2006/10/24, Kirill S. Palagin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Johnny Andersson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 9:04 PM

> Someone said that MS Office is 10-100 times faster than
> OpenOffice. I have Windows 98 (first edition) and
> OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 on a 450 MHz Pentium 2 with 256 MB
> SDRAM. A couple of years ago I had MS Office 97 installed and
> I agree. Office 97 was at least 10 times faster on my
> machine, probably 100 times is closer to the truth in my case

Office 97 is faster in what? Starting, opening documents, accepting what
you type?
While OO is indeed slower when starting or opening documents, but it can
not be 100 times.


I didn't measure it. About "10-100 times", I read it somewhere, but sadly I
can't remember where, but it was an article about OpenOffice.org and Google
somewhere. However 10-100 feels true when it comes to my own experience, but
this is only my own feeling, which I did not verify with a stopwatch or
something.

On my system, mentioned above, MS Excel 97 took about 1.5 s to open when
recently installed and about 6 s after using it for a couple of months. I
think there is a file called something wierd that grows depending on what
the user is doing. Starting up OpenOffice.org Calc 1.1.5 takes about 20 s,
which is 13 times as long as 1.5 s but
"only" 3 times as long as 6 s, so starting it up is an issue, but
there are bigger ones.

One of the most annoying thing I experienced was when I had a spreadsheet
which I filled in every day. It was some kind of personal economy thing and
it kept track on where my money went, and it was quite complicated. Long
cell formulas, conditional formatting and things like that for maybe 20
columns and thousands of rows, at least 2000 as I remember it. I started it
all with Excel before I even knew that there was such a thing as
OpenOffice.org and most things worked well. To save the file took much less
than a second and autofilter was rather fast as well, maybe a second or two
for those 2000 rows. Later on I "migrated" to OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 and since
then I upgraded to OpenOffice.org 1.1.5. I didn't notice any major
differences in speed between those versions, but compared to MS Office 97
the difference was quite noticable. Saving that file took several seconds
and autofiltering those 2000 rows took an eternity! First time I did it I
thought that the whole thing froze. I don't remember exactly how long it
took, but somewhere between 20 and 40 seconds, as far as I can remember. It
felt like the Autofilter function was some kind of a Star Basic Macro. Maybe
it is..?

So maybe the difference in speed iis not 100 times, but definitely more than
10 in many cases.

I also tried to install OpenOffice.org 2.0, I think it was 2.0.1 at that
time, on my Windows 98 system. Opening the program was somewhat quicker than
1.1.5 I think, but not much. The Autofilter thing was even slower than
1.1.5but the worst thing was that whatever I did, simple things like
to input
data into a cell, there was a delay for every character I entered! It felt
like typing in syrup or something.When I hit Enter, it felt like eternity
before the operation was done, and now I am talking about SIMPLE tasks, like
just entering a word or number in a cell. So I just went back to
OpenOffice.org 1.1.5, which I find slow but not totally unuseable. However I
no longer use that big spreadsheet I was talking about earlier, I try to
keep things small now.

Please don't misunderstand me here, I really like OpenOffice.org in many
ways. It's a great suite, but speed is just not one of the advantages. I
thing that this is something that needs to be taken care of.

By the way, the article I mentioned above, suggested that Google in
some way was going to be involved in the
OpenOffice.org project. Do anyone here know something about that? It was an
interview with some boss kind of guy at Google who talked about a lot of
things, where the speed issue was one of them, and he said something that
speed is something that is going to be looked into in the near future. Maybe
someone else actually read this? It was a couple of months ago anyway.

I am going to buy a new desktop soon and I will then give
OpenOffice.org 2.0another chance, I promise... =) One of the reasons
for me to upgrade is the
database "Base".

Johnny Andersson

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