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OpenOffice vs. MS Office for Education?
dbrian asks: "I work in a large high school district where there will be some discussion on whether or not to purchase another term of 'Software Assurance' for MS Office licenses on thousands of computers. This seems to be an ideal opportunity to promote an alternative such as OpenOffice. It will not be an easy sell, even though OpenOffice should more than satisfy all curricular needs and save the district lots of money; like many other districts we have political and cultural 'challenges'. So, I ask you, have you been successful in moving your education or business organization from MS Office to OpenOffice? What were the pros and cons from your migration? What advice do you have in selling this to tech coordinators and administrators who are not enlightened by Open Source?"
$0 vs $140?
I donno.
Can't you just do a demo? Call it "microsoft office" and show them the latest features. Then say "oh, by the way, this isn't microsoft office after all. It's a $300 competitor. Then say, "Oh wait. It's not $300 after all. It's free"
That way you kinda ease them into it.
Just a thought.
the first 1000 times a student brings in a disk with their homework or report in a format that can't be read on the teachers' computer
1. OpenOffice is free, but support may be obtained from a very popular computer company. (Sun Microsystems)
2. OpenOffice fully supports Microsoft Office file formats.
3. OpenOffice can be distributed to students without cost.
4. OpenOffice (and its sister project NeoOffice/J) run on ALL popular OSes, including Macintoshes.
5. OpenOffice is continually updated to have the latest features, again at no cost.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I am not claiming to be an expert on Open Office, but did you consider the tech support of it? Also the compatibility? I know that we cannot use Open Office in our firm because our documents will not open properly there. We have documents that are hundreds of pages of custom work, including our normal.dot files.
THere are benefits to using industry standard programs.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
It is free. This means people don't need to shell out for software.
PC's can be picked up dirt cheap these days (I've seen 299 retail in the UK) if your child can get the software that the school uses for free it can only be a good thing.
Be sure it it is indeed a viable alternative, it doesn't need to be better as long as it is good enough for that situation.
I work as an administrator/application manager at high school, the point you have to consider when trying to switch is:
Documentation, some teachers probably need to adapt their lessons, are they motivated for that and do they have the experience to make a change for them self?
Why should teachers be motivated to switch? Because it is a moral obligation for non-profit organizations to use product that are more suitable for the common good and not just profitable for a monopoly.
Education should be accessible to all layers of society, even the ones that don't have the money to buy "big bucks office".
So by using open source they aren't forced to use illegal software just to be able to get educated.
Dont you think that it does in fact satisy your needs should be the very first thing you determine?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
But I'm not impressed with Open Office's load times. One of the reasons we aren't moving more people to this particular open source package is that it typically takes 5 times as long to open the Text Document app if you don't have the tasktray icon loading.
So no, we're not planning on moving anyone to Open Office. We have, however, moved a few workstations to Star Office.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
It will give the students a more solid understanding of Marxism, which will help for their history classes.
When a kid leaves the school and tries to get a job and says "Yes, I am proficient in OpenOffice", how many employers are going to say "That's great, but we use M$ Office..."
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
If your secretaries can use it, then it should work. If it's for labs, then that's even easier.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
My school district has the most backward Tech policy I have ever seen. Every computer is licenced for all the MS Office apps, many random apps, and one cannot buy anything from anyone unless that vendor is "approved". This leads to some interesting pricing issues such as $200 for a stick of 128 MB ram, $50 mice, and very expensive computers. Furthermore, the computer science classes are stuck with old 233 Mhz Pentium IIs while keyboarding classes are upgraded to new 2.8 Ghz P4s. It's a big mess and nobody seems to care.
http://chrono.posterous.com/
I'm a power user and have been using openoffice, and before that staroffice, since 2000. I can't see why kids in a school would need any more than I do. I have access to MS office 2003, yet openoffice, and especially with the promising beta of version 2, remains my choice for now and perhaps a time to come.
The decision-makers will be finance-oriented, not technologists. Keep the "just like MS Office" points at a high level and keep pushing how much money it will save. Worst case, MS radically discounts their sw to play for the block. With either outcome, ther's more money to spend on the students, and that is what it's really all about.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I use both. At work I just have too many instances where the compatability just isn't there. However, I believe you should use OpenOffice in schools. Why? The biggest problem with people adopting open source in my mind is that they are afraid to try something new. Introduce them to something new in the beginning and they will use it. Chances are they will stick with it. If they move to Word later, at least they gave it a chance.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Aren't there some other things the school could do with the money you would send to MSFT? Why not focus on that? Of course, you could just refer them to this story which states that you are better off not giving the students anything.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
The real question is why would you want to switch a school to OO.o? If a company is hiring high school graduates for jobs requiring computer literacy, they usually want students with Microsoft Word experience. Don't let your zeal for OSS hurt the kids job search!
Remember the days when Apple simply gave their computers to schools, in a brilliant, philanthropic marketing move?
It really helps, down the road, to teach kids how to use your OS of software. Giving kids a chance to learn OpenOffice et al could have interesting repurcussions down the road.
