OpenOffice Responses

By James Gaskin, NetworkWorld.com, 09/07/06

Multiple readers pointed out, more politely than necessary, that OpenOffice does in fact have a Title Case menu item. I mentioned in my Anybody But Microsoft column that it didn't because that's not one of the options in the menu under Format > Change Case, as are Upper Case and Lower Case. However, OpenOffice puts Title Case under Format > Character > Font Effects (tab) > Effects dropdown > Title. Oh, you can also find it by highlighting some text and hitting F11 to open the Styles and Formatting popup. This is handy for some things, but Title Case is way down a long list of options.

Let this be a lesson to the Microsoft haters: just because someone isn't Microsoft doesn't mean they're smarter than Microsoft. I contend OpenOffice dropped the ball here, but maybe they can fix it quickly.

Why do I say hiding the Title Case like this is stupider than Microsoft? Because OpenOffice already has the menu real estate reserved for case changes. It would be one thing if there were no Format > Case options and OpenOffice forced you to use the F11 Style popup menu. But since they have Upper Case and Lower Case on a menu item, why not Title Case? Group decisions rarely mean great decisions.

Secondly, several readers pointed out that OpenOffice uses more system resources than Microsoft Word. Absolutely true. When I open several documents in OpenOffice I may be using as much as 150MB according to Windows Task Manager. I'm now testing AbiWord, another free word processor that's an excellent Word replacement, and two large open documents require 93MB. Microsoft Word with two short documents only takes 36MB. AbiWord is more efficient than OpenOffice but has fewer features.

Of course, OpenOffice and AbiWord fans point out that Microsoft does the resource reporting, and they don't trust Microsoft. Some also believe Microsoft continues to leverage undocumented code in Windows to make their own applications run better. I can't say if either is true, but I can say many people believe this.

One critical difference between Word and OpenOffice and AbiWord? Only two of those three excellent word processors run on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh systems. Hint: neither product name starts with a "w" or came from Microsoft.

Soon I'll test some commercial options to Word and let you know what I find.

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Comments

What about other missing case options in MS-Word and other word processors.
Like:-
* Sentence case
* tOGGLE cASE

Posted by: John on September 10, 2006 03:27 PM

Hi James,
very detailed observations. I just wonder why you use such aggressive language as "stupid" for simple style decisions/disagreements? I wonder if you would characterize a fellow journalist/blogger as stupid, just because he chose to swap two statements from your preferred sequence of making an argument? I think this is way over the top.

Towards the facts, you write "... OpenOffice uses more system resources than Microsoft Word. Absolutely true. When I open several documents in OpenOffice I may be using as much as 150MB according to Windows Task Manager." Your statement might be true, but your way to measure it is absolutely insufficient. have you ever tried to tally the memory numbers in the task manager? You will see that they do not add up in any logical way. OK there might be a certain amount of unreported kernel memory. However I have seen X amount of overall memory increase in the commit section and all I did was loading an additional document in an application (not OOo nor MS Office). However, the applications memory increased by Y (less than half of X). So where does the difference go? In other cases I saw applications add more memory than the overall memory increase (again for added data loading only, no added or shared libraries). Just to mention it the numbers for kernel memory staid put in both cases.

The task manager is like a speedometer or fuel gage on a 50th car. It gives you some rough idea of what it is doing, but by far no exact measurement.

Kind regards,

Kaj

Posted by: Kaj Kandler on September 11, 2006 09:00 AM