Moving this email to the [email protected] mailing list:
I work for a small company. I've recently convinced the boss to switch
over to OpenOffice.org and then subsequently to a Free Software desktop
as their main office suite. They use a number of different Excel
spreadsheets to do most of their work throughout the day. As such, Calc
is the critical application, and the subject of this email.
After some careful consideration I decided to try out the beta OO.o
1.9.x, as it will hopefully be the released version when they fully
switch at the beginning of 2006.
I installed the beta version onto two of their computers(Windows 2000)
and tried two of the spreadsheets. I was very surprised at how slow
Calc was at opening each of the spreadsheets(See timing info). After
some investigation I noticed that the equivalent Calc format
spreadsheets were significantly smaller than the equivalent Excel
Spreadsheets; this is great for people looking to save disk space.
However these employees open and load many different spreadsheets
throughout the day, and this wait time will be quite annoying for them.
Here are the stats:
All of the load times are approximations as I used my stopwatch to time
them. On the windows machine the OO.o quick start was loaded. I timed
from when I double clicked on the file to when the program presented the
screen with all of the numbers visible and the UI was usable (scrollbar
worked).
Computer specs: AMD Duron 1Ghz 512 MB Ram, Windows 2000.
File #1:
Excel Format Size: 7.05MB
OO.o Format Size: 1.68MB (1.77MB with XML optimization off)
Excel Load Time: 4s
OO.o Load Time: 1m40s (either format).
File #2:
Excel Format Size: 192Kb
OO.o Format Size: 64Kb
Excel Load Time: < 0.3s
OO.o Load Time: 10s. (either format)
I tried the files on my Ubuntu Laptop which is a 2.0GHz AMD64 machine
and got the following load times with OO.o 1.1 and Gnumeric 1.4.2:
File #1:
Gnumeric Load Time (Excel format): 5s.
OO.o 1.1 Load Time (Excel format): 26s.
File #2:
Gnumeric Load Time (Excel format): < 1s.
OO.o 1.1 Load Time (Excel format): < 2s.
I assume these discrepancies are the result of caching formula results.
The assumption is that Excel stores the previously calculated results of
the formulae in the spreadsheet and uses these values at load time,
while OO.o ignores these and fully recalculates the formulae on each
load? I haven't been able to find concrete proof of this, can anyone
confirm this is the case? I tried looking for an option to force OO.o to
use more disk-space and save on load times. I found: "Size Optimization
for XML Format" and un-checked that option, but did not notice much of a
difference(9k in file size, nothing for load times).
I'm curious to know if there are plans to address this for the 2.0
release? If not, I am willing to put in some work on this, but would
need some direction as to where the relevant processing takes place.
The concept is that there would be a check box which switches between
disk-space optimization and load-time optimization. At the very least,
when using Excel spreadsheets, the OO.o loader should be similarly fast
at opening the files.
Sincerely,
Lakin Wecker
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
