Hi......

At work, I am facing few problems with OpenOffice...

1. It Loads very slow...and when I open some big files (excel sheets), it takes forever to open...I know that openoffice is slow, but can I modify it to load files faster ? Is there some setting I can change?

2. Print Previews in OpenOffice do not display the entire preview of the page....So suppose if I have 10 columns in my page, OpenOffice will only show 6 or 8 in preview...and when I print, it will skip the leftmost area of the page and the rightmost area of the page....Why does it behave in that way...can I do something to make it correct ??

Pls help..

Regards,

--amit

Hi Amit!

As for 1)
The only thing you can really do is make more
RAM available. Which version of OO are you
using, what is the hardware you're running it
on, which distro are you using?


As for 2)
That may well depend on your page/print-margin
settings. Did you actually make a print region
selection?


Cheers,
TInk

I am using Mandrake 9.2 at work with OO 1.1....I got partial success by getting OO to load in 15 seconds by setting memory usage in Tools- >Options -> Memory (and the file that I opened wasnt a big file, so I am sure a huge file will take ages to open, which the windows and of course MS Office users do not like at all)

Second point is...I am migrating around 100 to 150 users from windows to linux but facing stiff resistance due to the above factors namely opening time of documents and printing related issues (I have tried both selecting text and just printing a page, but none of them prints properly...At least in MS Word, whatever we see in Print Preview is printed as it is, whether it was properly formatted or no...but that is not the case with OO)...Therefore I need help here so that I can convince real users to move on to openoffice and promote linux usage in a big big way.....

Thanks and Regards,

--amit

OK, the other way around...

How do you know you have "10 columns on your page"
(Is that in scalc or swriter, btw?) if you haven't looked
in the preview? I still don't understand how you actually
run into this 'problem'.

If I create a 12 column spreadsheet and don't define a
print-range I get i.e. the first 7 columns. If I define a
print range from col4 to col9 this is all I get in my preview.



Cheers,
Tink

I am using Calc (Excel Sheets)....and suppose If I create a sheet with 10 column data, preview in calc will only show 6, whereas, MS Excel shows the entire page......Or at least, if print preview in Calc is showing 6 columns, it will not print all of them...Calc skips leftmost part of first column and rightmost part of last column....I have tried adjusting the left and right margins, but that hasnt helped much....Similarly, opening big files in OO Calc takes ages...(Of course size of excel files created in organisations is quite large as it contains a lot of data) so keeping that in mind, I want the files to open faster, so that the users dont cry to switch back to MS Office...

Anyways, frankly speaking, I havent used OpenOffice at all, but am required to implement it in my company, so this is the place I'd always look around for help...If u could provide pointers to counter these problems, I'll be able to migrate a huge 150 pc users to linux and perhaps go on to implement linux and OOffice in other companies over the years...!

Regards,

--amit

Well, I tried your idea tink and the entire preview was printed..However, weirdly, Calc didn't print the leftmost 1st column....I need a quick solution to print the entire page properly...hope someone chips in to overcome this hurdle...

Regards,

--amit

well, I'm feeling very bad today coz due to openoffice problems with printing and opening time of files, I havent been able to retain one of my existing linux users..Tommorow, against my wishes, I will have to format his machine and install winblows again....why? just becos linux (specially openoffice) has been very slow on linux and full of problems ...

Yesterday, out of curiosity, I downloaded and installed OO 1.1.1 win32 and it opened a blank document in 4 seconds flat (that too on an AMD-K6 II)..If it was to be Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, it would be faster...anyways, the main point is that open office under linux dosent seem to be developed properly.....Unless, these guys offer comparable opening and document loading times to windows on a bit older hardware, it would be very difficult to implement linux at the user level...Users do not care if they r running linux or windows, they do not want headaches in small small issues...people have so much to do at work and none of them wants hassles in doing routine work...obviously Microsoft rules desktops becos it has been able to free users from these small but extremely vital issues..

I am just writing this becos I have not been able to retain a linux user for the lack of features or lack of performance of open source software(whether it is printing, loading time or anything else)...

I am hopeful, someday linux will load applications faster....

