LibreOffice 4.0 released

[rridgely]

New update to libreoffice today.

http://www.libreoffice.org/

 

I'm most interested in the commenting feature. If this is compatible with MS word documents with comments than it will be huge for students. Many teachers will comment on essays/assignments and send it back for revision. Before only MS word could see those comments. I'm going to try it later today.

[Winapp2.ini]

Thanks for the notice

[hazelnut]

Any news on the need for java ?

[barky]

Java still used for Base ... little else it seems!

unlike the old days libo installs without incident if java is missing

 

can't be many more versions until java is no longer used by libreoffice

[Winapp2.ini]

Hopefully! It's getting there. Is there a list of the remaining Java dependencies?

[pwillener]

http://www.libreoffi...m-requirements/ notes

For certain features of the software - but not most - Java is required. Java is notably required for Base.

 

From my understanding, Java will still be required for backwards compatibility, even if they use an SQL engine that is not dependent on Java.

[hazelnut]

My neighbour's grandson needs to have some sort of Writer at home for his college work (he's been banned from working in the college library but that's another story)

 

Would I be able to select Writer to put on his laptop without all the other Libre Office bits? (It's not a good idea for him to have Java on his machine believe me)

[mta]

if it's any Writer he's after OpenOffice allows you a custom install where you can just select its Writer component.

and it doesn't require java.

[hazelnut]

Will try that for him then.

 

Thanks.

[Alan_B]

if it's any Writer he's after OpenOffice allows you a custom install where you can just select its Writer component.

I use the Portable version of OpenOffice since a few years ago.

When I installed it there was the ability to select which components would be available,

but it made no difference to the size of the installation.

[Guest Keatah]

I just setup Libre Office with the word processor only. I'm sure you can do the same with OpenOffice.

 

I think a lot of people are thinking that LibreOffice is more progressive in design and development.

[Winapp2.ini]

(he's been banned from working in the college library but that's another story)

 

Elaborate!

[Guest Keatah]

Maybe he was running a nefarious scientific business behind the scenes. Thus the restraining order against using the other applications.

 

No CALC or MATH means no R&D.

No DRAW or IMPRESS means no strategic planning or advertising.

No BASE means no record keeping.

 

Sounds like a death knell to me..

[mta]

@keatah,

I agree, I too thought LO was a 'better' product than OO.

admittedly I didn't give it too much of a run, a couple of weeks.

but the turn-off factor was it's java requirement but it would appear from Barky that it's changing.

 

I found both have very good Word equivalents and both very average Excel support. (but Hazels naughty neighbour only wants Word, so all's good)

[Guest Keatah]

Well.. I got bored and had nothing better to do. So I did an informal benchmark of loading times on a 3MB .TXT text file.

 

To be absolutely fair, I ran CCleaner after getting the stuff set up and installed. I also ran UltimateDefrag to help eliminate HDD inefficiencies and make sure the heads didn't have to fly all over town to gather the required components of each program. I also rebooted between each of those operations. And then also did the additional requisite reboot 3 times afterwards and a 15 minute waiting period in-between to allow Windows to settle down and do any housekeeping.

 

I don't use any anti-mal-ware, or background backups, or anti-virus programs. So these weren't present and thus didn't skew the results.

 

I rebooted the system between each of these tests to help ensure that system caches didn't artificially speed things up. So not only the data had to load, but the program itself had to load.

 

Initially I was going to run this on my Hexacore i7 SSD Raid rig, but everything was effectively under 1 second. So I ran it on my old Pentium III with 1GB and a mechanical HDD to illustrate the differences with meaningful numbers. I also built a photosensor and control circuit that would detect the mouse click needed to load each application. This would start the timer. And the photosensor would trigger the stop when it detected a black area. With the black area being a pixel in the font of the text in the loaded document. Repeating each test 5 times yielded +/- .003 seconds variance. For

 

MS Wordpad 5.1 2.00 seconds

Notepad++ 6.3 2.52 seconds

MS Notepad 5.1 3.27 seconds

MS Office Word 2003 4.03 seconds

Apache Open Office Writer 3.4.1 20.2 seconds

LibreOffice Writer 4.0 48.6 seconds

Internet Explorer 8.0 122.8 seconds

 

And there you have it! Interpret it as you see fit.

[mta]

I guess you get what you pay for.

expensive MS but quick or free office clones and slow.

 

still, 20 secs and 48 secs, that's very surprising. thankfully most docs aren't > 3meg I suppose.

I wonder if OO & LO opens .DOC any faster.

if those timings are standard across all file types they can open, then I wonder how well used those programs are?

[hazelnut]

2 minutes just to open Internet Explorer 8 would suggest something was wrong with the way you had the machine set. Even people who knock IE would be able to get it to open quicker than that

 

Went to have a play on a machine last night which had Libre Office (full) installed. It was a Vista machine. No real slowdowns opening things that I could see and the machine owner says it's all he uses..

 

I'll be putting Writer on the neighbour's machine this weekend and will give some feedback in the next few days.

 

As for the reason the college banned him from working in the library......

