Is OpenOffice.org Bloatware?

Yes, speed should be part of the testing/reporting. I use WP Office 12 and MS Office 2003 Pro, but do not use OpenOffice at this time.

I stopped using MS Office at the start of this year in favour of the OpenOffice 2.0 beta (abnd am obviously running the release version now). I'll admit that the OpenOffice applications that I predominately use (Writer and Calc) take a little longer to load initially than what Excel and Word would from MS Office. That being said, once the application has been opened once, I don't notice any speed problems from then onwards.

Speed and memory tests probably would be interesting.

Also, this is just a guess, but if indeed OOo does take more memory at runtime, perhaps it has something to do with the XML based nature of the open document standard? Just a guess. I used to like having MS Word open on one monitor and task manager open on another monitor to watch the megabytes rise as I typed - it happened supprisingly quickly!

Speed and performance are issues for some few power users. However, as a veteran from the old Apple ][ days (I just had to do that), I can say the overwhelming majority of word processor users are far from power anything. And I'm willing to bet that same majority rarely, if ever use a spreadsheet except to epen something someone sent them.

The major metrics for office suites are two, cost and support requirements. Microsoft will lose the cost issue and the they will all tie for support costs unless OO is run in on a network terminal thin client.

Now, folks, how many of you remember when Microsoft gave away Word and Excel to kill arguably the best word processor ever, Word Perfect for Windows. Word still does not do what WP 6 could and would. But then, everything Microsoft is so well integrated now, right?

What you are comparing is a program written in java (open office) to one written in c++ ( Microsoft office). The virtual environment of java uses more memory than the compiled c++ causing a slight slow down, but it also has inherently less security risks because of the memory management built in.

I have faced no speed/stability problems when running 2003 Office Pro on my AMD1700 256mb ram PC. When I used OpenOffice2.0, esp Writer, it has managed to crash the program while loading. However it works well on my other PC with 1Gig ram and P4. 2.4ghz. Maybe OpenOffice is not suitable for lower capacity machines?

I have to say I notice Speed issues all over the place with openoffice 2.0. I'm no MS fan but really OpenOffice has nothing on the speed on MS Office.

It looks Great, But it's just to darn sluggish. A great example is the wizard in "impression" . Try changing anyrhing in the wizards setting. And you'll see it just sit there and wait. Even to the point of having say "not responding".

Does the initial load take a long time when the Quicklaunch is started. Could it be that MSOffice has half of its DLLs loaded during Windows startup?

As a consultant who has many clients running on both MS Office and OpenOffice, I must say that just from comparing the two side-by-side in the same company, on the same spreadsheets/documents, that there are significant performance differences between the two programs. Stability is another issue, the fact that crashes are "regular" with OpenOffice has raised my MS sales pretty high. That and the fact that many people just plain old complain about using it. It seems like it takes more of a machine to run it fast, AND more of a user to run it right. I don't think that OpenOffice is for the "normal" user, even considering the small amount of features that a "normal" user uses. That goes with most open source software though... go ahead, throw a Linux desktop on a "normal" users machine and watch what happens!

" go ahead, throw a Linux desktop on a "normal" users machine and watch what happens!"

One thing you wouldn't watch would be the crashing. Linux doesn't have to hog 2/3's of the system memory.

People learn .. the problem is most people have "learned" to use the Micro$oft suite of products. I've used Linux/OOo for quite some time -- and it's second nature. Then again, I wrote a shellscript to automate recompiling the kernel while I go for coffee (a'la WindowsUpdate).

I have had OpenOffice crash several times too, but only on a Windows platform. In several years of daily use I have never had any release of OO crash on a Linux platform. In my opinion the speed is irrelevant. They both work faster than I can think or type.

As far as reliability, I think MS Office is the way to go if you're using Windows (and don't mind shelling out the bucks). On Linux, OpenOffice is your only choice between the two unless you you use wine or one of the other emulators, which can really get nasty.

