ms office 2007 vs openoffice 2.2

[karellen]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=480
it always seemed to me that office 2007 is a little slowe than openoffice, but that's maybe I have a pretty old rig...

[jiminycricket]

George Ou....all I'm going to say is that from experience, he really, really, really likes Microsoft.

Not that I disagree with his article, or that I think OO.org is a heaven-sent application, but really..

[Najand]

Hmm, I think his computer have some problems dealing with openoffice.org... Mine is almost with same spec and OpenOffice is much faster than M$ Office.

[maniacmusician]

I dunno about speed and I haven't tried using Office 2007, but in the past, Office has been the only program that I felt wasn't complete and utter crap from microsoft. It is usually a pretty good and solid collection of software. But I personally can get everything done with OpenOffice that I need to get done, so I'm alright with not using Microsoft Office.

Office 2007 is the new one with the radical UI change huh? I wonder how Windows users will adapt to it...

[karellen]

Hmm, I think his computer have some problems dealing with openoffice.org... Mine is almost with same spec and OpenOffice is much faster than M$ Office.

I know. same here....even openoffice in windows runs faster

[mech7]

Offce 2007 is great the new interface (ribbon) Is really awesome it is easy and fast. They have really looked at how to improve user interaction, i hope Open Office will have such a slick and great working interface someday. I never really liked office untill 2007 or atleast for word they really got it right this time.

I don't care about CPU usage hardware these days is fast enough to run it without seeing any lag, it is not like it is the newest game or anything.

[karellen]

Offce 2007 is great the new interface (ribbon) Is really awesome it is easy and fast. They have really looked at how to improve user interaction, i hope Open Office will have such a slick and great working interface someday. I never really liked office untill 2007 or atleast for word they really got it right this time.

I don't care about CPU usage hardware these days is fast enough to run it without seeing any lag, it is not like it is the newest game or anything.

don't get me wrong, I really like office 2007 (and I use it alot in xp); I was just curious of a comparison with openoffice regarding speed

[DoctorMO]

*shrug* why compare the technicalities of a moral choice with an immoral choice?

To me it seems rather pointless to even consider Microsoft Office as a viable product when I can't run it and my moral judgement wouldn't allow me to buy it or use it.

I've always said OpenOffice was slow, I hope it gets better but I'm not holding out much hope.

[karellen]

*shrug* why compare the technicalities of a moral choice with an immoral choice?

To me it seems rather pointless to even consider Microsoft Office as a viable product when I can't run it and my moral judgement wouldn't allow me to buy it or use it.

I've always said OpenOffice was slow, I hope it gets better but I'm not holding out much hope.

I guess I'm not so much into this morality stuff. I want to use an os, not to make an life philosophy of it. if I believe something is better suited for what I want, I choose it. but it's just my personal opinion :)

[mech7]

don't get me wrong, I really like office 2007 (and I use it alot in xp); I was just curious of a comparison with openoffice regarding speed

With me on XP x64 openoffice does take a little longer to load.. about morality and stuff that sounds like crap to me. These are just tools and whatever works quickest / best i will use :)

[kragen]

I don't know about the word processor part of Open Office, but the spreadsheet part doesn't even hold a candle to Excell. Office really is intensely good, and in comparison my experiences with Open Office have been bugs, crashes and a small mountain of headaches.

Open Office is ok - I'd even go as far to say its quite good, but its just not as good as Office yet, its going to take a lot more work before that happens.

[diskotek]

OOo is faster in my spec... huh after few tricks, it's running much much faster than ms office...

[lakersforce]

Here is another comparrison:
MS Office 2007 standard edition: 449$
OpenOffice 2.2: 0$

So MS Office is indefenitely more expensive as OpenOffice, but only four times faster parsing xml files.

Not to mention OpenOffice 2.0 is free software. Whatever free software that works for me, I will choose.

[Macintosh Sauce]

I would much rather use OpenOffice 2 than Office 2007. I use NeoOffice on my Mac Pro and it is excellent. This is the Aqua version of OO for the Mac. My university is not recommending Office 2007 for submitting assignments because of massive formatting problems.

