Does OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word Create Smaller Document Files?

There are many similarities between Open Office and Microsoft Office. Each is a fully functional office suite, with the standard word processing, spreadsheet authoring, and presentation creating software.

There may be some minor differences between the two - for example between OO Writer and MS Word - but there don't seem to be any glaring problems that makes one clearly better than the other. Of course, that's if you ignore the fact that OpenOffice is free, while Microsoft Office costs quite a bit of money.

What if there were a qualitative difference between the two, though? Would that change your mind? What if one office suite created files that were four to five times the size of the other office suite's documents?

A Christmas Carol - Comparing the .odt and .doc formats

As an exercise in comparison, I downloaded a plain text version of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol to see how each format would handle this sized document. For reference, the original copy that I used came from Project Gutenberg.

The original Plain Text version of the book was 72 pages long and took up approximately 177kb of free space.

I copied and pasted this into OpenOffice Writer and saved it as an Open Document Text (odt) file. The resulting file was about half the plain text size - 91.5kb. I then exported the file to a Microsoft Document (doc) file. The resulting file was a whopping 542.5kb.

On face value, there's a heck of a difference between the two. However, you might have noticed that I exported the .doc from Open Office Writer - because I no longer own a copy of Microsoft Office.

This doesn't create the fairest playing field for the test. Writer has been shown to make .doc files slightly larger than MS Word would - by about 10 to 15%. If you account for this change, the odt file is still far smaller than the doc file - but perhaps we should find a neutral program to create the two files.

Enter Google Docs

Google recently piloted its own office suite - Google Docs. The merits of this system are best left to another article, but it will serve nicely as a neutral test ground for the two document types.

When you save text in Google Docs, you can export it to a number of different file formats - including .txt, .rtf, .doc, .odt, and .pdf. For our test, I'll copy and paste the original plain text into Google Docs and see how the file formats stack up.

Here are the sizes for the five file types:

• Open Document Text (odt) - 87.6kb
• Plain Text (txt) - 173.6kb
• Portable Document Format (pdf) - 16.6kb
• MS Word Document (doc) - 508.0kb
• Rich Text Format (rtf) - 887.4kb

On this neutral playing field, the same text saved as an odt file is clearly smaller than an equivalent doc file. In fact every major format - with the exception of rtf - comes out smaller than doc. Plain text and pdf are both more efficient ways to store information.

So Is Open Office That Much Better?

Well, not quite. The reason that an odt file is so much smaller is that Open Office plays by a different set of rules - they compress their files and Microsoft Office does not.

If you're on a Linux system and you right click on a file, you usually have an option to compress it into an archive (i.e. .tar.gz). With an odt file, you have the option to unarchive the file - because it's already archived. Incidentally, if you unarchive the odt file that Google docs created, it's 443kb - still smaller than the doc file.

You could argue that this auto-compression is a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, it obviously saves a lot of space. An Open Document Text is about a fifth the size of an equivalent Microsoft Word Document. With terabyte-sized hard drives, this may not be as important - but those kilobytes can slowly eat up a Flash drive and they can quickly eat up bandwidth for people still using dial-up.

On the other hand, this makes loading and saving slightly longer in Open Office. Saving a doc file is almost instantaneous, but it might take a second or two to save the odt file. Big deal? Hardly.

By auto-compressing their files, Open Office reduces file size, saves bandwidth, and compresses/decompresses files for people that might otherwise never do so.

Many novice users are unfamiliar with Zip, Rar, or Tar.gz archives - so they wouldn't think to archive their documents. Moreover, it becomes a hassle if you have to compress them and de-compress them each time you edit them. With Open Office, it's all done on the fly and you never need to know about the archiving itself.

Score one point for Open Office in my book. I like saving space and bandwidth. Until Microsoft shows me a feature I can't get with Open Office, this is a good enough reason for me to switch.