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
You can give it a shot. The only advice I would recommend is to find an answer to the problems that the students and staff would have getting into the systems from home and how they would do their assignments.
Meaning, almost all students that have computers at home are usually working on "mom & dad's" PC, which is usually loaded up with Windows XP and AOL Internet. I don't work a lot in OpenOffice but I do understand that there are several compatibility issues between MS Office and OpenOffice. If a teacher assigns a paper to be due and the students hand it in on disk or e-mail it to the teacher at work, how well would the file open under OpenOffice?
That is just one example that is sticking out in my head right now. I worked for 5 years in IT at a district here in the Houston area and it was a main sticking point for us to stay Win32 and not go to Linux on most of the servers & workstations.
Politics is probably your biggest hurdle though. What vendor do you purchase your machines through? Dell? If so you will probably be working with Windows for a good few years.
Good luck!
Or did I just miss the point, and this is about the administrative side of things....?
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Since OOo is completely free...
You should have them look up AOL Keyword: Large School District
You could save them thousands of dollars and give them a superior product all at the same time.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
As much as I am a fan of using all Free software, the only thing that's going to be a big factor for educational establishments is compatibility. Are students and teachers going to be able to access their old assignements/faculty documents?
MS Office - 100% compatibility with MS Office documents
Open Office - 99% compatibility with MS Office documents
It's the 1% that's going to go against use of OO in educational establishments.
I work as sys admin at a dept. of my University. One of the teachers was having trouble getting a powerpoint to open. It seems she had used Office XP at home to create it, but for some reason Office 2003 at the school would not open it. I opened it with Open Office just fine though....problem solved.
Just because OO isn't always perfectly compatible with Office doesn't mean anything since MS Office isn't even compatible with itself sometimes...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
I think an important question that needs to be asked is: what do students use at home? I remember countless frustrations when I was in high school (back in the day) regarding compatibilities with AppleWorks, Word and Wordperfect. What made it worse was people who insisted on using graphics and fancy formatting. Simply put it is not enough that the educational institute uses it, but also important to try to "educate" people at home to also use it.
Linux Resources
..so let them know that OpenOffice is free. If your school system is like most others, it'll be a seriously compelling argument. Money talks, and it talks louder if you're poor.
Take Microsoft's "Software Assurance" quote, and show them exactly what that money could be better spent on. Break it down in terms of "this unnecessary licensing expense could buy X amount of new textbooks, X amount of new football equipment, X amount of materials for the science club..."
And of course - use OpenOffice to make your presentation in as a final sales point. =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I personally can see no reason whatsoever not using OpenOffice, I mean, if you know one word processor, you know them all (well, except wordperfect, but that is a completely different matter:). Calc is very similar to Excel, and when OO.o 2.0 is out, Access will have a run for it's money.
:)
No, way pay a lot of money for something you can have for free? An office package is for typing letters and calculating numbers. OO.o is excelent doing just that.
That is my opinion at least
What advice do you have in selling this to tech coordinators and administrators who are not enlightened by
Open Source?
Short of "Don't even bother", I'd say that you have your work cut out for you. Undoubtedly these people will be familiar, even comfortable, with MS Office and you will face huge momentum because your target audience probably sees no problems with MS Office. All the benefits of OSS except price will likely fall on deaf ears, so you'd better do your homework and have a very compelling presentation.
I can't offer specifics because I'm not really familiar with OO. In my mind it is self-evident. Office sucks more ways than you can count. Period.
However, you can't make this sell by bad-mouthing Microsoft or Office. Most non-techie people won't see it that way, and in fact will probably have a high opinion of Office since it's all they know. OO can't be just "good enough" to replace Office. It has to be made clear that it is superior... and not in the ways that we computer folks tend to think, but ways that will be convincing to non-technical people. You got a "gimme" on price, but the rest will be a steep hill.
Good luck, I wish you well.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Microsoft offers some programs and grants to help defray the cost of technology. They can be found in the Partners in Learning section. I'm not saying don't go through OO.Org, I'm just saying that MS has some programs :)
loganavatar.com
It is difficult for people to go from Open Office > Microsoft Office, but if they start on Microsoft Office they tend to be much more proficient at Open Office as MS Office tended to set the 'standard' for them on how to critically think where things are and such.
Rate me flame bait, but this is honestly what I have found. Take somebody that never used MS Office and only used other products, and put them infront of Word and get them to do something reasonabily complicated, they are lost.
Take the person raised with MS Office and put them infront of OO and they seem to find their way around.
Strange but true! So I have personal reservations about using one or the other in a public (or private) school or body.
our choice was more of choosing between MSCA (pay $X every year, 'free' updates) and MOLP (pay $X once, use the software as long as you want, new version comes out, you have to pay for it)
.edu)
we have spent $22k over the past 3 years on MSCA. this year was the final straw, since MS changed the licensing and is hitting us up for many more things (we are a smaller unit in a big
so, this is the last year we'll be doing MSCA. we have decided that for the next year, we will be educating users about OO (and Firefox) and encouraging them to switch and letting them know that next year, they'll be on their own for MS software packages
vodka, straight up, thank you!