[msandersen]

I switched to OpenOffice on Windows some time ago from an older version of Ms Office. For my meagre needs, it's perfect, and in Windows at least I notice no slow start or font issues. I've only tested on Linux now and then, as I don't use it for my main OS. There are a couple of small things, but I'm very satisfied. I'm particularly interested in the Standards battle, and ODF is one of my chief reasons why I want to use OOo and for it to succeed. I hope others, including Apple, adopt it. WordPerfect is hedging its bets and support both ODF and MS XML. Win-win for them, I guess, and ironic considering the history between them and MS. A widely-suipported cross-platform Standards format is essential, and it's not going to be proprietary, like MS XML.

[msandersen]

@Macintosh sauce:
Here's hoping OOo will soon prroduce a native Cocoa version. I'm almost certain Apple has had one in the wings for some time as an insurance policy for whenever MS has threatened to pull Office from the Mac platform, just as they made Safari on the quiet and maintained an x86 build of OSX

[lakersforce]

...and it's not going to be proprietary, like MS XML.

Office OpenXML is not proprietary, but an open standard just like ODF. I think we will see OpenXML be ISO certified in a few months.

[forrestcupp]

I guess I'm not so much into this morality stuff. I want to use an os, not to make an life philosophy of it. if I believe something is better suited for what I want, I choose it. but it's just my personal opinion :)

AMEN! Linux isn't my religion, it's my operating system. I think Office 2007 is better than OpenOffice.org, but I don't use it for two reasons. I don't have $400 to spend on it, and OO is good enough for me.


OOo is faster in my spec... huh after few tricks, it's running much much faster than ms office...

I just have to ask, are you guys measuring MS Office speeds natively, or are you running it through something like Crossover or Wine? If you're using Crossover, of course it will be slower.

[mech7]

I just have to ask, are you guys measuring MS Office speeds natively, or are you running it through something like Crossover or Wine? If you're using Crossover, of course it will be slower.

As far as i know 2007 can't be run under WINE / CrossOver

[maniacmusician]

As far as i know 2007 can't be run under WINE / CrossOver
yet :D

[mech7]

I would much rather use OpenOffice 2 than Office 2007. I use NeoOffice on my Mac Pro and it is excellent. This is the Aqua version of OO for the Mac. My university is not recommending Office 2007 for submitting assignments because of massive formatting problems.

In 2007 you can save as docx as default or change it to .doc which will open in older versions.. you can also install a plugin which can save out as pdf.. Adobe did not want to have it installed by default, the beta had it by default though :p

[unntrlaffinity]

AMEN! Linux isn't my religion, it's my operating system. I think Office 2007 is better than OpenOffice.org, but I don't use it for two reasons. I don't have $400 to spend on it, and OO is good enough for me.



I just have to ask, are you guys measuring MS Office speeds natively, or are you running it through something like Crossover or Wine? If you're using Crossover, of course it will be slower.

I love Office 2007. The ribbon design took about a month getting used to, but now I vastly prefer it. If there's any program I've gotten my money out of over the years, it's been Word in all its incarnations. I'd have 2007 if I wasn't broke right now. OOo is nice, but it's like using Office from a decade ago as far as advancements in the suite goes.

And as for the $400 price tag, the student, teacher, and home edition is $150 and has 80% of what most home users would need. And if you're a student or work for a university, you can get it for around $75 if you shop around and can prove your current student status.

Plus, the print view not being centered in OOo Writer drives me absolutely crazy. A small complaint, but honestly, worth $75 to me just to not have it annoy me every time I use Writer. Maybe I'll change my mind after the next version of OOo that will potentially fix it.

[FuturePilot]

Open Office 2.2 on Feisty flies.:guitar:

[timpino]

IMO that article pin points my problems with OOo, It's not as fast as MS Office, and it's not even as good feature wise as MS Office. IMO if a program has less features but more speed it can be a viable option but OOo sadly still has none of it... :/ AbiWord on the other hand I like, it feels fast and stable.

