2007/11/22, Nick Whitehead <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > In my opinion Open Office - whilst generally excellent - has a serious > flaw when compared to MS Excel. > > Calculation speed. > > I'm comparing to an old version (Excel '97), but I would estimate that > on any decent sized spreadsheet where such things are noticeable and > measurable that OO Calc is about 5-10x slower than Excel.
That's approximately what I've seen as well. However I have read articles that says that Calc, in average, is 10×-100× slower than Excel (however I am not sure what version of Excel they were referring to, but it was '97 or a more recent version. It makes big > spreadsheets very difficult to work with, and I'm thinking of > reinstalling Excel (just Excel, not Word etc) for this reason. This is > with normal maths formulae (+, -, *, /, sum etc) - nothing fancy. Try autofilter with 20 columns and 2000 rows (which is not very much and should not be a problem, and IS not a problem with Excel). It's truly terrible with Calc! I raised a DEFECT for this, but it was instantly closed (by 'FST') on > the grounds that it was more a subjective opinion than an actual defect. > I suppose there is some justification for this, however one could also > argue that a complete crash could be classified the same way - just > avoid doing the thing that caused the crash and all will be well - and I > don't think anyone would agree that would be reasonable. I just have to add that in most cases, issue reporting works very well. At least mine were taken seriously and many of the issues, especially the most important ones that I reported, was corrected. So, the question is this - I think Calc has a serious flaw that will > stop potential users with big spreadsheets from using it (it is about to > stop me, anyway). How do I lodge that fact in the system in such a way > it might be addressed at some point? I do not think I am alone in > thinking this. You are right. You are not alone. I have been talking about this for years, so there are a lot of people on this list by now who think that I am a very annoying person... Unfortunately, every time you argue that Calc is slow with big spreadsheets, someone always will tell you that jobs like that SHOULD be done with Base rather than Calc. In some cases it's probably true, I guess. I really like most things with OpenOffice.org, so I continue to use it, even though I have MS Office '97 on a CD pack, just because I think OpenOffice.org is so much better and it doesn't appear so annoying to me that MS Office '97 - 2003 does (I never tried the 2007 version, but it looks annoying on the screen shots I've seen... ;P). If Calc was at least 10× faster, compared to the current speed, I would be even more happy about my choice. These days I actually don't have much of a choice either, since I threw MS Windows of from my window ;D and there is no Linux version of MS Office. And MS Office is still too expensive in my opinion. J.R.
