A friend knew that I was annoyed with OpenOffice because it opens slowly and takes up so much memory. He passed this information on from Fred Langa’s Langalist.

Apparently OpenOffice exhibits this behavior because it also loads the Java Runtime Environment on startup, to handle databases. If you don’t connect to databases when using OO, you can make it behave more reasonably.

Open Writer, or one of the other OO applications, and select Tools, Options. Click on Java, and deselect “Use Java Runtime Environment.” I tried it, and it now opens much faster and only uses about 30 MB of RAM. If you like this excellent office suite, it’s worth your time to make this simple adjustment.

Tags: open source, open office, bill webb, open writer, langalist