPRISE! That's all most people actually need.
You know.... "my requirements" versus "your requirements" beyond just the basic vendorlock thing.
The rest of us shouldn't have to buy a certain product just because you have a Microsoft fixation.
This includes the Mac users with their copies of iWork.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Abiword FTW! \o/
Plus it's easier to just download OO.o than to find a pirate copy of Office.
A week or two ago, I installed Gimp on Windows. Gimp takes forever to start on Vista 64. I figure it's because Gimp uses GTK, which is not Windows native, where as on my Ubuntu install GTK is native and Gimp starts up very quickly.
OpenOffice.org is a unix application rigged into running on Windows, sort of like Pidgin or GIMP on Windows.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Windows
And if you go over each of the official build services, you will find that one of the big differences between go-oo.org, StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org vanilla is simply build engineering. Specifically, if they're building with cygwin, it provides some major performance issues. Although Windows has some native POSIX support, you don't use it quite the same way as you do in Linux or Solaris- rather than accounting for these differences, OOo uses a POSIX emulation layer in order to avoid extra work. Despite the fact that Windows is the primary platform for distribution, it's simply too much trouble for Sun or Novell to screw with it. I know Novell is trying to move their build service (go-oo) into a straight GCC cross-compile solution, so the speed issue will not get any better on Windows.
My point is that this is built with Visual Studio 2005 as more or less a standard Windows application, not a Vista/7 application- it's not using the NT 6+ API's, so it's invalid as a true performance test. This would be similar to us testing Microsoft Office 2003 (I don't think OOo is quite feature comparable to 2007) on Windows vs. Wine and then declaring that Windows is the hands down superior platform.
So let's talk about Platform inequities. The Microsoft optimizing C compiler is a better compiler than GCC-- but GCC is really not half bad anymore. Visual Studio's really superior because of its debugging, refactoring, and profiling tools, not so much JUST its compiler. I think this is part of why Firefox runs faster in Wine than in native Linux. In fact, by writing your application in like vim and debugging with gdb then just using Visual Studio as a build slave, you're really getting the short end of the stick in both directions. But I digress, a native unix application like OOo is a native unix application, and I wouldn't expect you to get tremendously better success in Windows unless you're running it on Interix or something. Of course, that's not to say Windows doesn't do unix tasks like NFS better than UNIX, just that it doesn't necessarily run direct unix code better.
But this is all fluff, the fact of the matter is that OOo is not a Windows application and most people are Windows users, so let's look at some logical alternatives:
So... if you're running Windows and you just need to type a paper for school for free/cheap.... why not just use Softmaker Office 2006... or Softmaker Office 2008 if you have 20 bucks. Just use Office 2007 if you're doing long reports- the bibliography handling alone will make the 60 bucks to get it through ultimate steal worthwhile when writing something long and arduous. Consider the time you save on formatting and grammar checking and such over a semester or two- it's worth it. If you're paying thousands a year for your education, the least you can do is not waste time with shitty office software.
Personally, I use OOo on my linux netbook and Softmaker Office 2006 on my Windows box and just keep my documents in ODF. It's the cheap-ass pro solution.
If I had a mod up point, I'd give it to you. It takes me longer to relearn how to do things in Office 2007 that I was proficient at in Office 2003, than it does to learn something else (OO or iWork) from scratch.
It did indeed take me five minutes to figure out how to print.
And in Excel, why did they screw up the 'formula bar'? MS had in Excel, the one piece of the office bundle that none of the other packages had ever managed to get quite right, and then they had to muck it up.
OO.org is a surprisingly good Office replacement for a small non-IT business. Most often all they need is a text processor to write simple 1-2 page letters, and a spreadsheet for the accountant (no fancy macros etc). OO does that - and I had OO successfully adopted in such an environment. There was no way of replacing Windows with Linux (a lot of legacy third-party apps for making orders from suppliers, one for each, most of them written for Windows, and some even for DOS), but OO - no problem with that at all.