[dspari1]

In my experience, Office 2003 is loading faster with CrossOver Linux than Oo.org is native.

[igknighted]

office 2007 = excessive GUI clutter... I wont use it. I think OO.o is bad too, Abiword/Koffice FTW!

[msandersen]

Office OpenXML is not proprietary, but an open standard just like ODF. I think we will see OpenXML be ISO certified in a few months.
It is. Microsoft was a member of OASIS during ODF's development, but chose not to participate to make sure it met their needs, and instead chose to make a proprietary and patented XML format. The accompanying license agreement contains a patent clause which is incompatible with GPL software, for instance (OOo is not GPL, btw, but koffice is, i believe). They have worked quite frantically to make governments, in particular the EU commissions which investigated suitable standards, recognise it as "open", hence the later namechange to OpenXML. They even changed the license agreement to specifically state they would not now or ever sue any government agency over its use. It specifically excludes mention of business or individuals.
MS had applied to the ISO for fast tracking of their format, which meant possible recognition within 6 months, but about 1/3rd of the member nations ( new record) raised objections due largely to the document's huge size and so making it impossible to scrutinise in the short time, but also because it appears to duplicate or conflict with several existing ISO standards which the ISO tries to avoid, and because several members feel ODF already covers Office Documents and so would be duplication. As a result, it is highly unlikely MS will get it fast tracked, and so it may be a few years before it is decided. Several member countries did have concerns about the patent issue.
The lack of Office format standardisation has been a big problem for many years, as governments typically has to ensure public access to government documents and has to archive those documents for 70 years or more. Considering current versions of Word cannot read formats from a decade ago, that is a big problem.

[syxbit]

office is the best thing micro$oft has ever done

[igknighted]

office is the best thing micro$oft has ever done

So tell me, then, what great advances there have been in the past ten years? I use Office '97 at work, and guess what, almost everything has the SAME wizard in office 2007... nothing has changed. Sure they added the "ribbon" and jazzed up the look a bit, but all that has happened is that a functional product got bloated to look nice, and gained almost no new (productive) features. Office '97 was very good, but there has been no development since, so I would correct you and say office WAS the best thing microsoft did, but now they are behind in that category again.

[karellen]

So tell me, then, what great advances there have been in the past ten years? I use Office '97 at work, and guess what, almost everything has the SAME wizard in office 2007... nothing has changed. Sure they added the "ribbon" and jazzed up the look a bit, but all that has happened is that a functional product got bloated to look nice, and gained almost no new (productive) features. Office '97 was very good, but there has been no development since, so I would correct you and say office WAS the best thing microsoft did, but now they are behind in that category again.

behind whom?n:confused:
speaking from my point of view I find office 2007 a wellcome evolution from 2003/97 versions, which were good and worked fine for me. I happen to like the new interface and the new fonts (calibri, constantia and so on)...

[igknighted]

behind whom?n:confused:
speaking from my point of view I find office 2007 a wellcome evolution from 2003/97 versions, which were good and worked fine for me. I happen to like the new interface and the new fonts (calibri, constantia and so on)...

To each their own I guess... I find the ribbon to be in no way a good thing. It takes up too much screen real estate, it loads slowly, and (IMHO) is just an awkward tool to use. When I open a spreadsheet, I want as much data on the screen as possible, as quickly as possible, and I want tools to help me do stuff with that data. Office 2007 made me see less data, I have to wait longer to see it, and the tools that matter are still the same ones since office 97... Abiword & gnumeric FTW!!!

I would say MS Office is behind openoffice in many ways. For example, the bibliography feature in openoffice is amazing. I enter the source info, it worries about formatting. So nice. Things like this make an office suite more productive, MS seems to have forgotten that.

[Quillz]

So tell me, then, what great advances there have been in the past ten years? I use Office '97 at work, and guess what, almost everything has the SAME wizard in office 2007... nothing has changed. Sure they added the "ribbon" and jazzed up the look a bit, but all that has happened is that a functional product got bloated to look nice, and gained almost no new (productive) features. Office '97 was very good, but there has been no development since, so I would correct you and say office WAS the best thing microsoft did, but now they are behind in that category again.
And yet I feel that OOo also has not matured very much from 2.0 and 2.2, yet I get burned at the stake for even thinking this.

