Goodbye OpenOffice, Hello LibreOffice

[techidave]

i normally use AbiWord as it is light and fast.  not to mention, its free!  But this time around, I am wanting a spreadsheet and presentation program.  This computer was donated to these people and they dont have alot of money to purchase software with.  So I am trying the free stuff.

[40hz]

^Hear ya! I'm helping out people and organizations in the same boat. (Probably why I'm broke so often too thanks to all the pro bono and gratis work I do. ) But for spreadsheets and presentations I personally think (having tried as many alternatives as I could find) that Libre and Softmaker's products are about as good as the alternatives get right now.

[techidave]

I replaced the default icon on the desktop with the individual icons for Writer, etc. and noticed some speedup.

Then I found this tip for speeding up LibreOffice and noticed a 10 second faster opening of the program.  Tip

[f0dder]

My problem with LibreOffice is how resource intensive it is (and OpenOffice before it).

-Darwin (April 25, 2013, 09:04 AM)

Open with a 3-sheet spreadsheet open, LibreOffice is using 128k of memory on my openSUSE Linux machine. I don't know what it would do on a Windows machine, which I assume you're using?

-zridling (April 25, 2013, 09:44 AM)

I seriously doubt you're looking at the correct memory stats. It's around 31 megs for LibreOffice calc on my Mint install, just-launched with three empty sheets.

Besides, it's not just about memory usage, the suite is a major CPU pig. It's slightly sluggish even on my i7-3770 with 16 gigs of ram - but try using it on a pmmx-200 with 64 megabytes. Office2000 on that hardware flies.

[40hz]

The problem with Libre is that it basically loads as a suite. So there's a base memory footprint of about 28 megs for the main bin which always gets loaded - plus an additional 7 to 16 megs for each app in the suite you open. It's an approach that has provoked much debate over the years.

Back when machines were slower there might have been some rationale for loading all the common code needed by the suite up front to save time when opening and closing apps. But with the speed of today's systems I don't think that justification (if it is still the justification) makes sense any more.

[TaoPhoenix]

I replaced the default icon on the desktop with the individual icons for Writer, etc. and noticed some speedup.

Then I found this tip for speeding up LibreOffice and noticed a 10 second faster opening of the program.  Tip

-techidave (April 28, 2013, 03:47 AM)

This tip DOES look pretty good. I did most of it except the Quickstarter part, and it does seem faster!   

[pilgrim]

I replaced Softmaker Office 2008 with FreeOffice on my Netbook yesterday and found that I cannot open the help file from within the program.
The window opens for it but it's empty, if I click on the X to close it the entire program closes.
If I go to the installation folder and double click on the chm file it opens as it should although it is not showing images, just boxes with a red cross.
I re-registered the ocx and tried the repair option in the installer, neither made any difference.