I installed it here at work. We use MS Office but I prefer OpenOoffice.org.
I even have OOo installed on the Mac Mini at home for my wife to use. I never told her it was not the same as the software she uses at work, so she has no problems with it. She has learned to click the Firefox icon instead of Safari or just searching for the "ie" icon. It's amazing how comfortable people are with software if you don't tell them too much.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
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In my experience most home users and most small businesses OO acceptance over MS Office is easy.
It's those assholes who get all their software off of TPB that are hardest to convert. Its the notion that if you steal high value items they'll do you better than something that's free.
They might use their copy of MS Office 3 to 4 times a year to view a document. They have a copy of the latest Photoshop even though they have no idea how to use it effectively (It resizes photos so well you know?). They have terabytes of software that they've invested a lot of time and bandwidth getting. No way in hell are they gonna use something they can get for free if it doesn't have a high retail price.
Someone should do them all a favor and offer OO for $900.
Uuuhhh......Office 2K7 Pro is $109 and that was just from the first link I came across. You could probably get it even cheaper if you actually spent more than 3 seconds looking. I know I got my Office 2K a few years back for $50. For me the added speed and the fact that for me it just works better, even under crossover Office than OO.o makes it worth the money.
While you couldn't pay me enough to take Vista, MSFT has traditionally made good office software. For me, after trying OO.o 1.x I found that Office 2K was simply a better value. I have tried both Office 2K7 and OO.o 3, and frankly OO.o is just too damned slow and sluggish for me, so if I had to choose I would take 2K7(although I still prefer the simplicity of Office 2K). But to trot out that old $400 price thing doesn't really help your argument, as nobody actually goes out and pays $400 for Office, at least not in all the years I've been working with SOHO and SMBs. It is just too easy to find it cheaper.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That's a whole Insightful per year!
Being able to do everything Excel can do and being able to import an Excel file perfectly are two completely different situations. Anytime you do any sort of format shifting, there are going to be problems. Try taking an old DOS Quattro Pro or Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and bring it into a new version of MSOffice and not have formatting problems. You can't even bring an old Excel 4 spreadsheet into a new version of MSOffice without having to reformat the entire document.
My wife, for one. She's an elementary music teacher, and does a lot of prep work at home. Recently one of her coworkers showed her how to use powerpoint for her classes. She came home and asked me if we have powerpoint.
"No," I said. "But we do have pretty much the same thing."
I fired up Impress and asked her if that looked familiar. It did and away she went. She's now able to do prep work at home in the evenings and be in the same building as her family rather than work late.
Unlike the anonymous douche bag below--who's apparently running OO on an IBM XT--for us: OO = total success.
"Being able to do everything Excel can do and being able to import an Excel file perfectly are two completely different situations."
They would be different if opening and displaying an Excel file wasn't one of the things Excel can do.
Gnumeric works better Excel than Excel works with Excel...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
My laptop and desktop aren't that new. (desktop 4+ years old, laptop 3 years old) and I can manage to run OOo quite well on both. The laptop runs XP and the desktop is Ubuntu.
Maybe people need to get their porn from somewhere that doesn't load their PC with spyware to slow the system down.
AVG? so back in a month you clients are back because the PC infected by 20 or more variants of a virus? Thats a model of business!
Who runs OO on Windows?
Every single person in my company. Most of our people are doing the actual work that earns us money rather than reading or writing word processor documents and spreadsheets. For us, the choice was between OO.o or nothing at all. There are still a few legacy installations of Office for people who actually need a few obscure features, but all employees have OpenOffice.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The Microsoft optimizing C compiler is a better compiler than GCC-- but GCC is really not half bad anymore...
--You are on crack, aren't you...
I'm not really running OO, for the exact resons you listed. I'm just saying I tried using OO, and my response was a criticism of all the advice I got from linux zealots who love to rub in your face how OO is perfect and can do everything Excel can do. Bullshit.