One thing you need to consider is that the majority of businesses today use Microsoft Office, so therefore to adequately prepare your students for employment you should consider teaching them to use the software that has the most market share.
Break the problem down into server groups of users:
The ones that just need to write english reports would be well served by Abiword.
The ones that need just a bit more page layout flexability and a good spreadsheet could use OpenOffice.
The 'Power Users' that use Excell like a psudo-database, and have gotten used to Word's horrably random page layout should stay with MS Office. L
So...
Kindergarden through 8th Grade -> Abiword
8th through 12th -> OpenOffice
Normal Teachers -> OpenOffice
Crazy Teachers, Faculty etc with hard to port custom grading scrips, tables and other crap -> MS Office
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
The best way to determine if it's going to work for you is to set up 5-10 machines running OO and have a handful of students work with the program for a bit. Have each student complete a short survey, and you'll quickly identify who uses it best, and where the difficulties lie. Otherwise, many of our comments are heresay. Be sure to take into account all the normal uses students might want, for example: dropping images from the web into a document, printing small charts and graphs, and spellchecking. I'm sure you can think of others. Best of luck...
Try bribery, exthortion, or kidnapping, in that order. If none of that works, make them an offer they can't refuse.
btw, IANAMG (I am not a Mafia goon)
"2. OpenOffice fully supports Microsoft Office file formats."
Really want to seem some files that do not import correctly? What about macros?
OpenOffice is great but it is not "Really quite simple"
You also have to look at it from a job placement point of view. Many places want Microsoft Office experience not all that many want OpenOffice experience.
I have migrated my office to OpenOffice and yes it works fine but it is not as simple as you make it out to be.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Then you have to convince the people who hold the purse strings that this will save money. That's going to be a problem, because it won't save money. The cost of giving a secretary Word is negligible compared to the the salary you're paying her to be productive. There are also going to be training costs. This may seem ridiculous to Slashdotters, but this really is an issue. Where I work (at a community college), some of the secretaries and office managers (mostly the younger ones) are very smart and adaptable, but some of them are not. When we switched from WordPerfect to Word, our old office manager was completely unable to handle it. This was a lady who had trouble with cut and paste in the first place -- she would usually retype things rather than cutting and pasting, because she claimed it was faster and easier. They kept scheduling her to go to training classes, and she would always fail to show up.
And then you have to ask yourself why you want to do it -- is it to strike a blow for open source? Well, OOo is a badly designed, bloated project that has very little involvement from developers outside Sun, and can't be built using free-as-in-speech tools. It's hardly the poster child for the free-information movement.
Find free books.
I recommend transcendental meditation. Through meditation on Open Source, one will achieve enlightenment or awareness of the true nature of source code. After attainment, he will be freed of the cycle of Microsoft updates, reboots, virus scans and reinstalls.
(not trolling: merely rephrasing)
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If you are simply replacing MS Office with OO in a Windows environment, it may be an easier sell. Most people abhor change so replacing one software with another is more palatable than changing the OS and the application. If this works well, you can then work on changing the OS later.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What were the pros and cons from your migration?
Easy that one:
Case #1: students and/or personel work exclusively with OOo:
* PROS: OOo costs $0 and it's more than adequate
* CONS: None or nearly so
Case #2: student and personel want to exchange file to/from MS Office, to work at home or communicate with other non-OOo organizations:
* PROS: See above
* CONS: plan on commiting suicide soon after deploying OOo, when everybody comes to you and says "this documents looks like @*#& on Word, it's all your fault, it worked before!!"
Since case #2 is prevalent, as much as I enjoy OOo myself, I say stay the hell away from it if you're in any position to be blamed for problems.
Sad, but that's the way it is...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's absolutely great. It's free (as in beer). You can even buy support for it.
.edu license).
OpenOffice aint' so bad, neither, but I prefer SO (and take advantage of the
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
One solution I heard suggested is to burn a whole bunch of OOo CDs and distribute them to the students; that way, they can install it on their home computer too. If you don't tell them that it's perfectly legal to do so, they'll likely be excited about the prospect and do it right away.
As an added bonus, you could include source code and a free set of Windows build tools. Or even a small linux distro!
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Our accounting team became concerned about license issues, so we had to buy copies of MS Office for all the machines we couldn't prove had a legal copy. I suggested switching to OpenOffice. Someone else in our IT Department (who is addicted to Microsoft's webcasts and "free" seminars) said that it wouldn't work because "it isn't a Microsoft product". Management agreed. Since I'm my own techncial support, I use OpenOffice. Our product engineer also uses it. So the obstacle I found wasn't a technical one, just a bozo in the IT department pointy-haired manegment.
Office, with all its warts and proprietary nastiness, doesn't crash at random times.
OpenOffice, in all its free, open-source glory, does.
I use OO regularly and like it quite a bit, but it is missing the features and stability to be a *true* Office replacement.
