Comments on: Comparing office file formats http://heliologue.com/2008/02/12/comparing-office-file-formats/ Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:16:04 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Ben http://heliologue.com/2008/02/12/comparing-office-file-formats/#comment-153450 Ben Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:07:56 +0000 http://heliologue.com/2008/02/12/comparing-office-file-formats/#comment-153450 Hunh. I purposely didn't include it in the table itself, but I could've sworn I mentioned it in the preceding text. Well, I guess I'll make the change. To address Andrew Z's question: naturally, the idea of squabbling over kilobytes is silly. But I'm not marketing ODF as a way to squeeze a bit of extra space out of your documents—though for large corpuses, the difference will be substantial. What I'm really trying to highlight is two things: one, the stronger or weaker overhead, but also the size (and complexity) of generated markup. Clearly, OOXML has a lot of cruft. Hunh. I purposely didn’t include it in the table itself, but I could’ve sworn I mentioned it in the preceding text. Well, I guess I’ll make the change.

To address Andrew Z’s question: naturally, the idea of squabbling over kilobytes is silly. But I’m not marketing ODF as a way to squeeze a bit of extra space out of your documents—though for large corpuses, the difference will be substantial.

What I’m really trying to highlight is two things: one, the stronger or weaker overhead, but also the size (and complexity) of generated markup. Clearly, OOXML has a lot of cruft.

]]> By: Conor http://heliologue.com/2008/02/12/comparing-office-file-formats/#comment-153445 Conor Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:08:11 +0000 http://heliologue.com/2008/02/12/comparing-office-file-formats/#comment-153445 While I agree with Andrew that it's kind of silly to be fussing over kilobytes, I do think there's a lot of merit to the stance that one should always choose the best tool for the job. If one compression algorithm is better than the other, you should use it—after having also taken into account possible restrictions on its use, of course. It's like saying you could bump the RAM in your system up by one percent. Would you? Why the hell not? And comparing OOXML (how I hate that sneaky name) and ODF, the change is more like 25%. Ultimately we're still talking kilobytes here, but it's the principle of the thing. And Ben, shame on you for not including your units in that table! While I agree with Andrew that it’s kind of silly to be fussing over kilobytes, I do think there’s a lot of merit to the stance that one should always choose the best tool for the job. If one compression algorithm is better than the other, you should use it—after having also taken into account possible restrictions on its use, of course.

It’s like saying you could bump the RAM in your system up by one percent. Would you? Why the hell not? And comparing OOXML (how I hate that sneaky name) and ODF, the change is more like 25%. Ultimately we’re still talking kilobytes here, but it’s the principle of the thing.

And Ben, shame on you for not including your units in that table!

]]> By: Andrew Z http://heliologue.com/2008/02/12/comparing-office-file-formats/#comment-153150 Andrew Z Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:06:37 +0000 http://heliologue.com/2008/02/12/comparing-office-file-formats/#comment-153150 How to get data into Base: http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1222186,00.html Just for discussion, what's the "big deal" (no pun intended) about large file sizes? Bandwidth and storage capacity are increasing quickly. How to get data into Base:
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1222186,00.html

Just for discussion, what’s the "big deal" (no pun intended) about large file sizes? Bandwidth and storage capacity are increasing quickly.

]]>