hi, I need some help figuring out how to make OOo handle a massive 6 MB .xls file better.
Here is the background: As some of you might remember, I have been volunteering as a level one (meaning low level) tech support for a public middle school in San Francisco. I have been trying to move the whole school to FOSS, and I have been filming the process for the Digital Tipping Point<http://archive.org/details/digitaltippingpoint>documentary film. I now have a vexing problem that is posing a rather serious obstacle to that migration. The problem is a massive .xls spreadsheet that the school uses to track the students' behavioral development, meaning do they do their homework, do they arrive to school on time, do they participate in classes, are they misbehaving, and so forth. This document, called the "paychecks" Excel spreadsheet, is reported every two weeks. This spreadsheet is a mission-critical tool for the school. We will not be able to move the school to FOSS unless we are able to convince the principal that OOo can handle this mission-critical document. The document is 6 MB large. I has the name of every student in the school, and their performance over stretched over a period of time. We will not easily be able to persuade the school to move their teachers to FOSS boxes unless OOo can open this file as seamlessly as Microsoft Office. We are currently running this as a pilot project, and so I am not really all that hopeful about convincing them to save the file as an OpenDocument format, because we are currently considering letting only one teacher try to use the document, and only on one box. Unfortunately, the document will need to be printed from a Windows box. Currently, the school does allow me to place FOSS boxes in a few classrooms for simple word processing and simple email and simple Internet browsing. Plus, the school has dedicated an entire classroom to a GNU Linux lab running edubuntu. For the school to dedicate an entire classroom here, in San Francisco, where space is ALWAYS an issue, is a major miracle. So we are making some progress. But the teachers remain entirely on non-Free Software computers, and the principal is extremely skeptical about FOSS. She is the biggest technophobe I have ever seen. I typically have to train her multiple times on the same tasks whenever we introduce a new technology. She is highly resistant to any change in any teacher-facing device. Her resistance is somewhat understandable: she is forced to fundraise 40% of her budget every year!!! California schools provide less than half of what Delaware and New Jersey, for example, provides to their students, in terms of annual budgets. Her budget means that she is understaffed by about 10%, which means that the teachers who are willing to work here, must pick up the slack. So she is stressed out. I am currently writing this email on a system that the school bought from Zareason, Inc., with funds from the Microsoft Anti-Trust Settlement, and this box is a dual-core 2 ghz chips with 2 GB of RAM, and it actually takes 110 seconds to load the "paychecks" .xls file on this box. I am thinking that the teachers will consider OOo to be broken if we give them FOSS boxes to load that file. I had no other apps open at all when I loaded that file. I was running it on an openSUSE 10.2 box, and I am about to test the file on a Ubuntu Studio box with similar hardware. We have received a donation of some decent computers with 256 MB of RAM and with 1.2 ghz chips running PClinuxOS 2007, and it takes those boxes a full 12 minutes to load the file, even if there is no other application open at all. I am actually really rather vexed about this problem. One of the few remaining defenses for Microsoft at this school is this spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is, as I mentioned, a mission-critical tool that the school uses to assess kids' behavior. The big pay-off for us as FOSS advocates is that if we can get this spreadsheet running on FOSS boxes, then that is just one less obstacle to us moving the whole school to FOSS. Lots of the teachers boxes are getting old and buggy, and the principal is going to have to do something about it in the not so distant future. I believe that if we can solve this problem, we might be able to make them an all-FOSS shop eventually. But the teachers will probably not accept a box that takes even 110 seconds to load this spreadsheet, and they will get a negative impression of FOSS, which might actually set us back, rather than move us forward. Thanks tons, Christian Einfeldt
