On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 12:52 +0000, Andrew Brown wrote: > Jacqueline McNally <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> > "Meeks did not provide dates on when the features would become available > > because the project has a philosophy of releasing features as they are > > ready rather than by a pre-set schedule." > Surely the newsworthy facts from that article are not about the startup > times on Linux, but what he says about calc: > > "Meeks cited one example where a company decided to move a large Excel > spreadsheet to OpenOffice. The file would perform its calculations in Excel > in 30 seconds, but it took three hours in Calc. > > The project got that down to about one hour, but Meeks said that there is > still much work that needs to be done." > > I think that this qualifies as a quite remarkable understatement. If the > best efforts of the best minds of the project can only improve our > performance until it is 120 times slower than Excel, instead of 360 times > as slow, there is a problem that no amount of marketing will solve. > > Note that this is entirely independent of the issue about spreadhseet > loading time that raised such a firestorm in the autumn. While its obviously desirable to improve all aspects of performance and the compactness of the code, I think marketing should also make it clear to potential customers that spreadsheets that take 10s of seconds to open in Excel and minutes in Calc are a very small and specialised section of the market. I have been modelling the pay and tax for a small business this week in Calc on Linux and this takes under 10 seconds to load from double clicking a desktop icon including loading up Calc itself. I should think this is a far more typical scenario for the vast majority of users. Now I'm not complacent and I do want OOo to be made more efficient but let's get this in perspective. I suspect that there is always going to be some trade off with ODF rather than a binary internal format but then there are other benefits to ODF. Question is how much it affects people practically. For most people I think having a quick start will actually be more practically useful. -- Ian Lynch www.theINGOTs.org www.opendocumentfellowship.org www.schoolforge.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