Not to put too find a point on it, but: that's what happens if you listen to zealots. There are plenty of rational, helpful people in here that will tell you exactly what OOo can and cannot do. The GP, who says "use Excel if you need Excel" is one of these.
Your comment was disingenuous and came off as an attack (rather than a criticism), as you made the statement that OOo "slows your work". Well yeah, trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer will slow your work too.
My advice is this: ignore the zealots who say obviously wrong things (that's pretty much trolling in any case), and listen to the plenty of informed people instead.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
OMFG. We're pointing back to the "how many clicks does it takes" "benchmarks" on the pre-perf-tuned BETA now where "DRM checks" impacted copyfile?
I would like to celebrate this continued example of technical dishonesty on Slashdot. It's a biased site in all directions (which makes it fun and interesting, as opposed to sites that only tilt one direction), but that's pretty ridiculous.
I puked a little.
Can we be proud enough of our technical excellence that we actually require technically interesting tests? JFC, have some pride.
I do, because I have to use Windows at work. Office does my nut in and I've refused to upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007.
I decided to install OpenOffice last year to see how well it would cope in the office, and you know what? It works really well - no interoperability issues (I was even handling 2007 files from clients before anyone else in the company) and a far less frustrating experience.
1/
Measuring "speed" of a human interaction limited UI editor is simply daft, and the idea that you should reboot ever few minutes indicates a Win mentality, re-boot often since the OS memory leaks. Next since the scripting is unlike real behavior.
2./
What matters is how good the layout algorithms are, and what functionallity you get. I use vanilla OOO all the time, on my laptop for all personal and business purposes, even though I can/do run M$ Word under Wine or virtualised in an XP environment and all are fast enough for all realistic practical purposes, at least on a dual core with 2GB.
Subjectively OOO is easier to use, and less likely to cause idiots to miss-use its functionality, but much more important, with improved and now almost bug free font management, the output looks good. For a publisher/word-processor that is good. If I want it to look beautiful, I use La(Tex), OOO is acceptable and if, never, I dont mind ugly then M$ Word.
Exactly like IE, Word is a hostage to M$ marketing, so they waste time with ribbons in the UI rather than making the layout right.
You can just tell what typeset stuff, if you have reasonable eyesight, and an understanding of typography, you will easibly recognise TeX, OOO, and M$-Word output and I leave the rest to your own judgement.
Assuming they aren't prepared to get MS Office the torrent way (which works beautifully if you know how I might add), why didn't you recommend the It's Not Stealing promotion Microsoft likes to run which offers 2007 Ultimate for a relatively low price to students at least?
http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/itsnotcheating/default.aspx
(fyi. not a shrill, but it is a nice offer and 2007 is a very nice package in any case).
The files OO.org creates are also larger than those created by MS Office.
Try using Office for Mac. You will become capable of murder.
you should be sent on a training course for how to use a spreadsheet.
I cursed the day I heard the new version of Excel would let people go to a million rows. The kind of atrocities people create already, they're only ever forced to stop and think about what they're doing when they hit that 65,000 row limit and say hey, maybe I'm duplicating too much here, maybe I should rethink my design and organise my data better.
The more people get the new Excel, the more they'll continue eternally down the screen, copy and paste and edit, copy and paste and edit, and they'll email a million-row monstrosity to everyone in the company and kill the email system for hours. What's to stop them? Why should they ever rethink if they never hit the bottom? They'll just keep on as they are, generating more and more unnecessary work through sheer ignorance.
You often hear nerds flaming Access. Reasonably enough too: people create awful half-arsed relational databases using that app, which we then end up having to tidy up. But I tell you what, they're creating awful half-arsed relational databases in Excel too, and they're far worse. When all you have is a VLOOKUP(), everything starts to look like yet another $AF$210:$AH$409,3,FALSE. Give me a left join created in a click-and-drool GUI any day.