I've tried both linux's open office and window's 2000 microsoft's office on the smae machine and I have to say that linux and openoffice run MUCH slower. I think in general linux requires more horse power to get things done. That said I've heard great comments from "bystander" users of linux's open office...

I think that most average business computers these days can handle any office suite and related documents quite nicely. There are, however, some exceptions. I know for a fact that some people in the accounting/finance department at the company I work for work with monster Excel spreadsheets and Access databases, and I know at least one of them had to get a special-order computer that was beefed up on processing power and memory and stuff so it could chew through the data reasonably fast. In instances like these, the stability and speed of the office suite software would definitely be in question. My company pretty much lives in a Microsoft world, which does have many advantages despite the obvious problems, but I'm sure other companies that are open to alternatives would be interested in tests like those.

Oh, and in response to the comments about Linux and OOo running slower, that depends on a lot of things. Yes, Linux does tend to be a heftier OS than Windows, which becomes more evident on older, slower computers. Modern computers should handle it pretty well though, regardless. The first computer I ever ran Linux on was an old AST desktop PC with a Pentium 233MHz cpu, which I installed Red Hat 7.2 on. The first time I put the Gnome interface on, and it was so slow it was almost like watching water boil. I then wiped and reloaded the system, this time putting KDE on it. The speed difference was like night and day. I don't know why, but gnome apparently is much more resource-hoggy than KDE, or at least it used to be. KDE is a lot closer in resemblance to the Windows desktop anyway, and would be my preference any day if I were using a Linux box. I don't know if this directly has anything to do with the performance of OOo or not, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

I've found OpenOffice.org to be slower than Microsoft Windows on all computers, noticably so. But this is only an issue on slow computers for me. On a modern computer above 2ghz the difference is pretty negligible for most tasks. I would love it if they did speed up the program a bit but it's not a deal breaker. It would be interesting to know what is making it so much slower.

The company that I worked for last year regularly used the mail merge feature in Word. Word would stop responding after a couple of thousand records on our fastest machines (P4s with a 1gig of RAM), whereas OpenOffice plowed through 100 000 records without a problem on a P2 with 128Mb of RAM. I guess it depends entirely on what you plan to be using your office suite for.

For us, OpenOffice 2.0 opens faster than Microsoft Office. We think it is because Microsoft office requests a virus scan from our Mcafee enterprise 8.0i antivirus software and OpenOffice doesn't.

When we first ran OpenOffice it was a memory hog but eventually it went down but we don't know why. It still uses more RAM than Microsoft Office but for a free application that can export to PDF I'm not complaining.

I've used both and OpenOffice 2.0, though improved greatly from 1.1.x, is still noticably slower than MS Office XP or 2003, regardless of your computer speed.

If you ever need to quickly open and close multiple documents searching for something, you quickly find that MS Office is really rather snappy, at least, when compared to OO. OO feels sluggish. On lower end computers, this is much more evident.

BTW, contrary to someone up this comments column, newer versions (2000, XP, 2003) of MS Office does not "pre-load" parts of itself to accelerate loading time.

The reason why MS office loads so fast is because it dynamically loads features as it needs them. As opposed to loading everything at once. (This also reduces memory requirements.)

I am quite pleased with Open Office 2. I have noticed no significant waits vs MS Office 2003. Perhaps 1/2 an instant longer in a spreadsheet. As for the overall reported speed "Problem"? "Problem seems biased ond over stated.

I agree with Stephen that the slower times may be related to XML. The early reports on the next version of MS Office using XML show the same effect. What I've reading about XML and MS Office make me think that the XML release of Office will be MUCH slower than Office 2003.

I will be interested in seeing OOo 2.0 compaired to Microsofts next offering... not Office 2003

When my very favorite word processor got "improved" (read: new version was buggy) I took another look at OO's Writer.

It converted my .rtf formatted articles nicely..inclding preserving links, bookmarks and tables of contents.

