[sf-lug] Fwd: Fwd: help moving a public middle school in San Francisco to FOSS

[Steve Bibayoff]

I believe this was suppose to go to the main list.


Sorry for the late forward

Steve


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt at gmail.com>
Date: Sep 3, 2007 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: [sf-lug] Fwd: help moving a public middle school in San
Francisco to FOSS
To: Steve Bibayoff <bibayoff at gmail.com>


hi

On 9/3/07, Steve Bibayoff <bibayoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> > On a HP with 256 MB of RAM and about 1 ghz single chip, the file takes no
> > less than 12 minutes to load!!!
>
> This is a known problem. IIRC, the problem was the in regard w/
> spreadsheet formatting.

Okay, so we have more testing, and I wanted to report the results back
to this list.  Holden Aust saved the file as an .ods file.  That .ods
file was about 343.5 kb, as opposed to the original 6 mb .xls file.
Holden created the .ods version of the file by copying and pasting to
a new spreadsheet, and then saving in native .ods format.  The saving
and opening were both done with OOo 2.2.1 .  The opening was done on
the actual production machine that the teacher would have been using,
specs given above.

Holden was able to get the .xls file down to 1.7 MB with the simple
copy-and-paste method and then saving as .xls.

With the file under .ods, it opened in about 10 seconds.

With the file under .xls at 1.7 mb, it still took about 12 minutes to open.

Saving the file from .ods to .xls took about 6 minutes.  So unless and
until we can get the teachers to all us OOo Calc or (preferably) Base,
OOo is not going to be a solution that this new teacher is going to be
using any time soon.  And since this teacher is going to have to use
this file tomorrow morning, it appears that we are temporarily out of
luck at this school for swapping Microsoft Excel out for OOo Calc.

Now we are going to have to focus on the long term solution of getting
a proper file server in here, and either working with this
mission-critical file under a browser in Moodle, which I have never
seen, but have heard works, or we are going to have to get all of the
teachers using OOo.

I still have a couple of tweaks to test, such as turning off
recalculation on loading.  But for right now, it seems as if we are
not going to have a solution with FOSS.  Someone suggested using Kcalc
or Gnumeric, and I am going to try that before giving up the fight for
this teacher for tomorrow.

Thanks to all who replied!