Poor formatting and extremely slow performance

Eric_Marx · February 11, 2011, 3:47pm

Hello all,

My company uses documents exported out of Crystal Reports from a vendor. One
particular document which has been in use for years formats and performs
adequately in Microsoft Office but formats poorly and causes Libre Office to
lock up while scrolling, resizing, editing or pretty much just looking at
it.

I am attempting to have a large portion of my company use this as their
primary Office Suite but I am getting much flack because of this issue.

Any insight on the matter would be appreciated.

The document and screen shots are attached.

Thank you,

Eric Marx

Scott_Jones · February 11, 2011, 3:53pm

Can't attach docs on these emails. gotta post somewhere and put a link.

Eric_Marx · February 11, 2011, 4:15pm

Thank you Scott, I'm new here and was not aware of that.

Microsoft office image
https://gp.profinishes.com/remote/mso.2010.jpg
Libre Office Image
https://gp.profinishes.com/remote/lo3.3.jpg
The document
https://gp.profinishes.com/remote/document.doc

Colin_J_Williams · February 11, 2011, 4:29pm

Eric,The LibreOffice mail service is primitive.It doesn't handle
attachments, HTML or images.Thus your attachment went nowhere.Colin W.On 11-Feb-11 10:32 AM, Eric Marx wrote:Hello all,

My company uses documents exported out of Crystal Reports from a vendor. One
particular document which has been in use for years formats and performs
adequately in Microsoft Office but formats poorly and causes Libre Office to
lock up while scrolling, resizing, editing or pretty much just looking at
it.

I am attempting to have a large portion of my company use this as their
primary Office Suite but I am getting much flack because of this issue.

Any insight on the matter would be appreciated.

The document and screen shots are attached.

Thank you,

Eric Marx

T_R_Valentine · February 11, 2011, 4:59pm

The document
https://gp.profinishes.com/remote/document.doc

<snip>

My company uses documents exported out of Crystal Reports from a vendor. One
particular document which has been in use for years formats and performs
adequately in Microsoft Office but formats poorly and causes Libre Office to
lock up while scrolling, resizing, editing or pretty much just looking at
it.

I am curious as to why a document which is more a spreadsheet is being
edited in a word processor. ISTM a word processor is the wrong tool
for the job.

My LO Writer/Win XP does seem to struggle with the file, so the
problem can definitely be replicated.

Eric_Marx · February 11, 2011, 5:01pm

It’s a side effect of how poorly Crystal Reports exports that report as a spreadsheet. It was less work for the people at my company to export it as a .doc.

T_R_Valentine · February 11, 2011, 5:20pm

Might it be exported as a csv?

Eric_Marx · February 11, 2011, 5:31pm

That was tried and was a similar travesty. The root of my companies problem is how poorly formatted reports are from Crystal 8.5 which is ancient by any standard and is forced on us by a required vendor.

My company is looking into other ways around this issue, however I was hoping that pointing this out will eventually make LO a better product.

Tom_Davies · February 11, 2011, 7:13pm

Hi

It worked fine (ish) in OpenOffice 3.2 in Ubuntu 10.10. I didn't try with
Windows. I'm not sure that helps pin down where the problem is but hopefully it
might.

It was only about 3 pages long and looked more like the output of a database
rather than a normal spreadsheet. I looked up the main website of Crystal
Reports
http://www.crystalreports.com/

They seem to have a number of ways of contacting using their email form but i
couldn't get a simple email address. They only mention MS Office but seem to
lack the knowledge that an estimated 20% of European systems use
LibreOffice/OpenOffice. The UK being seems to be the exception to that tho.

So, one wonders if they know about how 'well' their systems integrate with the
fastest growing OfficeSuite and if they have any advice to make that integration
work more smoothly.

Good luck with this!
Regards from
Tom

Tom_Davies · February 11, 2011, 7:41pm

Ooops, no. Now i see the same formatting problems in OOo 3.2 that were in LO.
The document did open fine and didn't crash anything in linux but the formatting
was bad.

Apols and regards from
Tom

Pedro_Lino · February 11, 2011, 7:52pm

I know this won't help a bit, but it looks as bad under OOo 3.3.0, OOo 3.4.0
m99 and Abiword (all under Windows XP SP3)

If these files are not meant for editing I advise you to export to PDF using
the fantastic FLOSS program PDF Creator.

(BTW the reason most documents work in MS programs is that they have relaxed
rules i.e. ignore errors instead of pointing them out )

Len_Philpot · February 11, 2011, 11:44pm

[ From users@libreoffice.org (T. R. Valentine) on Friday, February 11, 2011 ]

My LO Writer/Win XP does seem to struggle with the file, so the
problem can definitely be replicated.