As far as spreadsheets go: 65 thousand rows should be enough for anybody.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
C'mon now. It's hardly fair to call Canada a "3rd world country."
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
Unlike the anonymous douche bag below--who's apparently running OO on an IBM XT--for us: OO = total success.
Well, I can't speak for the anonymous douchebag, but OO.org flies on my XT once I disable Java!
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
You do realize that your first link was to an academic version. This is not legal to use for commercial purposes. You might as well pirate it as pay $109 and use it in a SMB. You're NOT legal either way!
Anyone writing "M$" rather than MS automagically loses all credibility.
It's the key located left to D.
And the layout of the executable. If commonly used pages are stored sequentially then they'll be loaded more quickly from a normal hard drive than if they're intermixed with code that's infrequently used. MS Office, for example, is linked to take advantage of this.
Well then, here is 2k3 Pro for $89.99. And I don't see anything about education pricing. Again, this is just the first link I noticed, if one were to spend more than 3 seconds looking it can be found for even cheaper I'm sure. I got mine when a company went out of business. They had nice Office 2K pro edition still in the retail packages that didn't get deployed before the company went tits up. The boss bought a lot of their office machines(a whole trailer full IIRC) and he let me go through the software and have it at the auction price. I paid a whole $50 for mine.
But as I said, it really isn't hard to find Office at an affordable price, especially if you don't mind being a version behind. And since they have a compatibility pack that will let you open 2k7 in 2k or later, that really isn't a big deal. But if one were to spend more than the combined 6 seconds I did I'm sure they could find it cheaper, especially if they didn't need all the bells and whistles of Pro. But in all my years of dealing with SOHO and SMBs I don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually paying $400 for Office. Like I said a few minutes on the net and you can find it for a lot less.
I personally think MSFT advertises the price that high to get businesses to go ahead and buy site licenses or software assurance. It is a lot easier to sell a business on it if you can show them some crazy price if they had to buy retail. Kinda like how even on MSDN there are articles telling you to just buy the upgrade instead of the full version of Vista. Everyone including MSFT knows about it but they don't care, because retail boxed versions of Vista simply isn't where their bread is buttered. But if you want to believe that people are actually paying $400 a pop for Office go right ahead. But I'm telling you that if it DID actually cost $400 then OO.o would gain a lot bigger foothold than it has now. It simply isn't in MSFT's best interest to sell it at that price, not when they can sell so many more at the $100 price range and keep people and businesses buying Office year after year.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As for OO being slow, in my experience the slowest link is me typing/reading
So you have some text in your head, and you want to get it onto the screen. How much of a delay is there between starting OOo Writer and it being ready to accept input? Or do you use the Notepad/gedit workaround, where you start a lightweight text editor in the foreground, type the first sentence or two, then paste it into OOo Writer once it has loaded? And how much of a delay is there between opening a document in your file manager and the document being ready to view?
Some of these changes or enhancements [in Go-oo] will eventually be part of the Sun version, too; the process of assessing patches, "upstreaming", just takes time.
So would Go-oo is to OpenOffice.org as XEmacs is to GNU Emacs be entirely inaccurate?
There was no way of replacing Windows with Linux (a lot of legacy third-party apps for making orders from suppliers, one for each, most of them written for Windows, and some even for DOS), but OO - no problem with that at all.
You should feel lucky that these third-party apps weren't built to run on top of Microsoft Access. I don't think the typical accounting/POS/inventory management app written for Access would run on OOo Base.
But a locked down root account clearly shows they're not expecting anyone to do any serious sys admin on it because no one is going to want to type sudo for every single command they need to run under root.
Type sudo bash to see how not locked down it is. Disallowing login directly as root is a security feature to slow down computer vandals a bit.
Me, for example. Superior handling of styles. Integrated PDF export with bookmarks.
When you need to assemble and deliver docs, OO proves to be better solution than any Office version.
I guess you're simply not using the features I do.
