Randomthots wrote:
I think Writer is easily as good as, and probably better than, Word for most users. Ditto for Impress (in 2.0), and Draw has no equal in MSO. But Excel is likely the finest piece of software in MS's stable, and a damn high target for Calc.
I would be interested to hear more details on this. In which ways is Excel superior to Calc?
Cheers, Daniel.
Well, a lot of things... most probably, are right on par with Excel, but overall I just find Excel a lot easier to use. Charting, for one. It's just a lot easier to get the chart you want, and the way you want it to look in Excel. It's in a hundred and one little "ease of use" things that have been engineered into Excel over the years that are missing in Calc. And Excel is *fast* compared to Calc, much faster.
You probably won't notice the difference with average sized sheets, but you *really* notice it when you start working with a large data set. I posted on this a while back, and I attribute a lot of it to the XML file format of Calc. I understand all the very good reasons for preferring the OASIS formats overall -- and I think they're clearly superior for most purposes -- but it's a horribly inefficient way of storing a spreadsheet.
Try this: Go to ftp://ftp.arin.net/pub/stats/arin/delegated-arin-latest.
This is a bunch of statistics on Internet number registries for the American Registry of Internet Numbers. It's a character-delimited text file -- like a csv but the delimiting character is a pipe "|". It has 52670 rows. Save it on your hd with an extension of .csv. Open it in Excel. Then tell it to Save As in the xls format. Now do the same thing in Calc (you need to use the beta due to the # of rows) -- save it in xls. Excel takes just a couple of seconds, but Calc takes a little longer. Not bad, though, you could deal with it. Now Save As either sxw or odt. Get a cup of coffee, call a friend, have lunch, watch some TV.. whatever. It *will* take that long. It was like about 20 minutes when I did it under WinXP, IIRC.
It's even worse under Linux (FC3 with KDE). It took between 35 and 40 minutes to just save the raw data using 1.9.91 under Linux. I don't know how much of that is due to FC3, KDE, and OOo 1.9.91, but in the end it was simply unbearable. God help you if you have it set to autosave every so often.
And it wasn't just file saving, either. *Anything* I tried to do with that data set took a lot longer with Calc than Excel. I tried to use the Datapilot and it just crashed -- of course it *was* the beta, so I'll withhold judgement there, but using the Pivotable in Excel was a breeze. Every operation was nearly instantaneous. I had it chopped, minced, sliced and charted the way I needed it in under an hour. That's less time than it takes just to open the saved sxw and close it again without even doing anything to it in Calc.
If you were going to do this a lot, the money you would spend on both Windows and Excel would be worth it even if that's all you used it for.
Rod
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