And now for some vaguely on-topic off-topicality: OOo 3.2

[Amedee Van Gasse (u2s)]

On Sun, February 14, 2010 16:46, David Gerard wrote:
> I just downloaded and installed OOo 3.2. You should too.
>
> On this here laptop (a Toshiba R600 with 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and 3GB
> memory, running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit), I have the included OOo 3.1 and a
> copy of MS Office 2003 running under Wine.
>
> I have tended to use Excel simply because it starts in under a second
> from cold, whereas OOo Calc 3.1 takes seven seconds from cold.
>
> Let me tell you: that extra six seconds is approximately forever in
> user interface terms.
>
> And before someone cuts'n'pastes a reply about Excel preloading hence
> the startup time being illusory - I said Wine. No preloading. OOo is,
> quite simply, ridiculously fat and slow. I've used OOo since 638c and
> it's always been fat and slow. Way too fat and slow.
>
> So let me heartily recommend you install OOo 3.2, because Calc starts
> in two seconds from cold. Enough to compete with Excel for user
> convenience. Download the .deb tarball. Official instructions at
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Run_OOo_versions_parallel#Installing_3..2A_versions_.28three_layer_OpenOffice.org.29
> tell you how to extract the binaries into a convenient folder in your
> home directory.
>
> (And that person stuck on Windows? Just download and install:
> http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/localized/en-GB/3.2.0/OOo_3.2.0_Win32Intel_install_wJRE_en-GB.exe
> )
>
> I understand the 3.2 cycle was quite expressly a speedup and bugfix
> cycle. *GOOD*.
>
> It's also worth noting
> http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-openoffice-market-shares.html
> - OOo is around 10% in US and Canada, up to 20% in some countries. At
> that point it's really serious competition for MS Office, no two ways
> about it.
>
> Man. OOo is usable at last. Who'da thunk?

Kewl! I will try it in a sandbox first.

In my day job I have to do some really heavy lifting with Excel, mostly in
VBA. I always found charting and pivot tables superior in Excel, but I
guess that programming is superior in OOo. FFS, you don't have one but
THREE!!! programming languages inside OOo.

At the moment I feel that I have reached the limits of what is technically
possible (or feasable with a reasonable amount of effort) with Excel as
well as with OpenCalc. I think that my next step will be to explore heavy
statistical software like R. I could preprocess my data in Excel/OpenCalc,
and let R do the charting. My guess is that this interaction will be
easier with OOo than with MS Office.

-- 
Amedee