Learning curve is not overly steep for this medium-skilled user, the macros are a pain to drill down to...but I bought a separate macro app for that.

MS Word? Don't care to spend the money for it...

Word Perfect? Came on my machine...tried to love it...just couldn't get into it.

Compare cost with cost.
Who cares about a few more milli seconds to open an app that you are going to use for hours !

I have used MS Office for 10+ years but recently downloaded Open Office. I haven't noticed any speed differences for my usage. My only bone of contention is a lot of things take longer to do (menuwise) with Openoffice than MS Office on the word processing app. But saving several hundred dollars on not having to buy MS Office vs a free download is worth it.

I could not read all of the responses but I do not think that two factors were taken into consideration:

1. Windows loads office into memory. There is a quickstart link, you might say. Just look in startup tab of msconfig and you will see Office there with a check. Uncheck it and office takes longer to load and start when you initialize.

2. Conversely, OO does not load into memory, but you can do that with it, at least while running Linux. Also, you can devote a little more memory to it, if using Linux. I have not used OO with Windows for a long time so I do not know if you can even the playing field by running it at startup or cramming it into memory like MS office does.

OpenOffice is definitely slower than Microsoft Office -- I don't notice a difference in loading the programs, but in saving files I really do: When I save a large spreadsheet file over my network, if I save it in OpenDocument format it takes 28 seconds to save. But if I save the same file in Excel format (i.e., still in OpenOffice), it takes 8 seconds. If I save it while using it in Excel XP, it takes only 3 seconds. The main difference is probably the compressed file format of OpenDocument.

I can't say I've noticed much difference in speed over the last year of using both OOo and MSO, but I have noticed a *vast* difference in the *size* of the saved files.

Typically, an MS Word .DOC file, when opened and then saved in OpenDoc format, can reduce by 10x or more in size (this is less if you have embedded graphics, btw). When you're trying to get a whole bunch of docs onto a flash key, this can make a very big difference. I'm more than happy to wait an extra few seconds to OOo to run to get this saving.

I have found the OOffice 2.0 very responsive. It has had a remarkable improvement over the previous version. I have listed my experiences at the link below.
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/10/openofficeorg-version-20-definite.html

I use OO most of the time. On my windows laptop Microsoft Office does open faster, but not by much. On my Linux destop, everything just runs faster. OpenOffice starts faster than Microsoft office on windows... So I am a OpenOffice fan. :D

You should test speed. I, personally, can say that it wouldn't affect my choosing between one another, but I really think it would be interesting to see. I downloaded OOo when I upgraded my on-its-last-leg Win 98SE system, because I only had Word 2000. I really like the "free" price of OOo, so speed wouldn't matter to me as long as I have an office suite that is compatable with most major formats. But, I am a happy OOo user.

What kind of article is this? Does this guy know anything about software?

Unless you speed test on my computer and test the functions that I use, then the exercise would be pointless. That dynamic will replcate itself through all your readers. OpenOffice is a free program. I don't need to know very much in advance of acquiring the product. Download. Install. Decide.

I've used OpenOffice exclusively at home for about three years and MS Word at work. The differences are in every way negligible, except that OpenOffice is more attractively priced (FREE!) and more fully featured (a database program!) WordPerfect is far superior to either.

WordPerfect is a piece of shi*.

I have used all versions of MS Office since Office 97, All versions of Word Perfect since version 6 and Lotus Office Suite since 1995. I teach at the local communitty college, of all things, Microsoft Office Applications. I have taught Word Perfect Classes. I have used all three suites for complex tasks from extensive spreadsheets to complex word processing documents, and multi page newsletters. I have not gotten around to digging that deep into OOo.

From my experience spanning more than a decade with the various office suites. Word Perfect has always gotten my vote for ease of use, especially when creating complex word processing documents using columns, OLE, and embedding images etc.