I use it because of idealogiocal reasons, not beause it's a better product.
What advice do you have in selling this to tech coordinators and administrators who are not enlightened by Open Source?
Offer to support both platforms to save them money. For example, you could propose to install OO on the majority of the desktops, and they can only buy MS licenses for people who have problems with OO for whatever reason. Management likes choices...:)
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
Earlier this week I went to Open House at my daughter's school.
She is 6yo and in 1st grade at a private elementary school.
One of the things she had to show me was her computer project. It was an Impress slide show in Open Office. It was a presentation on the solar system, integrating stuff she had done in Draw.
I told the computer teacher (a 40+ year old woman) I was impressed they were teaching them Open Office. As I looked around the room and saw 12+ computers I said I bet it saved the school a bunch of money, if nothing else.
She made a "you know it" face and then said that last year they used MS Office, but it was always crashing and they had LOTS of problems. She figured over the summer, why not -- what have we got to lose. She said it was been wonderful and they haven't had a single problem.
This is heresay, but it is what I heard two days ago at a real school.
I wouldn't use OOo just yet. Wait until 2.0 is completely stable. 2.0 handles Microsoft documents types a whole load better than 1.x.x, but until it's officially released I would recommend sticking to the Microsoft product.
Not that the MS product is better, but you absolutely need to support MS formats, as previous posters have pointed out.
Le français vous intéresse?
Shouldn't that be "A greased up Yoda doll up my ass, I have"?
As far as real-world training, I'd say that a student would be far better off learning how to familiarize him/herself with MS Office, because chances are, that is what they will be using in the real world.
While I have no experience in this sort of migration I feel that while "we" may see the light & benefits I have to say that when concerning something like a school district it will be a very hard sell. The feeling of dealing with a brick & mortar company is a great relief to people when it comes to support and the like. I think there also may be a feeling of "if they give this stuff away for free then it can't be all that good" They may also use the "kids" card. Just like politicians when they say "it's for the kids" knowing that their bill cannot stand on it's own, they use the kids as a means of playing on the parents feelings.. Whatever happens I wish you all the luck in the world on this endeavour
Step out of the box and enjoy life
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At the risk of sounding like a troll, I don't know how good being proficient in OpenOffice is on your resume. That's one reason I could think of that a highschool would be hesitant to move to OO. I haven't really used OO to much to know how similar/differnt it is from MS Office, but I doubt the average interviewer does either.
When trying to get public schools to recognize the value of OSS and OpenOffice specifically, I would recommend looking up through the ranks. At least in the school district I worked for, many of the "rank and file" school-level tech support people were MS fans. However, as you look at some of the higher level positions, you occasionally find people with a more enlightened attitude. I know that when I showed the 2.0 beta for OO.o to the person in charge of technology, she was impressed. I suspect that the next few thousand PCs purchaced won't have MS office on them. I would recommend that you find the few key people, usually a "Director" or a sys-admin, and show them the advantages of OpenOffice. In my experience, people in the managerial side are much more interested in it because it offers a significant savings, while still providing necessary funcitonality.
Just remember though, it will take time to have any real affect. You have to build up good will towards OSS in general to fight off the FUD.
HTH
- It appeals to the "help the community" group by knowing that they are looking out for their teachers.
- It could be used to pressure the school board. "They are sending money to Microsoft rather than to our starving teachers."
- It helps the local economy by keeping the money, well, local.
Oh, and if it gets media attention then the pressure will really be on them. Just my two cents worth."Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Use this as a barganing tool. MS does NOT want thousands of school kids learning OO.o and finding out about free software. If you can't get them to make the switch at least get them to blackmail MS into practically giving them the licenses. If they won't do that then someone getting kickbacks somewhere.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
Really want to seem some files that do not import correctly? What about macros?
I used OO at university without problems for a year until I had to take a class that used a macro-filled Excel file. Had to break down and buy the student version of Office. I think macros, especially for heavy Excel users, are the showstopper. A lot of people with complex spreadsheets (sometimes inherited from former employees) are going to be the biggest group of 'No' votes in the article poster's project.
Sun licenses the Staroffice product to educational institutions for the same price ($free). All you pay is a one time media charge ($25 last I used it) or just download it instead.
Same stuff, just has the added functionality (I think spell checker, some additional translations, etc.)
And it comes from a large software company. That can be enough sometimes to get past the stuff shirts...
Microsoft Office got as popular as it is today by being a great progam. It's the 1 program I use both on my PC and on my MAC. The people at Microsoft put in the time and resources and market research and came up with a produce that is easy to use in most cases.
My impression is open office is an attempt to create a free alternative. Personally I think if you like how Microsoft Office works, use it. Part of the money will go back into market research and go into developing new features for the next Office (which openoffice will try to copy). If everyone switched to Open Office, then development of office software will stagnate since no research dollars are being spent.
My 2 cents.
OpenOffice has a large number of advantages. We already have been using OpenOffice on all our school desktops and it has been a full success. Just make sure to use OpenOffice 2.0. It is already very stable and superior in many aspects.
