George Ou, who writes the Real World IT blog for ZDNet, did a lengthy analysis of Microsoft Office 2007 vs. the free Open Office 2.2 suite. Not surprisingly, Open Office continues to be a resource hog, although the situation is improving over previous releases. Go to the entry for all the numbers, but here are some of his findings:

Office 2007 base memory consumption went up significantly compared to the Office 2003 I measured last year, but it's still significantly less than OpenOffice.org 2.2. Some of the OpenOffice.org applications, like Base, require Java to run, and the memory consumption spikes over 70 megabytes as soon as you start navigating in the interface. However, the difference between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org base resource consumption has gotten smaller.

... we can see that the OpenOffice.org ODF XML parser (while vastly improved) is still about 5 times slower than Microsoft's OOXML parser. OpenOffice.org also seems to consume nearly 4 times the amount of RAM to hold the same data. While OpenOffice.org continues to have fewer features than Microsoft Office, it continues to consume far more resources than Microsoft.

... It would appear that OpenOffice.org 2.2 has gotten significantly better than version 2.0, but it still has a lot to work on. ... So while I may still consider OpenOffice.org a resource pig, the pig has definitely lost some weight.

Since this is an open-source vs. MS issue (and, to some extent, a Linux vs. Windows issue, even though OO has both Linux and Windows versions), there are dozens of comments in various states of support and anger. At least one points out that once you open one Open Office app, it's quicker to open another one.

It's hard not to notice that Microsoft Office apps open extremely quickly in Windows (and, of course, they don't open at all in Linux, unless you're doing so under Wine). I have MS Office 6 on my old Mac Powerbook 1400, and that version is a real, honest-to-God dog, it's so slow. But on a modern Windows box, MS Office is, if anything, fast as hell.

On my Windows box (which DOESN'T have MS Office), the Open Office "Quickstarter" is always sitting in RAM, allowing a fairly quick start of the program. I don't quite know how I feel about it in terms of resources. I don't really use OO that much -- I'm mostly running our paper's publishing system (Unisys Hermes) and for blog writing, when I'm not working directly in Movable Type, I use AbiWord or EditPad. And I open about one spreadsheet a month (I'm a total Excel-phobe) in OO.

I use OO so little on the Windows box, I'm still on version 1.1.4. I have version 2 downloaded; I just have to get around to installing it. We have MS Office on the iBook at home, but I'm not all that comfortable using it (I've gottten rusty in Word over the years). Of course, I have OO on most of my Linux systems, but I'm mostly using AbiWord and a variety of text editors at this point. My love affair with KWrite pretty much stalled when the only time I could get "typograpical quotes" to work was in MepisLite, a distro that Mepis pretty much abandoned. In both Slax and Kubuntu, the "smart" quotes don't work. So it's AbiWord for the moment (and I'm hoping for my two most-wanted AbiWord features -- "smart" quotes and the ability to change the case of letters from the keyboard -- to be added, though I am not holding my breath).

But in the larger world of open source and Linux, Open Office is VERY important. The fact that it's free is a powerful incentive to use it -- and since it covers most of MS Office's bases, it's essential for many who might consider switching to Linux for desktop use. To "sell" open source apps and operating systems to the unbelieving public, you've gotta be able to deal with MS file formats, and while AbiWord and Gnumeric suffice, OO is better, albeit way slower. But if you're spending your whole day in, say, OO Writer, you load it once and keep it running -- start times for the program aren't such an issue.

For instance, I use the GIMP a whole lot, and while it's slow to load, as long as I've got the memory to run it, I just start it when I first need it and leave it running. Not something I'd recommend with less than 512 MB (and something I'd definitely recommend with 1 GB). But for low-resource Linux systems, mtPaint does what I need -- and it loads in a few seconds. The same is true in Windows: Irfanview isn't as powerful as the GIMP, and the former program is kind of quirky at times, but it does a pretty good job of editing images.

Of course, the best thing to do is get a PC with tons of CPU power and memory and just be blissfully unaware of all this.