Problem is, with Word Perfect, every version up to version 11 was too darned buggy, and crashing was a regular and frustrating event. With MS Office in a word... I HATE creating complex documents in Word. If you must use Microsoft products for this task, lay out the bucks for Publisher. Otherwise Word Perfect gets my vote especially v. 11 & up.

From my point of view Lotus has always been an acceptable alternative, but in reality a distant third. With OOo, I think everything has changed for the average office or home user. I have begun working my way to exclusive OOo use in my home and office. I am ready to recommend OpenOffice.org 2.0 with enthusiasm to anyone who asks.

I use OpenOffice all the time (both home and office), and I've never had speed or reliability issues! Yay OpenOffice!

Has anyone bothered to adjust the memory settings in OpenOffice? Hello World! Yes, you can do just that and the results are impressive. OpenOffice loads PDQ and everything else moves along much faster. You see, with MS Office you can't adjust anything but it does load most of itself into memory at startup. Sometimes it pays to look at the settings of applications rather than accept the default. OpenOffice can run much much faster if you look.

I use OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheets and MS PowerPoint for presentations. I agree with McCracken, Impress is sluggish when working with files created in PP. It's not just the Beta of Vista he's running, I get the same sluggishness with Impress and I'm running XP Pro (with a P4 and 2 gigs of RAM). That being said, I prefer the word-processing and spreadsheet apps in OO to their MS counterparts. In my opinion, they are relatively simple apps that are easier to work with than the bloated giants in MS Office.

until I upgraded, i was runnin p3 500mhz w/384mb ram... OO never crashed on me until I started importing from scanner... besides a potentially better layout for easier accessibility, I find the spreadsheet and word processor more than adequate, and they perform well.... I still use powerpoint for presentations, it beats OO hand sdown IMO

Ummm... EXCUSE ME PC WORLD AND PC WORLD READERS! Let's not lose perspective here people. In essence at the end of the day we are talking about the difference of $300 - $400 for Microsoft Office 12 or $0.00 for OpenOffice.org 2.0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm sorry I don't care how you cut it or slice it, this is a total no brainer. Unless your rich and you just have money to burn, the average joe blow like myself could give one rat's end about OpenOffice being a little bit slower or using more memory.

The real question is, "Does it get the job done?" Well the State of MA and several large corporations seem to think so. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. :)

Thank you, 09:33 PM (PST). I just implemented your advice. It took about 10 seconds to do and the program opened in a flash. Wonderful!

Any other tips for us?

guys i mean come on $400!?!?! i use OOo, but office works just fine too. But seriously. $400 against $000. i defintely dont have that much money to burn, even though i have office (office came preinstalled on my computer) - and i think i probably speak for most people here....even though i am only 12 years old....still....(i bet you weren't expecting a 12 year old to even read this lol)

With the $400 you will spend on MS Office, you can get a more powerful machine with double the RAM etc and the performance issue will no longer cause problems..

You can also use this powerful machine to run new games.. Get a MP3 player with the money you will save on Office..

I use whatever Word processor is convient for me, on one computer I have Office 4.2c, another has Office 2000, Works 3.0, WPwin 7, another has WPwin 6.0a, Office 4.2c, and Works 3.0, and my laptop has works 4.5, and WP suite 2000 (wp 9), the first computers are running win95 OSR2, the third is running WFW3.11, and the laptop is runing Win95 OSR2.5. It has been a while since I have Used OOo but depending what I am doing it is better than some, i.e. when working with a text document with pictures I would use OOo, typing my math homework I tend to use Works 3 or WPwin 6.0a. Over all I would rank my favorites as WPwin 6.0a top, Works 3.0 second, OOo third, and MS Office Last. Oh and BTW I just CAN'T stand MS Office 2003, if I had to use MS Office I would use Office 2000 or 97.

Most of the speed complaints about OpenOffice would be resolved, IF people would merely increase the memory settings. One hardly realizes what a small tweak can do, until you try it. As with most software, you have Options with OpenOffice....check them out. It's difficult to judge use and performance, merely with default settings.