People seldom make decisions such as these for
rational reasons. They make them for political
and emotional reasons.
If they board that's making the decisions are
"activists" tell them "We don't want to buy
from a company that won't support human rights.
They're under investigation for corruption and
have been found guilty in European courts".
If they're conservative tell them "governments
and organizations all over the world are
switching to this because of the cost savings
(and the predatory practices of the supplier).
If they balk show them "the department of homeland
security recommendation to use firefox, another
one of those 'free' programs."
Find the appropriate spin for the audience.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
My question would be, why does the school district really have to get involved in software choice? My thinking is the need (or lack there-of) for a piece of software is dictated by the users.
I'm sure I'm over simplifying but, the teachers have to be able to read and grade work handed in by their students. Most students are going to be using MS Office or something that is MS Office compatible. OpenOffice can decode almost all MS Office file features, and those it can't decode shouldn't be too important to an educational institution.
Show the person who makes the decisions on which software to install how much it costs for x MS Office licenses with support and how much it costs for x OpenOffice licenses with support and let simple economics win them over.
that in this next year, we're educating the users by installing OO alongside MS Office. we've been doing this already for about 3 months and results have been pretty positive thus far
vodka, straight up, thank you!
You should remember to teach our kids with MS products, since that is what they will need to know in college and in the workplace. I realize some colleges and workplaces use Open office, but in reality its a VERY SMALL minority. You might save your district money, but you would be doing a disservice to the youngsters. Sad but true.
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...are, certainly, a huge plus when seeking employment. However, I have to point out that we're talking about a school. Educational institution. Meaning you -can- set up MS Office classes without having to outfit every single PC in the school with MSOffice. One or two classrooms would suffice.
For everything else, well, from my long-term experiences with OpenOffice, compatibility / file readability issues will possibly appear only with complex documents containing macros etc - for a 'basic user' texts or tables, which is what 99.5% of grade/high school's documents would be, MSOffice's only advantage over Open Office is - amount of money you save if you go for Open Office instead.
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
...to OO. It has been painless. In fact, we moved to Linux 90%+. We still have one or two machines with XP for that rare Word or PPT file that OO 1.x can't handle.
What schoolkid uses macros?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I had to start small, a few Internet terminals at first. As time went on and machines left circulation the new ones came in sans office, loaded up openoffice made a few icon changes, set all the defaults to save as M$, done. The easiest part was switching my Mac users(neooffice), anything that didn't say M$ was worth any foreseeable trade off to them. Your deployment, however, sounds much larger.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. - Isaac Asimov
Biggest problem i've had when moving people to OSS solutions is the fact of "its different" or "but its not Microsoft ....". Once they've used the software a little its not as much of a problem once they're used to the new name / icon etc.
Tim (http://tim.igoe.me.uk)
Computers are like Air-con, open windows and they stop working!
She came home the other night and proceeded to tell me how they cut some teachers hours so they could meet budget constraints. Now if I was one of those teachers I would be pointing both barrels at the school administrator with my finger dead on the IT budget. Cutting teachers hours just so some bone head can keep using their MS malware is just unacceptable.
Got Code?
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When I got my new laptop in September, I decided to try it with open office instead of MS office. As a graduate student, I deal with LOTS of powerpoint files (both making them and reading others'). I was sincerely disappointed by the experience. First, the files it produced inevitably had formatting errors (if someone else tells you they are fully compatible, they are lying). Graphics tended to display differently, with different color schemes, 'etc. Second, it was so slow as to make it unsuable. On a top-of-the-line Pentium 4, there was a 30-45 second load time for the program, a 10-15 second lag between slides, and a really annoying 1-3 second lag between mouse clicks. After a semester, I gave up and went back to MS office. I'll be staying put until I see these issues resolved.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Now, the WordPerfect importer for OOo is first-try alpha software, but, in a school, students shoudn't be bringing in their work in Word format on a disk at the last minute anyway. When I went to high school, we had to turn papers in printed (not on disk, not handwritten); when I took college-level programming classes, I usually had to turn files in by executing a setuid program on a specific computer system, in a directory with my Makefile and .c files, all in UNIX text format, before the stated midnight deadline. Students' not being able to bring in Word documents that their older siblings wrote and print them flawlessly might be seen as an advantage in a high-school environment.
Three years ago, everything we had used Microsoft Office. We now use Star Office and Open Office on PCs and don't even bother with Microsoft Office.
The way this came about was I started using it on my own. Whenever someone new came in, I'd set up their PC with Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. Earlier this month, our accounting clerk, the final holdout, asked to switch.
Now the only Microsoft Office we have is on the Macs. And they are using a really old version of Microsoft Office because of one particular feature available on that version.
I've talked to many of the school board members about OpenOffice and Star Office. They keep complaining about the school district being short on money but they still haven't seriously looked at switching.
