[plug] Word97 vs Openoffice

[Brad Campbell]

Bernd Felsche wrote:
>>>Word97 loads from scratch (clean boot) and loads the document in about
>>>5 seconds. Ooo takes about 30.
> 
> 
> Major difference: Word97 loads the memory image in the document
> file and trust the content.
> 
> OOo _interprets_ the memory image in the document and renders the
> document.
> 
> Word97 will invariably crash if the memory image is corrupted.
> OOo will simply chug along and do the best it can with what's
> recognizable.

While I do realise this, for 99.9% of documents what the end user sees is that Word loads the 
document in 5 seconds and OOo takes 30. For that .1% of corrupt documents Word crashes, but this is 
also an expected behaviour in the minds of most users and they simply swear at it and try something 
else. Trying to get them to swallow an extra 25 seconds of response lag to justify not crashing that 
.1% is bloody hard.

Early last year I had a "spreadsheet" which was really a horrid bloated mess that some lunatic 
within the company created that Excel used to load in about 10 seconds. It took OOo nearly 15 
minutes to load the same spreadsheet. Now granted it never crashed, but then in the time I had to 
use this spreadsheet, neither did Excel97.

I also concur with Camerons point that the OOo UI is appallingly slow (on my laptop anyway). I still 
use it when I can, but it is not the quickest beast in the world.

I'm not trying to bash OpenOffice. I use it and love it. My last company used it exclusively for 5 
years (Well we started with Star Office 5.1 anyway) and I got to make the policy so we only used 
Microsoft as an OS to run Protel and AutoCAD, other than that we were completely MS free.

This time around it's a different kettle of fish and prompting change is far more difficult.

Brad