[igknighted]

And yet I feel that OOo also has not matured very much from 2.0 and 2.2, yet I get burned at the stake for even thinking this.

2.0 to 2.2 are minor releases, and it's been like a year. Compare that to the 10 years MS has had with its office, and at least 4 major releases along the way ('97, XP, 2003, 2007). And, yes, OO.o wastes a lot of time trying to copy crap that MS does. I wish they wouldn't.

[karellen]

To each their own I guess... I find the ribbon to be in no way a good thing. It takes up too much screen real estate, it loads slowly, and (IMHO) is just an awkward tool to use. When I open a spreadsheet, I want as much data on the screen as possible, as quickly as possible, and I want tools to help me do stuff with that data. Office 2007 made me see less data, I have to wait longer to see it, and the tools that matter are still the same ones since office 97... Abiword & gnumeric FTW!!!

I would say MS Office is behind openoffice in many ways. For example, the bibliography feature in openoffice is amazing. I enter the source info, it worries about formatting. So nice. Things like this make an office suite more productive, MS seems to have forgotten that.

you can hide/minimize the ribbon (I do that sometimes when I want to see as much of the page/spreadsheet as possible)

[PartisanEntity]

I have always been of the opinion that MS Office is one of the few MS products that I think is truly good and useful. I have yet to compare MS Office and OO on an XP machine.

So far OO has been adequate for my needs, although IMO it needs a little polish and speed.

[syxbit]

yea, behind whom?
IMO it's far more stable/bug free than OOo

[salsafyren]

The Office 2007 UI is heavily patented.

This reason alone should make users abandon it.

Microsoft is now so protective; in the past they stole a lot of ideas from everyone, but no-one can steal from them. How pathetic.

[jgrabham]

Can I just ask, WHY??? Why do you need such great office software, so long as it can spell check (in english and french) and I can write essays on it, I dont care, and cant see what the difference is.

[mech7]

Can I just ask, WHY??? Why do you need such great office software, so long as it can spell check (in english and french) and I can write essays on it, I dont care, and cant see what the difference is.

Because some of us would like to see innovation , if we would just be content with what we got now we would never get anywhere ;)
Also the new version is much easier to use and the workflow is much faster.

[Tundro Walker]

*Sigh*

...and I just got done getting my MS Office 2003 certifications outta the way. Good to know they'll be about as useful as a tick on a dog's behind shortly.

[rubenvb]

I see a lot of FOSS users complaining about new GUIs and different looks (and maybe even hardware requirements, excluding Vista, that's over the top), but I can't seem to understand a natural innovative person (what I assume is the reason for using FOSS) could condemn a great leap and bound in Office 2007. Sure, it's patented and all, but there is no viable alternative... I keep repeating this and it stays the greatest ignored fact: compatibility is important! OO.o can't even import an automatic table of contents! That really gets me depressed.
Sure OO.o is good software, but way behind on its chief competitor.
And about the development cycle and great improvements: yes, MS has lacked any real innovation for ten years now, but no one forced you to buy the newest version! OO.o has failed to innovate anything. As far as I can see, Excell still kicks OO.o Calc's butt, and the new word has tight Excell table integration, a lot of picture editing options, a decent word and grammar check...
Feature-wise and when you take in consideration speed and compatibility, OO.o just doesn't cut it, by a long shot.
And please don't turn this into another MS is bad, use <fill in any FOSS program here>.
You have to accept that OSS can be beaten sometimes, and I hope OO.o will catch up real soon!
By the way, I seem to remember there is an ODF plugin for the MS Office suites :)
cheers

[mysticrider92]

Office 2007 is the new one with the radical UI change huh? I wonder how Windows users will adapt to it...

Personally, I don't like the new Office interface at all. We have Office 2007 and Openoffice 2.3 on our computer. The speed is fairly close, but Openoffice is probably the faster of the two (it might be because our registry is so messed up...).