The school's job is to teach the kids how to write, not how to use MS office. They should be doing it in the most fiscally responsible way. Spending money on an over-priced bloated piece of software is not really necessary. The US has continued to throw $$ at our schools (so they can continue to license MS products?), but it hasn't changed the results. I don't see how using Open office would decrease the quality of education.
One thing that is not often mentioned is the fact that infected documents are less likely to cause harm if opened with OO.o.
Help fight continental drift.
> Many places want Microsoft Office experience not all that many want OpenOffice experience.
Oh, right...
Let's be serious: if you're not aplying for a VBA programmer job, one's experience with OpenOffice will be good enough to handle anything in Microsoft Office. Either that, or that person is too stupid to see the similarities.
And really, almost everybody I know who uses Word doesn't even know about paragraph styles, image wraping or anything close to justify using a word processor. Although I must admit that Excel gets a few more advanced users, but also has its share of losers.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
I wrote my Masters Thesis in OpenOffice.
... and the equation editor in OO was far faster than the point and click equation editor that comes with Word.
I found there were some bugs in the version I was using (page numbering beyond the number of pages in the document was messed up), but it never lost an equation or picture. Word is notorious (especially in earlier versions) for loosing equations and pictures beyond the 10th or 11th one.
The time saved not dealing with Word loosing portions of my document was far more than the little time I spend working around some bugs.
I even thanked OO in my acknowledgments section.
Thanks OpenOffice!
...if it doesn't have to. Tax dollars are wasted enough as things are without spending billions on software when there are free solutions available that are just as good as the commercial ones. Government should not buy Windows over Linux, Office over OpenOffice, etc. If there is something that meets requirements and doesn't cost as much, that's what government should use.
And they shouldn't be putting information that I need to access in a format that requires me to purchase software to use it...
I've been experimenting with this for the past year and a bit in an educational WIN32 environment, and there are two issues which you to think about very carefully:
1) 1.1.x versions of Oo.org are non-trivial to configure sensibly on multi-user computers in a lab environment. The workstation installer needs to be run for each user, and while it can be automated, its less than neat. The 2.0 version is much better in this respect, as the workstation installation step is only accepting the EULA and few 'Next' clicks.
2) Speed. If your environment is anything like ours you will have a wide span of available hardware (5 year replacement cycle is pretty common), and on anything more than 3 years old Oo.org is painfully slow, especially starting up, and especially compared to what's most commonly on these machines already: Office 97 or 2000.
The last point should give you a clue to the most realistic approach to this. Determine if you really need maintenance on Office. We decided many years ago that we didn't, and we have yet to come across a feature in XP or 2003 which we genuinely need. Our volume license agreement gives us downgrade rights, so we always buy licenses for the latest version when machines are added, but we install 2000 on everything, and it works well on older sub-500MHz PIII hardware, which Oo.org unfortunately doesn't.
I don't know what it's called, but my High School used all macs (running os 9) and we learned word processing and everything on whatever the apple version of office is. It made me really mad that we were learning something and that we would never be able to use it because not very many people have macs. If we had used OpenOffice I probably would have been much happier because that would have been something that I could have used at home on my computer because it will run on Windows as well. As a side note, as I look back on it there's really not that much difference between OpenOffice and any other. Sure all the buttons are in different places, but in high school most of the time was spent on learning basic concepts such as what 'margins' are and what a 'table cell' in a 'spreadsheet' is. Those are all universal and most of my classes didn't really teach anything beyond that. If you're going to be having classes on things like VBA macros or advanced stuff like that it might be beneficial to the students to use MS Office (as well?), but if you're just going to be doing word processing I'd say go for OpenOffice. Perhaps you could have OpenOffice on everything and then just have 1 or 2 labs where you do advanced stuff with MS Office.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Having worked in a school system for several years, I can tell you that anything you can get for free is a good idea; however; So many schools are hellbent on teaching using MSOffice because that is what the industry is using.
This is my biggest compaint. Instead of teaching the skills neccesary to create professional documents, they are teaching the knowledge neccesary to do this. Yes there is a difference. Instead of teaching word processing they are teaching MS Word, or instead of teaching spreadsheets or databases, they are teaching MS Excel or Access.
To Answer your question. I don't think it will be possible to completely convert your users over to OpenOffice. I would start by deploying it to your labs and various other student desktops. Your Administration and some of your more proficient users will not want to switch. This is not something that is going to happen overnight.
Cheers,
Matt
Where is SpellCheck on this thing
Don't start with the attitude that Open Source is more enlightened. Even if people 'don't get it' it may because you speak a different language. Why anger them instead of convince them?
Most software is purchased because the perception is it solves a problem or business need. Why is OpenOffice better suited to meet that need?
