A few days ago, on a computer that I own, for a couple of reasons I deleted everything on my hard drive and have started over again. I’m using Windows 98 and one thing I have not reinstalled is MS Works Suite 2001. I’m thinking about downloading and installing OpenOffice instead, but I’m not sure which is better. I know OpenOffice was meant to compete with MS Office and not Works Suite, but still, if anybody can tell me how they compare, I’d appreciate it. Also, I have two specific questions. One, does OpenOffice take up less disk space than Works? And two, do the OpenOffice programs take up more, less, or the same amount of memory than it’s MS counterpart. For example, does OpenOffice.org Writer take up more or less memory than Word?
Thanks.
OpenOffice is wonderful. But I don’t think it provides alternatives for everything that comes with MS Works. Looking at the current Works bundle, I see that there is a money management/check balancing tool, an encyclopedia and map tool. OpenOffice does not have these.
It does have a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool (slides, drawings, graphs, charts, etc…) and, if you use StarOffice, a database.
So, if you are looking for an Office Suite, OpenOffice can help.
If you are looking for maps, nope. Encyclopedia? Nope. Check balancing? Nope.
As for your two specific questions: Microsoft gets to cheat and tightly couple MS Office and MS Works with the operating system. OpenOffice doesn’t have that luxury. So, OpenOffice will take more room on the disk drive that will be noticeable. MS Office and MS Works, by most people, gets lumped in with the OS and isn’t noticeable.
MS products also get to stake out a bit of memory so they start faster. OpenOffice takes longer to start and will seem to take much more memory.
I recommend OpenOffice. I use it exclusively for work. It does a wonderful job for documents, reports, spreadsheets and slideshows. But it don’t do encyclopedias very well.
OK, thanks for the info. One final question. When you say that OpenOffice takes up a noticeable amount of drive space, I take it that you mean it takes up several megs more space, right?
The latest OpenOffice release takes up 137 megabytes. Unless you’re running it on a significantly older system, though, this shouldn’t be a problem, since hard drive space is cheap nowadays.
Also, I believe that leenmi is mistaken with regards to speed; one thing that OpenOffice has against it is that it’s written in Java. The EXEs used are a frontend used to run the JAR files in the directory. This is what makes it slower to load, not any special memory reservation MS has in Windows.
As for taking up memory – OpenOffice Writer takes up 28 MB of memory starting out with an empty document. It will increase as you write your document; loading a 16-page term paper made its memory space jump to 32.2 MB. If you have 128 MB or more, though, you should be fine.
OpenOffice has smaller documents than Word – a 16-page document in OpenOffice (no images) takes up 16 KB. That’s the same space a 3-page document takes up in Word.
I’m happy with OpenOffice. It’s a great office suite for the (lack of) money.
Another alternative you may not have considered: If you’re running on a low-resource system, and all you need is word processing, I would also check out AbiWord. Free, open source, faster, and consumes less memory. But you only get word processing, and their Word document reader is not quite as polished as OpenOffice’s. But it’s your call.
OK, thanks.
Couple of nitpicks: OpenOffice is not written in Java - one or two features require Java to work, but you can install OOo without Java. Also, I’m not sure what leemi means by Microsoft “tightly coupling MS Office and MS Works with the operating system” - the only “cheat” I know of, one also available to OpenOffice users, is that a MS Office installation preloads some code when Windows starts. AFAIK, OpenOffice takes less space on disk than recent versions of MS Office.
Sorry, that should be leenmi.
I downloaded OpenOffice 1.1, and the entire file is around 60mb in size, compressed. Fat chance of getting Works that compact! (obviously this may not have a direct relationship to the uncompressed size).