The Office 2007 interface (IMO) looks like it was stolen from KDE and redesigned by a 5 year old. Almost no configuration options + too much flashy blue stuff makes for an ugly program. I expect nothing better from MS, after seeing Vista, but for the money they demand it should be a little better...

[igknighted]

I see a lot of FOSS users complaining about new GUIs and different looks (and maybe even hardware requirements, excluding Vista, that's over the top), but I can't seem to understand a natural innovative person (what I assume is the reason for using FOSS) could condemn a great leap and bound in Office 2007. Sure, it's patented and all, but there is no viable alternative... I keep repeating this and it stays the greatest ignored fact: compatibility is important! OO.o can't even import an automatic table of contents! That really gets me depressed.
Sure OO.o is good software, but way behind on its chief competitor.
And about the development cycle and great improvements: yes, MS has lacked any real innovation for ten years now, but no one forced you to buy the newest version! OO.o has failed to innovate anything. As far as I can see, Excell still kicks OO.o Calc's butt, and the new word has tight Excell table integration, a lot of picture editing options, a decent word and grammar check...
Feature-wise and when you take in consideration speed and compatibility, OO.o just doesn't cut it, by a long shot.
And please don't turn this into another MS is bad, use <fill in any FOSS program here>.
You have to accept that OSS can be beaten sometimes, and I hope OO.o will catch up real soon!
By the way, I seem to remember there is an ODF plugin for the MS Office suites :)
cheers

Good points, but try thinking about it this way: Is the goal of OO.o to re-implement every feature in MSOffice in a free package? Or is the goal to create a great Office suite?

If you believe the goal is a reimplementation of MS Office and the .doc/.xls conventions, it is certainly behind the times. But if you simply view each program for its own merits, OO.o has some excellent innovations of its own. The bibliographic feature in OO.o is amazing and far beyond anything MS Office had (at least pre-2007, the only time I use that is when my dad can't find something and expects that I know for some reason).

Compatibility is a huge issue. But spending all our time trying to reimplement features from a proprietary standard will _always_ leave us behind. If the OO.o devs would leave MS Office be for a while, and just make great features, then we would have an awesome Office suite that would make people actually want to use it, as opposed to it being an MS Office knock-off.

Besides, for turning in assignments and resumes, etc., you should use PDF instead because it preserves formatting better and is more universal (what if you used 2003 and they use 97? Minor issues can arise). And if you are working on a collaboration, then MS Office and OO.o are light years behind Google Docs. So out of laziness we tend to use .doc for everything, but it really isn't that hard to avoid the format and never have any reason to miss it.

[hyper_ch]

There are two essential tweaks that will speed up OOo extremely:

(1) Memory allocated
1. Open up Write or Calc.
2. Goto Tools, then Options.
3. Locate the setting on the left called ‘Memory’. Then on the right, check to make sure that the following are in place.

* Number of steps is set to 20.
* Graphics Cache for Open Office is set to 128 MB.
* Memory per object is set to 20.0 MB.
( * Enable systray quickstarter is check-marked.)

(2) Deactivating Java
--> if you don't need java, deactivate it for OOo!
1. Open up Write or Calc.
2. Goto Tools, then Options.
3. Locate the setting on the left called ‘Java’ and deactivate it



----------------------------------------

The one thing I've always had a trouble with at university was a complete styling of a scientific paper. M$O always screwed up. Either footnotes on the wrong page, page breaks at wrong spots aso.
Since M$Office '98 they haven't been able to setup this up correctly. It will screw your numbering or or or....

OOo has been no issue with it. I formate my 90+ pages master thesis in less than 5h to what I wanted it to. Others spend several days on it - and it still doesn't work.

As an example a friend of mine use Word 2003. She had about 110 pages for her thesis. In the middle of it she set two pages to be landscape and she had one table accross those two pages.

The issue she then had was that - for no reason I found - after those two pages no footnotes were shown anymore. When I imported it into OOo it was all prefectly layoued out. I couldn't find out why this behaviour is.

