From: Download Squad

Open source software advocates like to point to OpenOffice.org as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. It can open, create, edit, and save Office-compatible documents including text, spreadsheet, and database files. It might not have every last bell and whistle of Office, but it gets the job done. But OpenOffice.org also has a dirty little secret: It's kind of slow. And apparently, it's getting slower all the time.

OpenOffice.org Ninja ran a battery of tests and found that with each major release, OpenOffice.org has gotten a little slower when performing common tasks like opening, closing, and exporting documents. OpenOffice.org 1.1.5, for example, launches about 40% faster than OpenOffice.org 2.4. That figure holds true whether you're doing a cold start (loading the program for the first time since rebooting your computer) or a warm start (starting the program a second, third, or 15th time).

The developers have certainly been tweaking the open source office suite to improve performance. But they also keep adding new features, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes those new features slow down program performance. Of course, if you can't wait 20-25 seconds to load your office suite, you could always just buy more RAM, a faster CPU, and umm... Microsoft Office. Or try an online office suite like Google Docs or Zoho, which load faster than OpenOffice.org if you already have a browser window open.

Microsoft has done it again - the new 2007 .docx format isn't supported by OOO which kinda blows... Outside of that this is great, and surely they will be providing .docx support...

OOo Write is great. It may not be as pretty as MS Word, but it's far more stable and logical to use. It also supports every file format you can think of and doesn't noticeably slow down with large documents.

OOo Calc is not quite as good as MS Excel, but Excel has always been the technological leader in the MS Office suite. Even so, the price is more attractive and it's still usable.

I've been using this over the last 12 months - I'd say its 70% of the way there for my word processing needs. Word docs that contain graphics and tables sometimes show up a little screwy but they work 80-90% of the time...

I was beginning to like this but it seems like my loyalties are shifting to Google Docs of late :)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1851001,00.asp