Are the FUDdy-duddies at work again?
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| ABCC May 01, 2007 5:08 AM EDT |
In my experience both OOo and Excel are slow and use a lot of RAM. However, seeing the numbers in the linked article surprised me. What on earth have they done to make Excel use that much RAM, and how come OOo is pushing nigh on a gig of RAM use? I've seen some large spreadsheets, but never ones that pushed my system that hard in terms of memory requirements. Scanning through some of the comments turned up this little nugget though: http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10533-0.html?forumID=1&thread... which links to this article : http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2005/10/25/the-rorschach-of-ooo-a... Apparently Mr. Ou has some history when it comes to comparing OOo and Excel. His previous test was done with a 3.6mb spreadsheet, which unzipped to nearly 300mb of xml. In other words, a specially crafted file for a specially crafted comparison. Ah well, it's what we've come to expect right? Regards, ABCC |
| devnet May 01, 2007 5:16 AM EDT |
Turning off Java in OOo makes it run quite snappy for me :) |
| azerthoth May 01, 2007 6:22 AM EDT |
My only problem with OOo is how it opens text delimited spread sheets. Regardless of whatever tricks you might try it insists that the document needs to be opened with writer and nothing you can tell it will change its mind. Luckily Gnumeric opens them up correctly, so its more of an annoyance for me than anything else. |
| dinotrac May 01, 2007 6:38 AM EDT |
azerthoth - Your complaint makes me question your very moral character. Any sensible person knows that spreadsheets are the work of the devil. |
| bigg May 01, 2007 7:20 AM EDT |
> Luckily Gnumeric opens them up correctly, so its more of an annoyance for me than anything else. I always use Gnumeric. It does things like text to columns as well. OOo is an incomplete clone of MS Office. The only reason I ever use OOo for anything is because the formatting of .odt files is messed up with any other program. Even using kword or abiword on a different computer the formatting will come out wrong. |
| azerthoth May 01, 2007 7:32 AM EDT |
I'll admit to the character part ... but how dare you imply that I have morals. *grin* Actually all my work is listed in a db, so I send a query and it exports it to a spreadsheet. That in turn gets a shot of macro magic and it lets me know what projects I have coming up for the next few weeks. |
| tuxchick May 01, 2007 7:38 AM EDT |
OOo seems to be afflicted with the Gnome disease: Devs Know Best What Users Need. Let's start with the name- OpenOffice.org. Um, it's not a Web site, it's a software suite. Next head-pounder: despite continual wails and protests from users, every release has even more horrid things turned on by default, and you have to dig deeply to find the seekrit methods for turning them off. I shall limit myself to two horrid examples, though I could rant and rail all day: -Context toolbars that come and go, popping in and popping out and making the page jump all over creation. GAAHHH. Stab this one until it is dead and bleeding and dead and suffering and gone forever. -No more is there an option to show the complete file path of your document in OOo's title bar. Noooo, because the devs were afraid that users would become lost and confused and not know what application they were in- is it the word processor? The spreadsheet? The presentation thingy? OMG!! They all look exactly alike! (no they don't, sheesh). So now you see only the document name and the app name, like 'mydoc - OpenOffice.org Writer' Well sheetfahr, duh! I want my whole filepath back, and I don't want to have to click freakin File -> Properties -> General to find out what it is. Grrr grrr. OOo has a lot of great features, so I stick with it. It also way too many vexations per kilobyte. Oh, and don't take anything George Ou writes about too seriously. |
| dinotrac May 01, 2007 8:13 AM EDT |
>but how dare you imply that I have morals I humbly apologize. What could have gotten into me? To the world: I, without reservation or equivication, acknowledge and proclaim that, to the best of my knowledge, the poster known as azerthoth is completely and utterly uninflicted by any form of morals. Better? It's the best I can do, but I'm afraid readers will consider the source. |
| bigg May 01, 2007 8:28 AM EDT |
My favorite with OOo Calc is turning off autocomplete. You have to follow these intuitive steps: Tools > Cell Contents > AutoInput I'd like to meet the guy that figures that one out by himself. Or maybe not, as that guy is probably mentally unstable. |