In the end I had to export those two pages as .pdf and import them as images again so that she didn't have any tables there.

[a12ctic]

abiword and gnumeric <33

[macogw]

Offce 2007 is great the new interface (ribbon) Is really awesome it is easy and fast. They have really looked at how to improve user interaction, i hope Open Office will have such a slick and great working interface someday. I never really liked office untill 2007 or atleast for word they really got it right this time.

I don't care about CPU usage hardware these days is fast enough to run it without seeing any lag, it is not like it is the newest game or anything.
I think they completely bombed on O2k7's interface. The old one was much better. The new one is so confusing I gave up and used Notepad the few times I tried it. If OOo ever gets an interface that bad, I will feel totally justified in using LaTeX for all my typesetting needs. I still need to learn to make slides in LaTeX, though.

As a computer science student, I care about CPU usage. Inefficiency and code bloat have no excuse. Any software released now should run fine on a 4 year old computer. If it runs great on my 10 year old, even better!

[popch]

abiword and gnumeric <33

Yes? How do you arrive at the result that the boolean inclusion of those products is less than thirty-three?

[rubenvb]

As a computer science student, I care about CPU usage. Inefficiency and code bloat have no excuse. Any software released now should run fine on a 4 year old computer. If it runs great on my 10 year old, even better!
This is bs (sorry for the crude phrasing).
When I run software, I want to implement all of my hardware capabilities. How can software evolve without an equal increase in required computing power? I don't see quake 3 using the same amount of memory as pong or Frogger? (maybe an exaggeration, but still the point is clear I think).
If you want an innovating product it may well be necessary to implement a bit more memory (sure MS sucks at coding and there os uses to much memory...), cpu power doubles each five years (or what was that one guys law about this stuff?), why not USE what you're given!
These thoughts (in my humble opinion), keep FOSS a bit behind (in regard to eg user friendliness) to other, more expensive and proprietary solutions...

[SunnyRabbiera]

Koffice!

[SomeGuyDude]

If I could run MS Office 2007, I would. It is GORGEOUS, and far and away the best writing software I've ever had the pleasure of using. It made writing a joy instead of a chore.

Being unable to use it in some manner on Ubuntu is easily the most disappointing aspect of the switch.

[phrostbyte]

OpenOffice is really the enigma in Linux, this really fast and performent system somehow got married to pig of an office application. I'm going to have to agree with his claims, OOo is pretty bloated.

[phrostbyte]

Because some of us would like to see innovation , if we would just be content with what we got now we would never get anywhere ;)
Also the new version is much easier to use and the workflow is much faster.

Thankfully OOo is still actively developed. I think we will see great improvements in the next year or so.

But also gnumeric is out there for spreadsheets and prolly has more features the OOo Calc, and much better gnome integration and performance.

[Tannster]

My first post :)

I use 2007 here at work on a daily basis, and as the admin got the joys of testing it before we went full swing into a company wide upgrade. After dredging through the outlook mail capacity issues, and 2007/2003 format compatibility changes heres what I've been doing.

If the user is unhappy with 2007 I've been offering OpenOffice as a testdrive for about a week. Amazingly none have requested MS Office back from OO. I've only installed 15-20 so far if I remember correctly so it looks promising.

I think the major issue for the general user is the fact that most standard office workers ( outside of IT) will be on a windows xp/vista business machine and have no knowledge of the linux alternatives. It somewhat scares them I think when they first try OO and realize that this could have been what they were using for so long compared to the issues of Office.

Don't get me wrong, OO has its hiccups as well. But comparing the price of Office2007 to the well..no price of OO it helps sway the judgements a bit.

[Northsider]

I hate Office 07...way too "pretty" for an office suite. Lags the hell out of my computer while office pretty much nothing that Office 2003 couldn't give me.

I love Oo though!

[tehet]

Is there a way to make MS Office stop helping you? I.e. change lower case to upper case at the beginning of a sentence when I really want it to be lower case, make all kind of formatting decisions for me etc.

