Hi all,

A very quick query for you all. How do KWord and OOo Writer compare in terms of system requirements and feature sets? I currently use OOoW as my word processor, having tried Abiword and found it wanting. (Not that Abiword is a bad program as such; it just doesn't feel right for me.)

As we all know, OpenOffice is a hefty beast and one of my computers is an old 233Mhz laptop. Opening a document can take anywhere up to a minute on my laptop, which can be pretty frustrating when I just want to make a quick adjustment to a file. I have had a quick look at KWord previously but was put off by what seemed initially to be an overly-complicated user interface.

Any input gratefully received... but please let's not turn this into a flamewar!

Thanks,

I don't know whether you've tried the new OpenOffice 2 betas yet, but they're quite a lot faster than 1.1.x. Also, there's an article at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8308 which talks about tweaking the OpenOffice memory settings to speed it up.

I've never really used KWord and although I think Abiword does what it is supposed to do very well, it lacks features that I really want (like AutoCorrect, AutoComplete etc.)

OOo still takes eons to open moderate-to-large spreadsheets, particularly spreadsheets with hyperlinks between worksheets. 45 minutes to two hours, whether in Excel or native .sxc format.

The same spreadsheets take <5 seconds to open in Excel under wine.

And what version of OO is this? 45 mins to 2 hours s a bit too much and I don't think things should be that way.

Back to that 233MHz laptop----if it also has limited RAM, that could be most of your issue.
My wife's box is a 733 PIII with 320M RAM. I regard THAT as marginal

The laptop in question has 160Mb RAM...

I've tried it on a dual Pentium III, dual Pentium III Xeon, and Pentium 4 3.2E (Prescott core). All three machines had 1GB RAM. I've tried both dual boxes with SMP disabled, to rule out any race conditions, and of course it took longer. The spreadsheet is ONLY 1,300 rows. This is with OOo 1.1

2.0 isn't any better (I tried OOo 2.0 under Windows)

KimVette > you're flaming unless someone can confirm this crazy story

erraticassassin > Kword is very usable on slow pc's. Openoffice simple requires more power. There can be some problems with MS Office files as Kword doesn't handle all functionality. Footnotes for example are a mess in Kword if you open a doc file. Openoffice handles this much better.

Do you want a copy of the (self-censor)ing spreadsheet so you can see how crappy OOo's I/O performance is? I'm willing to post a copy, then you can post a public apology here for accusing me of lying.

In short: don't be an ass. I have no reason to lie about OOo as I much prefer it to Microsuck Office, aside from I/O performance issues.

Hey, I hope to shed some light:

Which one you use should depend on your needs. In my experience and research project for the University wishing to switch to open source, OOo is best for people who wish to share files with MS Office users. Compatibility is orders of magnitude better than Koffice. If your documents are for your own computer only, then I reccomend KOffice as it loads VERY fast in comparison.

I have a 600 Mhz 128MB RAM as my linux box (donated so I can't complain) and OOo can take a few minutes to load a complex document with pictures. 45 minutes seems a little weird, but there could be something weird in KimVette's spreadsheet causing problems.

Of course if you really want to be out of the box, you can't get much faster on a linux system than Emacs. It is blazingly fast and many a Linux vet swear by it. I recently started using it after an article about in the UK Linux Format Magazine. However, be warned that without a tutorial you'll be very lost. Control-C to copy? yeah right! Control-S to save? Nope! You'll be searching. Saving is control-x control-s. But, if I remember right, it DOES have spell checker and a lot of powerful features. Worth checking out if you are primarily typing text documents. I think there is a way to do images, but I haven't the slightest clue how to do that.

One last thing - if you are doing simple desk top publishing like flyers and broshures, KOffice is the better of the two. Don't use it for real DTP, that's what Scribus is for, but for basic things it works a LOT better.

*looks back at rest of thread* So much for not turning this into a flamewar...

Anyway. The suggestion about using Emacs isn't too far off the mark. For day-to-day scribbled notes and suchlike, I tend to use JOE, which is a nice, simple text editor and reminds me a lot of Wordstar. For anything that requires specific formatting or presentation I tend to use OOoW, mainly for the PDF export feature - is this available in KWord? (If memory serves, Scribus can export to PDF, so maybe that would be the way to go - write plain text in JOE, tidy up in Scribus, export to PDF?)

KWord can't do PDFs. I tried with horrible results although maybe I was doing something non-standard. Perahps print to postscript and then us ps2pdf. Didn't work for me either in that case, but it's a suggestion.

Here is a spreadsheet that takes 45 minutes to open on a dual Pentium III, Dual Pentium III Xeon, and a half hour on a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4. It's smaller than the others that give me problems by 300 to 1,000 lines but otheewise the symptoms and characteristics are identical.

http://kim.biyn.com/stuff/moderateSpreadsheet.xls

If I remove the hyperlinks, it opens in seconds.

In excel, it opens in <5 seconds as-is via wine, slightly slower natively under Windows thanks to virus scanning software.

OOo has its problems, and when I looked into fixing it myself and downloaded the source, I found badly-architected spaghetti, so I immediately lost interest.

Moloko, I will be expecting your apology posted here publicly for all to see. Thanks in advance. Think twice before accusing someone of lying, lest you be proven a witless fool again.

It opens really slow in kspread and OO Calc. I will try it later with gnumeric and see if there is any difference.

Gnumeric opens it in like 2 to 3 seconds but OO 1 and 2 as well as kspread 1.3.x seem to just hang.