Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on a sales campaign and have a big chunk of customer and product data – 17,324 records to be precise. To make sense of it all, I pasted it into a Lotus Symphony spreadsheet and then used a couple of Data Pilot tables – like Excel’s Pivot Tables but in my beta of Notes 8.5.1 they’re better than Pivot Tables thanks to some new features.
The resulting Open Document spreadsheet file was 1.6 mb – “crikey” I thought, “that’s small”. So I pasted the data into an Excel spreadsheet and re-created the Pivot Tables. Both files now had the same content, format and logic… but the Excel file was now 14.5 mb… nearly 13 mb bigger. I went back and checked I hadn’t accidentally formatted all 65,000-odd rows… nope. That’s one hell of a difference.
ODP is basically a ZIP file, so it beats many other formats. To compare apples to apples you would need xlsx (the Office 2007 format) which uses compression too. And o07 and Symphony have the same age.