From the category archives:

Performance

Spreadsheet file format performance

May 13, 2008

I’ve been doing some performance timings of file format support, comparing MS Office and OpenOffice. Most of the results are as expected, but some are surprising, and one in particular is quite disappointing.
But first, a little details of my setup. All timings, done by stopwatch, were from Office 2003 and OpenOffice 2.4.0 running [...]

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Why is OOXML Slow?

October 19, 2006

Of course, one could simply dismiss this question, saying that a specification for an XML vocabulary does not have performance as such, since a specification cannot be executed. However, the choices one makes in designing an XML language will impact the performance of the applications that work with the format. For example, [...]

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The Celerity of Verbosity

October 17, 2006

I’ve been hearing some rumblings from the north-west that Ecma Office Open XML (OOXML) format has better performance characteristics than OpenDocument Format (ODF), specifically because OOXML uses shorter tag names. Putting aside for the moment the question of whether OOXML is in fact faster than ODF (something I happen not to believe), let’s take [...]

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