OpenOffice, as time goes on....

[GT2000]

I used OO a bit in the past, but never stuck with it, I noticed it wasn't as fast as it's expensive protege..MS Office. Granted, it's free, instead of $100 or whatever, depending on your discounts and such.

A benchmark was run between Office '03 and OpenOffice 2.0 on creating and loading files..and OpenOffice clearly has code that needs to be optimized, but again, it's a free program.

Article and benchmark diagram here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=119

[raublekick]

So we're comparing a propriatary, 15+ year old office suite to a fairly young (unless you consider Star Office) suite using a extremely new open document format? Fair? Not at all in my book. Add the fact that it's built by mostly unpaid hobbyists. And lest we forget the Linux world... find me a better office suite and we'll talk.

The memory footprint is right, but those times seem waaaaaay too high. I've never had a problem with OOo 1 or 2 being slow.

I just thought of another counterargument... Who makes Office? What OS does it run on? Who makes that OS? Who's most likely to write highly optimized code on that OS? Granted, OpenOffice isn't highly optimized on Linux, but again, unpaid, free, etc... I want this guy to add the Mac Office port to the test.

[johnny]

i've been using openoffice for a long time now and i prefer it to microsoft office. and i pretty much agree with raub that this is an unfair comparison. but all in all i don't really take much interest in this benchmark business because openoffice works just fine for me--it always has--and i'm sure that it will only get better.

[Cid]

ooo IS slow, but it is also an unfail comp. I've been using OO for a while, since pre 1.0, and it has always been slow to load...if you don't use the pre-loader. The thing with Office is, it always gets preloaded in Windows...so it's going to be faster.

KOffice is good, not as feature rich, but faster.

If you want free and you want Windows, get OO. If you want to pay money...get Office. It's simple, really.

[thecreeper]

i think that 2.0 made OpenOffice a hell of a lot nicer to look at and gave it some really handy features. for making my software engineering papers, the cool active link features for glossaries and tables of content are so much easier to use once you get used to it. there's some fairly good integration of the other parts of the suite as well.

it does chug a bit, but i definitely prefer it (and its much smaller file sizes) over Word.

[Mike]

I always like to pretend like I like the free, proprietary open source software ... but if given the choice, I'd always chose windows and MS Office. I may be supporting the Microsoft empire, but I've just been programmed to use MS products and gotten used to it.

[GT2000]

I had forgotten about Google having their hands all over OpenOffice..looks like they're using those deep-ass pockets of theirs to handle this.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/31/1927212&from=rss