[SomeGuyDude]

I hate Office 07...way too "pretty" for an office suite. Lags the hell out of my computer while office pretty much nothing that Office 2003 couldn't give me.

I love Oo though!

Let me tell you, if you make heavily formatted documents (such as my current book I'm writing), then MS Word 2007 is nothing short of a godsend. I'm trying to make OOo work, but it's not quite there yet.

[Northsider]

Let me tell you, if you make heavily formatted documents (such as my current book I'm writing), then MS Word 2007 is nothing short of a godsend. I'm trying to make OOo work, but it's not quite there yet.

I don't think Office is designed to do such tasks...you should really be using a desktop publishing app.

[macogw]

This is bs (sorry for the crude phrasing).
When I run software, I want to implement all of my hardware capabilities. How can software evolve without an equal increase in required computing power? I don't see quake 3 using the same amount of memory as pong or Frogger? (maybe an exaggeration, but still the point is clear I think).
If you want an innovating product it may well be necessary to implement a bit more memory (sure MS sucks at coding and there os uses to much memory...), cpu power doubles each five years (or what was that one guys law about this stuff?), why not USE what you're given!
These thoughts (in my humble opinion), keep FOSS a bit behind (in regard to eg user friendliness) to other, more expensive and proprietary solutions...
If it adds no value but uses more resources, that's a bad thing. Speed is a feature.

Say you need to sort data, what algorithm do you use? Bubble sort? It's simple, but it takes a long time. Best-case (already sorted) is O(n). Worst case is O(n^2). If there are 1000 things to be sorted, that's 1000x1000= 1,000,000 times the code is run.

Or you can use heap sort which is O(n log n). That means for 1000 things to be sorted it'd take, worst-case, 1000*log(1000), which is 3000 times the code is run.

1,000,000 / 3000 = 333.333...

The heap sort would then be 333 times faster than bubble sort. Both have the same result. The data will be sorted at the end. One takes 333 times longer, though!

When the same results can be attained faster than they have been, that is code bloat. That is bad.

Yes, actual innovation is good. If it's really innovative. Moving buttons around so nobody knows where anything is and turning it blue is not innovating. It does not add any features. Adding "features" that add no real value is also bad. That's called "feature creep." I have yet to figure out why Microsoft Word lets you put animations on text. It makes no sense. It's not like you can print the animation! That's a useless "feature."

One of my friends says "all the other programmers are out to get me." He means that they are using up cycles and memory that he could be using. Yes, we have more powerful computers, and yes, with infinite memory (which we do not have) you can waste memory, but you have to remember that users want to use more than one program at a time. if one program uses all of the memory or hammers the CPU, the other programs can't do their thing. Depending on which program is getting priority, others will freeze or crash. Using the computer's resources as if nothing else were running results in a bad experience for the user because it kills everything else they want to do.

And it's not "cpu power doubles..." it's "the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months."

[forrestcupp]

If it adds no value but uses more resources, that's a bad thing. Speed is a feature.


What is not valuable to you may be very valuable to someone else. You may have 10,000 different opinions of what is valuable, but you can't really have 10,000 different versions of your software. MS came out with 4 different versions of Vista and everyone complained.

Anyway, I've never used 2007, but from what I've seen, Office 2003 is much faster than OpenOffice. But my wife uses 2007 at work and she loves it. She likes the new things that it can do. One thing she loves in Excel 2007 is the ability to sort by background color.

I'm not into bashing software just because it is from MS.

[rubenvb]

forrestcup, thank you for backing me :)
I completely agree that some MS Office code is bloated, but it's undeniable that there are new features in the 2007 release (well let's keep it at: a lot, and i mean a lot of features are now normally accessible through the good, yes good interface of the new version!).

Why does OpenOffice.org run slower? Code bloat maybe? I thought you hated that? Then why do you use it? In my opinion, MS Office runs faster, and I sincerely hope OO.o will catch up quickly before everyone forgets about the old-school office suite which could have been.

Again, no offence to OO.o develpers, they've done a keen job, just saying they shouldn't rest easy yet, there's still a looong way to come.