Massive file size increase

[Marvin]

Hi, first post here, please be gentle

I've just moved from LibreOffice which i've used ever since i first learned that OpenOffice wasn't actually fully "open".

I opened one of my existing spreadsheets, entered under 20 char's of data (one cell), cleared the contents of another cell and auto re-sized (very slightly) one column then saved it and the file size tripled (149.9kB -> 457.9kB).

Am i going to need a bigger boat? ... sorry, still can't get that damn fish out of my mind.

Am i going to need a bigger hard drive?

[SuperTech]

Thank you for posting your query. It depends on your current hard drive capacity.

If it's unable to hold your few/100s 457.9 KB size PM files, then yes, you should upgrade it.

[Woody44]

What was the original file format, and what file format did you save it as after making the edits?

[Marvin]

Thank you for posting your query. It depends on your current hard drive capacity.

If it's unable to hold your few/100s 457.9 KB size PM files, then yes, you should upgrade it.

Unfortunately i have rather more than a "few/100s" if files on my system SuperTech.

[Marvin]

What was the original file format, and what file format did you save it as after making the edits?

Orig: ods (LibreOffice default)
Saved as: pmdx (SoftMaker's choice)

[Woody44]

What was the original file format, and what file format did you save it as after making the edits?

Orig: ods (LibreOffice default)
Saved as: pmdx (SoftMaker's choice)

Interesting, considering that the .pmdx file format is supposed to be a compressed file format.

Out of curiosity, open the same file and try saving in both .ods format and .xlsx format. Then post the resulting file sizes. Oh ... and also save it as an .xls (the old Excel file format) as a baseline for comparison.

[Marvin]

Out of curiosity, open the same file and try saving in both .ods format and .xlsx format. Then post the resulting file sizes. Oh ... and also save it as an .xls (the old Excel file format) as a baseline for comparison.

OK, here goes ...

pmdx = 457.9kB
xlsx = 443.3kB
xls 97 = 922.1kB

Free SoftMaker could not save as ods format so ...

Libre could not open pmdx file, so i opened the above xlsx file and saved as ods ...
ods = 148.4kB

Any further thoughts?

Mine would be, MS must be using some really st*te compression.

SoftMaker's compression is clearly much better than MS's.
But why doesn't everyone just use the same compression as LibreOffice?
After all, it is open source ... or is the compression they use similar to MP3 compression - are they throwing stuff away?
But what?
And if all the data is still there ...

Thanks for your interest Woody. It's appreciated.

[Woody44]

I am interested, but I don't know anything about how any of these programs work "under the hood," so I don't have any idea what any of them use for compression algorithms. Everyone I interface with uses Microsoft Office, and that's what we use at work, so I have set both LibreOffice and SoftMaker Office (and FreeOffice, before I upgraded) to save in the Microsoft file format as the default. I knew the old Microsoft file sizes were significantly larger, but I didn't know they were double.

[Marvin]

As i'm retired long ago Woody so i don't interface with anyone with word processing docs these days.
If i am sending something to someone i would rarely know what they preferred, with the exception of my family, so i resort to sending pdf's.
Although I do like to create a formal letter and send it via email attached as a pdf.
The best of both worlds - plus i'm a mean old git!

As for the size of M$ files, i stopped using using it long ago (Lindows & "i love you" virus ish) partly (not double at that time but bigger) because of that, although mainly just because it was M$.

Thanks for showing an interest Woody ...