| Sander_Marechal May 01, 2007 1:14 PM EDT |
Quoting:Let's start with the name- OpenOffice.org. Um, it's not a Web site, it's a software suite. That has a good reason. They found out that OpenOffice has been trademarked by someone else. See http://www.openoffice.nl/ and http://nl.openoffice.org/faq-algemeen.html#1 (Dutch). The OpenOffice trademark is far older than OO. The Dutch company OpenOffice has been building Linux-powered business solutions since early 2000. |
| dcparris May 01, 2007 1:19 PM EDT |
They also wanted a way to express the sense of "community" that OOo is, and felt that the .org would help convey that. Frankly, I think Sun should have called their version "Sun Office, and let Star Office be the community version. But I'm just an individual with an opinion. |
| tuxchick May 01, 2007 1:48 PM EDT |
.org conveys "We have no idea how to come up with a good name," and in the US the 'OpenOffice' bit would still be a trademark violation. How does tacking .org at the end make it OK? Like, crazy, man! |
| jimf May 01, 2007 2:02 PM EDT |
> OOo seems to be afflicted with the Gnome disease Well, to be fair, only the Gnome desktop proper really has the disease. Most other GTK apps like abiword and genumeric have a 'much' cleaner interface, and certainly a quicker one, than OO. As has been mentioned, the real problem is that if one works with odt and doc formats they're 'forced' to use OO for any kind of usable industry compatibility. As far as the usability, I don't know anyone who really likes using OO. Maybe it's the stupidity of the interface, or the sheer ugliness of the design (it doesn't integrate with either Gnome or KDE), or that the bloat and speed are not even up to MS office 2000 level, but, OO just isn't cutting it as a Linux draw. Truth is, If I wasn't so aware of the evils of MS and their proprietary formats, I'd take MS Office over OO in a heartbeat. > sense of "community" It's a community that's delusional. Patting yourself on the back doesn't make it the better product, not even a very good or capable one in my view. |
| dcparris May 01, 2007 4:02 PM EDT |
Well, for one thing, I used to like the Star Office 5.2 interface - everything integrated, and documents were tabs. I liked the sidebars, etc. It was way cool to me. I have adapted to the new interface and love Writer's document navigator. The only app I have a problem with is OOBase's stability. It's about as stable as an elephant on a steel ball in the middle of an ice patch. Put another way, it's not much more stable than Steve B. ;-) Otherwise, I have no real problems with OOo. I sure don't care about whether it integrates into GNOME/KDE, but I thought it did have KDE integration. That was kind of a big thing when I used SUSE. |
| jimf May 01, 2007 5:30 PM EDT |
I don't doubt your ability to work with faulty equiptment Don. Neither of us blame the tool as an excuse for not getting the job done. But, it's also no reason to believe that they can't have made the equiptment just a little better given the time and effort expended on putting it together. I'm also not about to hand it to the next guy telling him it's 'de bomb' for doing the job.... |
| bigg May 01, 2007 5:48 PM EDT |
> 'm also not about to hand it to the next guy telling him it's 'de bomb' for doing the job.... I've got to agree. Actually, if there were a native version of Excel for Linux, I would buy it. I personally don't see anything wrong with proprietary software if there are no suitable free replacements. Graphing, available feature set, opening text files in Writer, and so on, overall OOo Calc is a joke. To suggest it as a replacement for Excel is just a way to make open source look bad. If Microsoft would stop sinking resources into maintaining the OS monopoly (IE, Media Player, fixing security holes,...) and just focus on software they know how to make, they'd have little to worry about. |
| jimf May 01, 2007 5:55 PM EDT |
> they'd have little to worry about. Well, actually the WP office suite is/was far better than any of them. Another case of the best doesn't always win, or, just file it under 'what could have been'.... |
| bigg May 01, 2007 6:08 PM EDT |
> the WP office suite is/was far better than any of them That's true. They apparently have no interest in the Linux market. |
| jimf May 01, 2007 6:31 PM EDT |
> no interest in the Linux market. Lol, and not doing well in windows either ;-) |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!