Do I like OpenOffice? Well, I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice, before switching from MS Windows XP to SUSE Linux. I'd never go back. In fact, I just auctioned my MS Office on eBay. I won't miss it! OpenOffice is fast enough and cheap enough for most!

Does anyone remember when you could buy a stand alone word processor instead of having to take what developers of office suites want you to have?

I NEVER have any use for a spreadsheet or any of the other crapola. So I found a FREE word processor called ABIWORD that mimics Word in layout and feel and has a very small footprint. Word users can open the program if I send them a document.

Starts fast for me _if_ the load at startup is functional, and the little icon appears in the tray. I wouldn't like to run it in 256mb as all kinds of paging would happen. 256mb is barely enough for Win XP itself. It appears there would be 178mb free on my machine with oo just opened and 512mb memory installed (I have 2 gigs).

Tools/Options/OO/memory/load during startup

Also, I wonder if people experiencing crashes are using an old java version? I haven't used it enough to crash it yet.

PS To the poster who lamented the lack of stand-alone word processors. You can install just the OO word processor. AbiWord is really neat!

I run OpenOffice 2.0 on a WindowsXP, 256 RAM and 800 Mz system, and it runs with no problems. It hasn't crashed itself or the system ever, since I started using it 2 months ago. My swap from MS office is gradual, as I still use it every once in a while, until I get familiarized with some characteristics that are easier to find in MS Office because of all these years of using it. All in all, I think OpenOffice is wonderful and it's future, as open source, promising. Speed...well, not really a difference with MS office.

I cannot believe that there are people complaining that an open source program isn't as fast as its super expensive alternative. Yes Open Office is a LITTLE slower (measured in seconds!) but I would like to remind us all it is FREE! All the crash and security problems that I was concerned about have been addressed in the final version and it works great. We have sold our souls to Microsoft and Sun is offering us a way out. Lets just keep that in mind.

OOOrg

Tools-->Options-->memory,
Cut settings in half,

Keep open or run at startup??

Should review based on:

Features, Functions, benefits, drawbacks...
and use a weighted score
But this is not a review,
It's just a blog!

$400 versus $000...well OEM versions can be had for $285 for Pro. Still don't have that kind of money...what about productivity. If you can measure it, does it add up. The State of MA runs it so I can...whatever happened to people's individuality. They do it so I can too...what bs...use what works for you and your needed environment. At work...got to use MS...@home...my choice.

That Microsoft latest and greatest Office suite is speedier, has fewer crashes, contains more features, looks slicker, uses less computer resources at run-time, and bla bla bla... than Open Office 2.0 is of no surprise to me. And I am expecting Microsoft Office suite will always have an edge over Open Office in the future. After all Microsoft Office suite is running on the company's Operation System.

Microsoft has the know-hows and secrete tricks to make its software runs better than software created by people outside the company. In addition Microsoft Office has been around much longer than Open Office. It takes time to make great software. I am sure you all agree with me the developers of Open Office deserves a few more years to perfect their software.

And for those who are concerned about the performance of Open Office, I would like to remind you that with the amount of money you saved from getting a copy of Microsof Office, you can get one gigabyte or two of RAM for your machine. If you are willing to shop around and are lucky, you can get a dual-core CPU too.

Sorry! I am going away from the blog's point about software comparison, but let not lose the sight here people. With Open Office, the majority of people in the world, who barely afford getting a computer costing less than one hundred dollar ,now have access to great office software; something which Microsoft cannot offer with its Microsoft Office.

Tam makes a great point. If you're working on Wall Street or at Halliburton and your employer buys your software, then you can afford to entertain the question about which is office suite is better. ONLY if you exclude from consideration the exorbitant price of MS Office can it win this contest.

Mr. McCracken,

I'm familiar with Mr. Ou's test, and have downloaded and worked with his Excel file. You had two questions in your posting.

1. Should speed tests of common tasks be in a future comparison of office suites? Yes, because it is common tasks that tell people about real world performance. Mr. Ou's test is arguably not real world.