1. Cost (enterprise wide licenses at no cost, but documentation and media [commercial off the shelf version] costs X
2. Licensing (students are licensed to use at no cost) [ok, so is everyone else, but focus on comparitive function]
3. Compatibility (Did you know MS Office doesn't open on older versions?)
4. Security (MS Doesn't support older version bug/defect/security fixes. Every student's computer that isn't protected is a vector for virus or trojan entry)
5. Disk space (which uses less space on the harddrive?)
6. System Requirements (what memory and cpu speed is required)
7. Interoperability (which systems does it run on? what systems will it not work with) Note: They're may be need to have excel to export reports in a MS Centric solution that OpenOffice can't handle - be honest and figure out their NEED. Of course this could be a boon, encouraging open techniques that work for both OpenOffice AND MS Office, rather than just one. The joys of OPEN technology!
8. Section 508 Compliance: If they receive federal funds to make this purchase or their state requires it, OpenOffice file format is more accessible and the product has full keyboard access.
9. Auditing (You'll never have a MS Licensing audit or site license tracking, or costly counts after-the-fact )
10. Features (last I checked, MS Office didn't export to PDF without purchase of Adobe software) (I could be mistaken about this - go do your homework!)
Do you see where I'm going with this? Don't be a Zealot. You're not pushing a religion - or you shouldn't be. If you really want to be enlightened, offer them a better CHOICE and be prepared for them to not take your offer!
~Gildas ('cuz I'm too lazy to log in)
... but when I try to load OpenOffice (the spreadsheet app) on a P4 2.4GHz with 768 megs ram on Fedora Core 3, it takes well over 60 seconds to start. This is with just basic stuff running in the background... maybe 3 Firefox windows and 5 terminals. I've been advised to use gnumeric by a few people but haven't gotten around to it yet.
OpenOffice is certainly not 100% when it comes to MS compatibility either. If you embed an image in a spreadsheet or text doc you'll see issues pretty quickly.
rooooar
Its an office product.
Its not something that requires much skill beyond clicking on "file-> open" and begin typing.
Any knowledge and skill development with OO *would* translate to MS Office product.
Just like learning how to add Two plus Two translates into how expensive Gasoline is at the pump.
Which translates into how expensive it is for School Systems to keep their buses running on the road.
MS Office = better on resume
And that's the problem. Employers will usually trade critical thinking, adaptability and just about any other virtue for a little bit of training in some crappy piece of software.
That's the problem with modern business in America. People just want the seats kept warm. More often than not, they have no interest in anything about a person other than keywords on their resume and how little they can get away with paying them.
I know firsthand. I've been told numerous times that my resume doesn't really reflect my skill and experience because I haven't listed every technology or software package I've so much as brushed up against a book on in Barnes & Noble, which apparently is the standard these days.
I made the mistake of writing a resume meant to be read, not just searched for the latest MS kludge of the month buzzword. Of course, the last time I was hired by such an employer, all I did was make them angry by repeatedly demonstrating how clueless they were.
Keywords. Keywords. Keywords. And "MS Office" is one of the big ones. No one cares if you're a halfwit, slacker or a cheat, as long as your resume has the keywords. You'll just be laid off in a year regardless when the next reorg or merger happens.
To most corporations we're all just meat.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
#1 -- get Sun involved. They offer StarOffice at no charge to K-12, colleges and universities. Its one thing to go into a meeting and say "try this free thing!" and quite another to go in with representivies from a known major tech company (in person, on the phone, in writing, whatever..)
#2 -- Clearly define the requirements. What features are being used in the existing productivity suite? What features are wanted? Does OOo meet these requirements? Are there any exceptions?
#3 -- Clearly show the benefit of the switch -- cost savings, standardized across all school systems and student home computers (if applicable)
#4 -- Get some case studies or contacts with others who have already made the switch.
Basically your job is to demonstrate that the new product can meet the needs fo the users, that the new product brings benefit and that it is already established and the risk of switching is minimal. If your able to do this, there is a strong chance of getting OOo.
They probably already know how to use MS Office. It's really not that difficult to learn.
It would be a great choice for teachers & students. Administration should stay on MS Office though.
if you were to change all the computers over to Oo then there should be no problem with formaitng.the only format i used was MLA in highschool and Oo dose that fine.
I do not think that there are any Major diffencese between oo and word for the avg. user (f1 is help, ctr-x cuts, crt-v pates, ...ect. there still are some though.
some [of my Microsoft Word] documents were basically unreadable, as OO.org seemed to randomly flow the text.
Did those documents use hard returns to terminate the lines?
Sometimes if you take a Microsoft Word document from a machine with one printer to a machine with a different printer, even Microsoft Word will screw it up. Have you tried setting the default paper size in OOo first? (It defaults to A4, a size used more in Europe than in the United States.)
What about Bill Gates??? Has no-one thought about HIS feelings? What if people learn something different than Microsoft? Bill has a goal too. I mean, eventually, Microsoft will remind us that Earth is flat. I mean, I'm one who remembers the world when we all knew it was flat. Man-kind has been cheated by the "fact" that Earth is round. It's round, but the only pics they give you are the one's from right above, and that is just the earth's shape, a circle, but a flat circle. Are we really going to give into the dorks that spend hours of their days, just to provide the computing world a "groovy", or "hip" way to compute. No, this needs to be in the hands of qualified professionals, like those at Microsoft. If it weren't for Microsoft, then what will kids be going to school for, just to learn that 2+2=5? Come on man, you ain't fool'n me!
