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