Same here, LibO 3.3 on Vista. It's very sluggish to navigate.

In terms of general comments, I don't have the stroke to convince my ~1300-person employer to move away from MSO, but this kind of thing would almost certainly be a showstopper in most people's eyes. OOo/LibO is great in so many ways, but I've long been disappointed by its often poor "interactive" performance, particularly in regard to speed of program launching, document loading and interactive document handling. Sometimes I'll copy / paste from webpages into Writer and I've often seen the resulting doc just grind to a halt for quite a while. It's not just a matter of caching - It will often continue to be slow when moving from page to page. It's been that way for a long time.

IMO, if functional UI / document performance and handling speed for normal-sized documents can be fixed, that will be a major milestone forward to favorably compete with MSO. I'm not a developer, but am willing to help in any way I can.

NoOp · February 12, 2011, 12:09am

Please bottom post on this list - thanks.

It’s a side effect of how poorly Crystal Reports exports that report
as a spreadsheet. It was less work for the people at my company to
export it as a .doc.

...

The document https://gp.profinishes.com/remote/document.doc

The issue (as I see it) is that LO (and OOo) have a difficult time
handling documents with that many frames. It does not matter if it is
produced by Crystal Reports or some other source.

If you review the doc in MS Word (2003 is all that I have on my WinXP
virual machine) and LO you'll see that the document is full of text
frames. Word does an excellent job at opening the frames (quickly and
easily editable); LO (and OOo) struggle with multiple frames. I'm sure
that there are bug reports documenting this, however I haven't the time
to go searching for them today.

Note: I've also tested in OOo 3.2.1 (linux Ubuntu/go-oo), OOo 3.3.0
(standard), LO 3.3.0 (linux & windows), and all exhibit the same
behaviour on a variety of different machines.

My suggestion would be to file a bug report and use a modified version
of that report (omit BASF & other identifiers etc) as an example.
Unfortunately Crystal Reports are now SAP, so I doubt that you'll get
much sympathy there given that their rival Oracle now owns OOo - but you
never know, try their support forums and/or:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/advancedsearch?query=openoffice.org
Example:
<http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/10337>

<snip>

My company uses documents exported out of Crystal Reports from a
vendor. One particular document which has been in use for years
formats and performs adequately in Microsoft Office but formats
poorly and causes Libre Office to lock up while scrolling,
resizing, editing or pretty much just looking at it.

I am curious as to why a document which is more a spreadsheet is
being edited in a word processor. ISTM a word processor is the wrong
tool for the job.

My LO Writer/Win XP does seem to struggle with the file, so the
problem can definitely be replicated.

...

NoOp · February 12, 2011, 12:18am

...

My suggestion would be to file a bug report and use a modified version
of that report (omit BASF & other identifiers etc) as an example.
Unfortunately Crystal Reports are now SAP, so I doubt that you'll get
much sympathy there given that their rival Oracle now owns OOo - but you
never know, try their support forums and/or:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/advancedsearch?query=openoffice.org
Example:
<http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/10337>

...

Sorry, forgot to add that it may be difficult to have your vendor change
from CR, but you might (from your side) explore the Sun Report extension:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/reportdesign
[inluded with LO]
as well as a few opensource alternatives:
http://www.osalt.com/crystal-reports
Note: jasper is http://jasperforge.org/projects/jasperreports rather
than the link in osalt.

Villeroy · February 11, 2011, 6:57pm

Am 11.02.2011 16:32, Eric Marx wrote:

Hello all,

My company uses documents exported out of Crystal Reports from a vendor. One
particular document which has been in use for years formats and performs
adequately in Microsoft Office but formats poorly and causes Libre Office to
lock up while scrolling, resizing, editing or pretty much just looking at
it.

It is quite likely that Crystal has some difficulties to produce perfect Word documents. By mere intention, Word is the one and only program to do this trick perfectly.

LibreOffice Base can do the same as Crystal Reports. It can connect to a wide variety of databases and create reports as Writer documents or Calc documents. Once you have established such a database connection you can access the tables (or subsets of tables) in any of your office documents.
Simply hit F4 and drag any icon, column or row(s) of the "Bibliography" into any office document.

Reportedly, the Report Builder Extension works with LibreOffice as well as with OpenOffice.org: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/reportdesign
Based on a third-party report engine it can create fairly professional reports, including page levels, charts and database pictures.

Hope this helps,
Andreas Säger