Daniel Carrera wrote:
But saying "a hundred little ease of use things" is not very helpful to me.
I understand that. I'm in final's week, so I don't have a lot of time to write out a laundry list. It's literally a bunch of little things that would qualify as RFEs, none of which by themselves is terribly significant, but they add up to a noticeably improved experience.
It's subjective and I apologize that I can't be more specific. Some of them have been discussed here already. One example: if I hit the delete key I just want to blank out the cell. I don't want to see a dialog asking me if I want to delete the values, the formulas, the formatting, the yidda, the yadda, etc. Just erase the contents of the cell already. A little thing, not a deal-breaker, but annoying. And one of dozens of things like that that you wouldn't even think about unless you used both of them for long enough to be familiar with both.
Since that's something you won't do for political reasons, you simply can't understand. Of course, you also have no basis for saying that Calc is as good or better than Excel, but that won't stop you.
So the only tangible report you've given is over speed. Ok, thanks
for letting us know. Fixing the problem will be a bit of a challenge, but Calc's speed can be improved I'm sure.
The execution speed per se isn't the real issue, overall. It's still waiting on me a lot more than the other way around. But loading and saving is significant on larger sheets, and it's all due to the xml file format. Loading and saving times using either xls or csv is comparable to Excel. Not enough of a difference to bother. But ods or sxw is another story.
And it's not hard to see why either. The csv was about 2.3 MB, whereas the ods was 36 MB before compression. There is an incredible amount of overhead with that format.
It's not as big a problem with smaller sheets and it's not a problem at all with other file types like Writer or Impress because the ratio of overhead descriptors to content is a lot smaller in those cases.
For example, a cell with the two characters "US", default formatting, no table styles, row styles, column styles, or cell styles was expanded into this:
<table:table-cell office:value-type="string"><text:p>US</text:p></table:table-cell>
That's 91 extra characters to describe that single cell. And that's probably close to the least overhead you can get.
Now the compressed file size is only 545K, which is another indication of just how much overhead there is. LOTS of repetition. Why does it need to spell out each word like that? Would it be so terrible to use one or two character abbreviations at least? It would make for a lot less parsing I would think. Like the tags in HTML; <p>, </p>, <tr>, <td>, etc.
That's my take on it for what it's worth.
Rod
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