[Guest Keatah]

I converted the test.txt file to test.doc and ran the tests again. Keep in mind the filesize grew by about 20%, but the text content inside remained the same.

 

Word 2003 and Wordpad 5.1 remained the same.

Apache Open Office Writer 3.41 slowed way down to 56.09 seconds

LibreOffice Writer 4.0 lost a little ground, 51.97 seconds.

 

Both MS products remained blazing fast. I expected Wordpad to slow a bit because it has to filter some of the "advanced" features of the doc format. And I also expected Word 2003 to get a bit faster, as it can forego the .TXT conversion process. But they remained the same.

 

Cache Test:

Here I loaded the file in each application. Exited. And loaded it right back again. Back to back operations.

 

It is interesting to note that the MS products make good use of the system caches. On exiting and immediate reloading the already good score was cut in half for Word 2003, now clocking 1.95 seconds. And even Wordpad 5.1 got faster, down to 4.2 seconds.

 

Both OpenOffice 3.4.1 Writer and LibreOffice Writer 4.0 made up some lost ground, but nothing noteworthy. AOO loaded the .doc file in 46.76 seconds and LO in 41.95. In the cases of these two free suites, the standard caching mechanisms in Windows afforded some improvement, but nothing as dramatic as MS Word's 50% reduction.

 

I also ran Office 2010, and across the board it took about 2 seconds longer than it's Office 2003 counterpart to load things, cache or no cache.

 

Memory usage: loading test.txt (3.2MB standard text file) I switched back to loading the text.txt file so I could include

 

MS Notepad 7MB

MS Wordpad 11MB

MS Word 15MB

Notepad++ 20MB

AAO Writer 98MB

LO Writer 131MB

IE Explorer 36MB

 

And the underdog of text editors MS Dos EDIT consumed about 5MB with the 3.2MB test file. It also scored a record load time 0.68 seconds for loading itself and the file.

 

 

@Hazelnut: IE loads in less than 5 seconds by itself. And Google's page comes up at the 6.31 mark. That's from the time I click on the "E" to the time I can type in the search query. That is very good. But asking it to load a mega-size text file is what slows it down. But also remember, this in on a slow machine. With a Motherboard from the late 1990's. PC-100 ram and all that. ISA sound card..

 

Much of the time consumed by IE is in the page rendering and not in loading libraries and getting itself ready. That part flies by as you see, from click to search it's a little over 6 seconds. A stellar performance for this old hardware.

 

IE is a bit of an outcast here because one does not normally edit text locally within the browser proper itself.

[mta]

great testing Keatah.

guess it really highlights how far PC's have come.

and how the current bloated software struggles on the older gen hardware.

 

thanks for your efforts.

[eL_PuSHeR]

Nice work Keatah. I love benchmarks.

[Guest Keatah]

Yes. It is important to match software, hardware, OS, all together from nearly the same era. New software on old machines isn't always best thing. But old software on new machines is just fantastically fast, though lacking features.

 

While speed of the CPU in MHz or GHz is always a factor, "it", today, is more and more about instruction sets. A lot of slowdows like this are probably because old CPU's need to use many many instructions to do what one instruction does in a modern CPU. You'll note that every new intel chip generation is coming with more instructions rather than ramping up clock rates. And for a while there they were ramping down the clock. Things like X87, IA32, MMX, SSE1,2,3,4,5, X86-64, AVX. Each offers more capability per clock tick than ever before.

 

It's great that compilers build software to fall back and that has lead to great compatibility and made for easy migrations. I remember playing some DOS games back in the late 1980's. And the stuff worked on every computer I've had since. Great compatibility, even if you need to use emulators like DOS BOX. Newer CPU's breeze through the workload of the emulator and emulatee. Guys & Gals, I'm playing games from the 1970's, today, on a state of the art machine. The same code, the same graphics. Totally fantastic! Atari games rock. And the magic happens not because today's CPU's are fast, they are rich in instructions. Oftentimes 1 instruction doing the work of 150 instructions in an ancient 8-bit machine.

 

Now, I would have no problem recommending either LibreOffice or ApacheOpenOffice. As a matter of fact, I rather liked the simplistic install that both offer. Furthermore I kind of got all flustered with the confusion and extraordinary amount of options and cloud things and collaboration features present in Office 2007 and later. Too many distractions. Too much bloat.

 

I always like to, more and more, stick with basics. This way I can concentrate on the task at hand. I almost want business to slow down and for once let the employees think through a problem rather than rush rush rush and spending extraordinary amounts of time looking good rather than doing good.

 

AOO & LO tend to fit into this style. Not because my old Pentium runs it slow, but because they take you back to basics. It has often been said that CS2 was the best version of Photoshop for it's time. And I find myself *still* using it!

 

And as a final comment I think the world would be a better place if all PC's came with AOO or LO, your choice.

 

And did you know that LO, supposedly, lets you use FireFox skins? So that means I can make it like once of those futuristic starship control panels or something.. I did this for the lady since she wanted a greenscreen look with Windows 3.1.. Something like her first job as recptionist at the airport or hotel. Yep got Win 3.1 going on i7 machine.