2. My own performance experience with OOo? I use it daily. It's fine, but does take longer to open the first document.

As for Mr. Ou's article:

1. Yes, raw XML requires more storage space than binary representation.
2. Open Office files are smaller than MS Office files only because the OOo files are compressed using Zip.
3. The OOo files must be uncompressed into memory.
4. A 50MB spreadsheet is exceptionally large. I searched all mine and the largest was about 6MB.

The last point is the most important. It's true than Open Office is slower than MS Office. However, that slowdown is only obvious when working with abnormally large files. Working with a 6MB spreadsheet, the difference is negligable.

So, why so slow with a large file? Easy. That 50MB Excel file converts to a 4MB(!) OOo file. But the OOo file must be uncompressed to work on it, and it uncompresses to 300MBs! That is a large memory hit, and can cripple a machine. But, again, who routinely works with 50MB Excel files?

You can test this yourself. Just open an OOo file using WinZip or another zip compression utility. You'll see the "file" is a set of xml directories and files.

Open Office keeps document elements in memory even after the document is closed. This is unexpected, but can be controlled in the Options > General > Memory settings by reducing how long data is stored. In my view, though, the memory should be reduced as soon as the file is closed.

Mr. Ou argues against XML for size. This is like arguing against HTML for its size. The point of XML is standardized data storage and exchange. In other words, even though I'd never want to have to extract my OpenDocument data without the application, the point is I could do so years from now as long as I can uncompress using standard Zip, then read using standard ASCII. I could easily read the information, even without the formatting.

I believe office suites should have to compete on features, not on how they store the data. One document standard, many commerical options for reading those documents. Since documents are data, it's reasonable to use XML.

I don't really mind wether it takes 9 more seconds to load than MS Office. Its free!

Have used OppenOffice for some 6 months now, I have no problem with speed or anything else for that matter.
It gets a little trial and error to find some things but it is ok to work with.
I'm a high school teacher so my work might be considered light in comparison to others.
But I still prefer the MS office distribution of icons and menu options

I like OO's pw option for public computer. I only use the text editor and spreadsheet because I can save them as .rts and .xls and send to professors with no fears of compatability issues (with the exception of specific excell accounting commands).

Reliability is important.

Load time is trivial to me, takes 10 seconds to load, who cares...

That is exactly the point. Use what you are comfortable using. If OpenOffice doesn't effect your productivity and you like the options offered then use it. Most people have MS at work and are comfortable using it at home. I personally like WP ease of use and formatting, but use whatever is available where ever I may be...speed is only an issue when it effects productivity. I like OO's price, but have used them all and will continue to do so in the future.

One thing I can't understand is why PC makers do not provide OO preinstalled on their machines (instead, some even provide M$ Office trial). Open office, firefox, thunderbird, picasa, skype... these high quality programs should be provided pre-installed for new users, instead of trials of MS word or office. Are PC makers (DELL, ACER, and so on), being threathened by Microsoft? That would be my theory, as that is usual M$ practice.

Does it make ANY sense to provide your PC customers with trial 3-month versions, when you can provide them with real software?

I tried Open-Office for a while. It was noticeably slower, but the clincher was the inopportune crashes on all three of my computers. That has never happened with MS Office. I also have Wordperfect on one machine, but generally use it for personal stuff. Free is an excellent point, but I really hate having to repeat a long hard work project.so bye bye to it for me.

simply stated...ooo is written in java. All java applications need to natively load the JVM (java virtual machine), JVM is quite a memory intensive process. Java in general is slower than C/C++, however on newer computers with more than 512mb of ram this is not an issue.

MS Office is written in C++, which is arguably as fast as you can get (with Object-Oriented Programming at least..)

ooo is not slow, java..especially the intial loading of the virtual machine (look for javaw.exe in your task manager)...takes time.