Regards,
Ruemere
No,
33% longer than 3 hours is 4 hours.
25% shorter than 4 hours is 3 hours.
Or if you're making a paper for school, why not just use LaTeX? Produces better looking output, autoupdates your reference numbers for you, Bibliography handling is still the easiest yet, typing mathematic symbols and formulae is infinitely easier than any other word processor on the market, etc etc. (Ok, I'll stop derailing this now with fanboyisms).
You haven't been practicing.
(which works beautifully if you know how I might add)
Just FYI: It took me a while to parse your note properly. A comma after the "how" would help.
Same here. Over 50 computers in an educational research environment. Retail prices for Office Academic are outrageous ($250 to $600).
Select licensing (where a single license could be purchased for $35) has been discontinued and replaced with a 'package deal' where you pay ~$120 for Windows + Office + whatever crap they want to share but you can't just get 5 license, you need a license for every single machine in your department no matter whether they're even capable of running Windows (eg. PowerPC Mac) just because they would be covered for Office.
And then there is of course the nice Enterprise licensing. They give you a Windows and Office package for ~$100 or $60 for individual licenses per year with automatic upgrades but you have to cover every single person that might work in the offices and might use Office at some point. So we're stuck here again because we can't afford to pay for our 5 staff and the roughly 50 researchers that have a part-time appointment and only come in once in a while.
All of the above is affordable for large departments that have bunches of students and the budget to go along with it and they get a better deal out of the 'packages' but if you're running a non-Windows environment you're pretty much screwed
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If you are one of those accounting types with 100000 lines in an excel file you should consider to use a decent DBMS.
I load Openoffice-Writer i 2,5 seconds on FreeBSD... how is that slow?
do you have any data to back up the fact you're basically calling avg inadequate as an anti-virus program ?
oh my god! Operating System X loads OOo faster than Operating System Y! I'm going to switch immediately! Because clearly that is the deciding factor between my using Windows or Linux. not program availability or compatibility or actual usefulness, no.
Loading times is where it's at dog.
I checked the second link as well. You can go ahead and download the software, but it does NOT include a license! I've spent some years in the Microsoft System Builder program and have some familiarity with the program requirements and what is required to stay legal. There are some gray areas, and some really strange licensing requirements that put SMBs in a bit of a difficult spot. MS Office Home and Student is available from Newegg for about the price shown in your link and it can be installed on 3 computers! It says right in the license that commercial use is a violation of the terms. No doubt, a small business that has no disgruntled employees can go cheap and stay under the radar. As a business grows, this is more difficult and the licensing requirements and associated costs must be considered. It is obvious that you are not taking them fully into account, or perhaps are unfamiliar with the terms/requirements. I do advise folks to consider standardizing on OO unless their requirements suggest this will not do. Have any of the folks you've advised been through a BSA audit? We did a trial audit using a form/checklist that guided us through the process. It was a real eye-opener that didn't make us rush out and buy the site licenses. We simply moved to Open Office for all the users/computers that did not require MS Office.
Allow me to summarize:
OOo FTW!!! Ubuntu FTW!!! OSX... ftw?!
Windows, not so much.
There is a company(sorry it is the crack o' dawn here and my Google Fu don't work without coffee) that does nothing but buy and sell MSFT licenses in bulk. They buy them up when companies go tits up. That is how a buddy of mine in LR outfitted a SMB he was freelancing for. Yes, there are some grey areas, but whose fault is that? Microsoft's! I doubt very seriously they would have any luck in court with the byzantine minefield that is the MSFT licensing scheme. I seriously doubt even an army of lawyers could decipher that mess.
That said, again I took a whole 6 seconds total. But in all my years working SOHO and SMB I can't ever remember anyone paying over $150 for MS Office and they did NOT buy the education version! There are OEM, there are those from companies that went tits up, hell there are 50 ways to get MS Office. Just clicking the first link on bizrate has Office Basic 2k3 for $131, standard for $219, and again that took all of 3 seconds.
