A reader of the site asked the following question today:
Hi, I was wondering how you've found Open Office, performance-wise under OS X. I'm running MS Office on my dual G4 500 and find it disappointingly slow and sluggish, especially when editing documents and switching between applications. -DC
I thought it would be simpler and also helpful for me to post the comments (that I already posted) as a short follow-up article to the original commentary that lead to the question.
If you are uncomfortable with using XFree86, then it is unlikely you are going to want to try OpenOffice. Perhaps, however, you will get the I hate Office bug and insist on finding an alternative (I can also recommend AppleWorks, but only in passing because I have only written a notice with it to inform people working in my house not to urinate on the toilette seats). You are warned...
The commentary:
I find the performance of OpenOffice more than acceptable on both my 12" PowerBook and 17" PowerBook (one is my wife's and the other is mine). I find the performance better than Office - without a doubt. Office is oddly sluggish when doing editing operations - I have none of these problems when using OpenOffice. I have both software products on my machine, however, as I have a lot of documents that are Word formatted that end up somewhat garbled in OO. I still would recommend trying it out. As the weeks pass, I am finding it less and less necessary to open Office/Word
One caveat is that you cannot cut and paste between XFree86 programs and OS X native/Aqua programs. Therefore, you cannot cut-n-paste from TextEdit and Open Office. I forget this at times, but the inconvenience is worth the fact that I am slowly freeing myself of Office molasses.
