The crew over at Zolved put together a great little tutorial for maximizing the performance of OpenOffice. Entitled “How to make OpenOffice run faster in Ubuntu,” this screenshot-rich presentation walks the end-user through all required settings to tweak the performance of the open-source office suite. Although the web page is targeted at OpenOffice on Linux, the basic steps are applicable to OpenOffice running on Windows or Apple’s OS X.

In a nutshell, the steps are as follows:

1. Launch any of the OpenOffice applications.
2. Click Tools>Options.
3. Select the Java menu and uncheck “Use a Java runtime environment.”
4. Select the Memory Tab and change the following options:
   • Number of steps: 30
   • Use for Open Office: 128
   • Memory per Object: 20
   • Number of Objects: 20