[ubuntu-uk] OT: OOo bashing was Word 2002 under Wine?

[Rob Beard]

Sean Miller wrote:
> I concur... Openoffice is bloatware of the highest order.
>
> If I could be bothered to get an older version of Office working on
> wine I would - but I don't use office suites enough to do so.
>
> It's a shame, really, that Sun decided to go down the bloated route,
> because the early versions of Openoffice were really quite pleasant to
> use; I dread to click on a ".doc" attachment in an e-mail because I
> know the machine will whirr and click for ages before I actually get
> to see it.
>
> Sean
>
>   
I'd have to disagree on this one.  I've just opened a spreadsheet (one 
of my invoices) in OpenOffice.  I'm running my notebook in low power 
mode (1GHz) to save battery and it took 5 seconds from a cold start.  
I'd hardly say that is ages.  There are tweaks that you can do to 
OpenOffice to speed it up such as altering the memory usage [1].

Now compare that to Office 2007 on one of my clients notebooks running 
Vista, it takes a good 30 or so seconds to start up.

Not to mention, when did this become an OpenOffice bashing Mac loving 
mailing list?

I have got a Mac myself (albeit older iMac G3) and I have used Macs for 
many years (going back to the old 68k Macs on System 6) but I find 
sometimes doing things on a Mac can be just as annoying as doing stuff 
on Windows (or in some cases as doing things on Linux).  I guess really 
it's what you're used to.  For instance I'm used to a lot of keyboard 
shortcuts and generally the shortcuts are the same on Windows and Ubuntu 
(for most applications), now going to a Mac I find that rather than 
using CTRL I have to use the Option key.  Not a big thing really but I 
do find it annoying sometimes.  I dare say it can be annoying for a Mac 
user to go to a Windows or Linux box and find that some things aren't 
Mac like.

With regards too William's comment about OpenOffice not being a native 
app.  As far as I'm aware OpenOffice 3.1 IS a native app for OS X on 
Intel CPUs, and there is also NeoOffice (which IIRC is a native build of 
OpenOffice on both OS X Intel and OS X PPC).

With regards to MS Office 2008 being prettier than OpenOffice, remember 
this, the cheapest version of Office 2008 is the Home & Student version 
which is about £70 (doing a quick google check), and how much is 
OpenOffice? - FREE!

There is nothing stopping anyone picking up the code for OpenOffice and 
contributing to make it look better and work better and it's not as if 
you get it shoved down your throat like you do with Office 2007 on a new 
machine (I've lost count of the amount of Windows PCs I've seen with 
Office 2007 trial preinstalled which can only be used about 20 times 
before it disables itself and turns into a bloated Office viewer).

Don't get me started on the install sizes [2] (about 1.7GB for a full 
install of Office 2007 and about 400MB for OpenOffice.org)

Now I'll be the first to admit that OpenOffice isn't perfect but it is 
enough for most people and works pretty well (apart from a couple of 
niggly bugs, but you can report bugs and track them online) and compared 
to the cost of Office 2007, you won't see me switching in a hurry.

I'll reply to the original question in another e-mail.

Rob

[1] 
http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28209/How_to_make_OpenOffice_run_faster_in_Ubuntu
[2] 
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/05/openofficeorg-microsoft-office-moores.html