Your lost time think, why MS office load faster than a OO...why you losing time??, well MS office is programing by MS for a OS that is make by MS. Why MS office have to load slower???. And that B say: Windows loads office into memory. There is a quickstart link, you might say. Just look in startup tab of msconfig and you will see Office there with a check. Uncheck it and office takes longer to load and start when you initialize.

But this is a apart of the issue in the xml format, that have another load penalty in OO.

Office = 400 bucks
-512 mb RAM - $50 = $350 left
-AMD 64 3500+ - $200 = $150 left
Midrange S939 mobo - $100 = $50 left
$50 worth of beer = A LOT OF BEER

See, you get a great computer, nice office that performs faster on your new computer VS MS on old, and a lot of BEER.

I was using OOo for about a year (casually I should add), but it was never a problem to me. Load times I care not about, still takes a mere second, memory - I have 512 megs. Bought for $50. I run Win2K on a 1GHz P3 with 512 megs of RAM. Writer took 25 seconds to load as I was typing this, while running Bittorent with traffic of 200 kb/s (a LOT OF INTERNET TRAFFIC + disk access by BT, not to mention memory hog of all BT clients), and Opera with about 10 pages. IE took 10 seconds. OOa does not seem to be too slow given the conoitions. Besides, memory and CPU resources are critical when and only playing games. Who plays game while working on a document/spredsheet/presentation? Noone. Period. Besides, if you say it does not work well for you because of stability issues - remember the horrid days of Win95 (and 98, and Me) when your chances of seeing the Blue Screen Of Death were 300% a day, and saving documents every 5 minutes were not all that uncommon.
I heard this joke a while ago - may give you a laugh: Christ and the Devil bet who is the better user of the computer. They ask god to be a judge. So they are given 4 hrs and a set of tasks. With 10 minutes left, power goes off and computers die. After restart, Christ starts prining out all the spreadseets, documents, pictures, fomula sheets, etc. Devil has to start all anew. Devil goes "How the hell does he do that?" and the thunderous voice answers: "Jesus SAVES!!!" Cheers ralph.
To D - well, saying "crashes regularly" from a consultant seems a little scary. Perhaps you should stop being too greedy and push more expensive M$ products to poor people. Oh, and can you (pretty please, with sugar on top) define "regular": twice an hour is regular, but so is once a month, which is regular. Once a year is regular as well. As often as pope dies (which probably describes how often OOo's crashes) is NOT regular.
So, out with MS, on with OOo. Cheers mates.

Interesting article and good followup. I wanted to add by 2Cents. I have been working on OO 1.1.4 and 2.0 beta and full version. Putting the effort and getiing out some thing free the OO community has done a wonderful job. Had they had the internal know how of OS like what MS has, and ofcourse the money I am sure they would have done much better.

But then for us, normal users, OO has everything that I do. I am yet to find a feature that either me or my clients are unable to do in OO 2.0. What I find difficult is books, training materials and other support from OO. Which probably they are also trying and know it already. Many times my users spend time in searching on how to do a option done. That time is much more than CPU times (milli second stuff). If OO can request the schools and colleges students to go to Linux/OO to do their documentation for projects, I think that these kids when come out to work can accept, than us seasoned PC users, who worked with wordstar and wordperfect and word and oo write.

Thumbs up for OO.

Love OO but version 2 crashes CONSTANTLY on my XP Pro machine. Does not happen on my Win2K machine and did not open with beta.

I do find OO somewhat slower than MS Office. Screen updates in Writer when deleting with backspace are sometimes annoying slow.

On the other hand, I've rewritten all the department aumotation routines using MS-Office VBA to use OO Basic, and they all run very much faster. (But I expect this is in part because I also programmed more efficiently in these revisions.)

Both MS-Office and OpenOffice have annoying bugs. But I've seen many of the OpenOffice bugs disappear in new releases while the MS-Office bugs and infelicities date back years and never get fixed, indeed seem to increase.

For every defect I find in OpenOffice I could probably find a correspondingly annoying one in MS-Office.

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