Open Office kicks Excel's backside in terms of speed

[Tofer]

I spent an infuriating hour trying to coax Excel 2008 into letting me create a simple scatter plot of 8192 data points. Beachballs like crazy, and my whole system was unresponsive (Macbook core duo, 2gigs of ram). I couldn't do a thing in Excel, and trying to adjust anything on the graph would freeze up Excel for minutes at a time. I was sitting next to a fellow student (we're partners on a project), envying her quickly putting together snappy graphs with Open Office on a Linux machine. So, I downloaded OO and within about four minutes had a perfect graph with the same data that Excel had completely choked on. Crazy.

-Tofer

[volcs0]

Thanks. I'll give it a try - I use Excel for very-large data sets, but not for graphing. For that, I usually use Prism from Graphpad. If things get sluggish, I usually resort to matplotlib or some other programming-language-based solution. But I'll try OO.

[ztirffritz]

I don't know how the Mac version of Excel compares to the Windows version, but one of the selling points of Excel for Windows vs. OpenOffice Calc is that Excel can handle many more records in a dataset. I think that Calc tops out at around 27,000 records, while Excel was around 100,000. I'm working from memory, so I could easily be off by an quite a bit, but I think that the ratio of the difference is close. I'm sure that Calc will quickly catch up though. OO 3 was quite a leap for that application in my opinion.

[Don C]

Excel 2008 has 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns.
I am using a file right now that uses 135,342 rows so I appreciate the new larger capacity of Excel 2008.

OTOH, copy and paste of even small numbers of cells can take more than 30 minutes on both my G4 and my Intel MBP.