If anyone reading this has any tweaks for running OpenOffice faster and make it load faster (other than Tools -> Options -> Memory), I will highly appreciate it...after all I have been employed by my company to migrate all existing windows systems to linux...and i need assistance in achieving the company's goal and ultimately promote linux among corporate users...

Thanks and Regards,

--amit

are you installing from rpm or from source? source should be faster, since it will be compiled on the machine it's going to run on.

otherwise, i did a quick www.google.com/linux search, and found a couple links you might find useful. warning: i haven't tried these myself, i'm just trying to help you consolidate info

there are actually 3 different binaries you can point soffice.bin to, some of which may be faster than others.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedor.../msg03248.html


here is a discussion on the speed factor, and what causes it:
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewto...35447e41343ccd


and here is a general help forum for OpenOffice:
www.http://www.oooforum.org


it seems like there's not a lot you can do to increase load times, but once the program has been started, loading individual documents should be pretty fast.

if you are using open office 1.1.0 then there is a known bug which is easy to fix.

go to file://OpenOffice.org1.1/user/psprint

delete the psprintfontcache file
now open and close open office

the psprintfontcach file will have reappeared
now make it read only.

hey presto!

Hi mcd,

I am using OO 1.1 that came with Mandrake 9.2 preloaded.

Actually, I've searched quite a lot on google myself and discovered that the above page leads to an ftp link which no longer exists...

I have gone thru the entire thread, its nothing spl..but thanks for the link anyway..

I've also been to OO forum but there also nothing special has emerged.

I guess Open Office will continue to disappoint until it reaches version 2.0....but my need is today, becos I have been assigned the job of migrating windows users to linux...and it is difficult to convince people to use OO when they r so used to the speed and comfort of MS Office..

More help in this regard will always be appreciated...

Thanks and Regards,

--amit

in addition I have just found that my psprintfontcache file is growing with 000111 so have done the above for my system

well, I tried the psprintfontcache tweak on my home pc but it didnt improve the speed apparently...I am not saying that this wont work, but at least it didnt have any noteworthy impact on my system.....

I guess either someone should tweak the OO code so that it loads fast...someone got to do that for the Open Source community...

--amit

here's the text I found at the link above, don't know why it wasn't working:

Hi!

I've done some tweaks to OO.o to make it more prelink-friendly
(and thus to start up faster).
ftp://people.redhat.com/jakub/openoffice.org/
contains openoffice.org-1.1.0-3.1 package, with 2 differences
against 1.1.0-3 in rawhide:

1) there are 3 variants of the /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin
binary (the actual OOo program), soffice.bin is a symlink to one of
them:
soffice1.bin should be the same as soffice.bin in 1.1.0-3
soffice2.bin instead indirectly links against another > 40 libraries
which are ALWAYS dlopened when soffice starts
soffice3.bin is like soffice2.bin, but unlike soffice2.bin, it has
all DT_NEEDED tags directly in the binary, while
soffice2.bin is just crt files and all the binary's
code plus most of the DT_NEEDED tags moved to
new shared library
2) IMHO there are too many wrapper scripts, so there is a change
in ooffice script to avoid /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice
script which does things like check for Solaris installed patches
and whatever else and instead just run the pagein and soffice.bin
binaries directly with right env variables and options.
If you have problems wit this change, just do:
perl -pi -e 's/# exec/exec/' /usr/bin/ooffice
and you'll get previous behavior

I'd like if you could test all 3 sofficeN.bin binaries on a prelinked system,
ie.:
1) as root: install the above package
2) as root: /etc/cron.daily/prelink
3) as normal user:
for N in 1 2 3; do
ln -sf soffice$N.bin /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin
run OOo a couple of times, test. Measure startup time.
Run
LD_DEBUG=statistics /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin private:factory/swriter
a couple of times
done

and tell me how do you feel it starts fast and average output of
LD_DEBUG=statistics (just the first 10 lines is enough) in each of the
3 cases.

Thanks.

Jakub

mcd, its not working...I checked it 4 times right now and 2-3 times couple of days back too...the link dosent work....

--amit

you're right, my bad. grr.