OpenOffice.org is quite sluggish with its default settings. Every time I install Ubuntu, one of the first things I do is change the OpenOffice.org settings.
I usually change the settings as follows:
MEMORY - 30 steps, 128MB, 20 objects, 20MB per object
JAVA - Do not use Java
VIEW - Open GL, optimized output, dithering, refresh during interaction and hardware acceleration all ticked.
Without the View settings changed, running old powerpoint presentations in slideshow mode literally brings a dual core processor to a halt.
I'm not sure that the default settings should be exactly as described above because I'm not sure what ramifications that might have for other computers, but it seems to be that there is a lot of room for improvement in performance.
Developer comments
Changing the memory settings would increase the minimum memory needed to
run OpenOffice.org by quite a bit, which would not be good for lower end
machines. OpenOffice.org uses Java for most functionality not deemed
'core functionality' so by disabling Java many parts of OpenOffice.org
would not work. Also, changing the view settings leads to problems with
older systems and video cards that have buggy drivers.
The fact that some PowerPoint presentations take large amounts of cpu
power without the view settings changed is probably a bug. Also, the
poster on Ubuntu Forums that had mentioned using those settings
corrected his problems later mentioned that the changes didn't actually
help on all documents. So there are probably some bugs that still need
to be corrected in OpenOffice.org regarding these issues. If you see
issues like that it would be very useful to report them on Launchpad and
include a sample document exhibiting the problem.