Now I concede that is you are trying to outfit a huge business(50 nodes or more) then it gets to be a minefield, but that is the POINT. That is how MSFT sells so many site licenses and software assurance programs, which is where their bread is buttered. But since I don't work often with the big corps(I HATE PHBs!) I can't comment too much on that. I work with SOHO,SMB, and churches as well as home users on occasion, so those are the markets I can comment on. And for those markets I can say I don't remember ever paying more than $150 for Office. BTW, where does it say that the link I gave don't have a license? Because I looked everywhere and I couldn't find any. All I could find was the standard "this is OEM" software rules, which means once installed you're not supposed to transfer it to another machine like you can with retail. But since I have found when most of my customers PCs die it is usually HDD failure and they NEVER hang onto the damned discs like I tell them to the whole OEM catch is moot.
But if MSFT Office really WAS $400, then Wordperfect and Staroffice and OO.o wouldn't be so far behind MSFT in the market. And MSFT knows this, which is why they don't go around trying to kill first sale like certain other companies do. It simply isn't in their interests to build a market for the alternative. I really wish there WAS a market so I wouldn't have problems like I do now. Anybody know of a program that will convert publisher files? Because I got a church deacon that was stupid enough to take his PC over to the local college(where they use Mac,dumbass) to get his PC fixed cheap and they wiped out Office and all of his churches stuff is tied up in 2K3 publisher files. That is why I always say I'm like the old commercial "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later" because they always end up paying me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Or if you're making a paper for school, why not just use LaTeX? Produces better looking output, autoupdates your reference numbers for you, Bibliography handling is still the easiest yet, typing mathematic symbols and formulae is infinitely easier than any other word processor on the market, etc etc. (Ok, I'll stop derailing this now with fanboyisms).
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't tried that. Maybe I am just not smart enough for unix or something, but I've sort of come to like spelling/grammar check and good WYSWYG. Office 2007 handles so much of the headache for you it's just crazy... bibliography is as easy as adding the fields to a simple gui app and then clicking generate bibliography.
If it's easier than that, I must have been using a different LaTeX.
So far I've had 100% (2/2 yei!) success with converting co-workers from Office to OpenOffice....
Small print: these guys were not programmers or writers and only do simple tasks; they most likely had never even (nor will learn in the future) learned how to use styles with word processor.
Considering what the average manager in any company does with WordProcessing(Word), Spreadsheets(Excel) and Slide Presentation (PowerPoint) (the three biggest reason for Office) they have been able to do since the Windows 95 days...this is not a surprise.
OOo Writer, Calc and Impress do everything that those three do and as you get use to it you start to love them.
Not surprised that you are having such success.
Now if we can get people to turn the auto update crap OFF, selectively updating only a couple of times per year, than Microsoft will no longer control their desktops.
This of course is why they insist via FUD, that you MUST KEEP auto update turned on to be safe - NOT.
My response, if the operating system is That BAD, that unsafe than I need a different BETTER operating system. I suggest Linux, at least you can turn auto update OFF with Linux.
The auto update BLOAT can ONLY be conquered by turning it OFF. FUD, FUD, FUD...lol, when are you people going to stop believing this crapola FUD?
Eventually you too will get tired of your PC being slowed down by their FUD, when that happens you will look for a better alternative.
Good news: there are many Linux alternatives out there...go for one of them and leave Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt where it belongs, in your past, permanently left behind!
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"Then maybe you might try compiling it yourself or find a different binary package."
OOo: Faster than MSOffice...if You're a Nerd.
Seriously though, OOo should obviously be compared after it's been compiled against the latest libraries, and it's the developers job to release that latest version on their site.
In any case, a fair comparison should be done using the same version. All I know is that OOo is snappier on Linux, and without the bleeps, sweeps, and the creeps which the Windows version suffers from.
Who doesn't love it.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.