We all dance, we all sing.
-The Streets
Every time I start Word at school, it has a random message inserted.
After getting that to work, I had to cut off my fingers for using VB.
1. All your students can be provided free copies of exactly the same software they're using at school for their home machines. 2. No audits from the BSA. 3. No worries about whether every single machine in the school has valid licenses for every single piece of software on them (see item #2). 4. It works good enough.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Schools are, in general, far better placed than large companies to switch to OPenOffice. That doesn't mean that it is an easy or painless transition, merely that it is a lot easier than it is for corporations to make the move.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Job interview.
Do you have any experience with Microsoft office?
No but I have used OpenOffice and it is just like it. I am sure that I can do what ever you want.
Well thank you for coming... Next.
One you think that the person doing the hiring knows the difference?
Do you think they care?
Do you think there will not be someone does know Office? These are entry level positions we are talking here.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've seen it tried. It didn't really work out, mainly because more than half the students promptly pirated MS Office instead. In many of the cases without even trying out the provided alternative seriously, but rather dismissing it right away.
:)
On the other hand, for some parts of the suite, like for the presentations part, the MS variant is still so much better interface wise that it saves a *lot* of time using the real variant - we are talking hours and hours here. And yes, doing presentations are a large bit of what the students do around here.
It doesn't really handle MS documents all that well either, in the sense that almost anything opens, but the formatting is often distorted and the same thing the other way around, plus that the warning everytime you try to save something back to doc can be really scary to the average user. To those who say that formatting shouldn't matter - it does. We are not talking about just being readable, but papers and mateial that should look a certain way, if only because the student wants it to look that way. And we are not talking advanced stuff either... a simple image can be enough to throw it off.
Personally I do use OOo exclusively, but then again I'm not the average user; I'm a geek. No amount of gentle education, helping out or poiting to similarities will get the average user to even try something new if it doesn't behave just like they are used to - at least that is my experience. A real pain in the ass.
On the plus side, we don't use doc as the internal format, we use HTML or in worst case PDF instead, which makes the situation a bit brighter.
Spine World
The switch to OpenOffice is simply not going to happen in education. Take the UK for example, schools get Microsoft Office very, very cheaply, same for Windows.
So my question is, if both Microsoft Office and Windows are free on your site, why would you want to switch to Linux and OpenOffice.org?
It's a very clever strategy by Microsoft to get students and teachers hooked on MS Office; helps assure custom when they get older.
Use Word to prepare a document in a two column format, add some text, a couple of JPG images, figure captions and a couple of equations. A typical report. Then, import it into Open Office. You'll be lucky if the images aren't all over the place and equations are not complete gibberish because of some font incompatibility.
So far I've tried using Open Office at work twice. However, when even the simplest of legacy documents won't import/export, there's really no other alternative than to keep on using MS Office.
The owls are not what they seem
You should also mention Sun Microsystems as the big giant behind it, also the creator of Java. And I'm sure in a high school environment the language kids learn on is most likely Java or something similar. If you just mention "Open Source Office product" then the administration will think it's something unreliable ("how can something free be high quality?"), but if you mention it's from Sun then there's more of that corporate culture that they're used to.
First of all do you have sponsor for your idea? Someone who knows the organizations ins and outs. If you don't find one or forget it.
Two. Make sure you factor in the conversion (old files still need to be accessible) and retraining costs (users and support), including time and effort. Many users will complain loudly to their bosses if you give them a new app without training (easy to learn apps and well written user guides don't make a difference).
Three. Compare the cost of subscribing versus the cost of upgrading when the next version of office comes out (that you want to upgrade to). I know of a few organizations that skip releases because of the upgrade (mostly time and effort) costs.
Four. Consider reducing the number of copies. Doesn't always work if it drops you from a high discount category in a low discount one.
Five. The time may not be right. Microsoft is entrenched and people have to be ready to switch. You probably need a multi-year plan to slowly bring OpenOffice (and Linux for that matter) onto peoples desktops, and make the decision to dump Microsoft a natural decision.
Last. Make sure you don't end up on the pile with others who have made unpopular decisions. It just means your are no longer able to influence change.
I would contact someone in IS for the City Of Austin, TX. They made some big news a year or so ago for some major OO moves. Perhaps they might share their experiences.....
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
The summary I'm seeing is to migrate to OpenOffice, and yet supply some MSO licenses for back-compatibility.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
Who actually pays for MS Office?
Those who can realistically expect a visit from the BSA. That's everybody who isn't an individual at home.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Mine, they're geeks. But hey they come by it honestly enough. :)
The problem is if you give it to students, you are teaching them something that ( currently ) they have almost zero chance of seeing when they have to get a job..
"Can you use Microsoft Office" will be the question, and if they say ' nope, never seen it' , then you can bet they wont be hired.
Now, teaching both.. THAT'S a good idea..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Companies are much less likely to download Office than individuals. It's more likely that a company will buy 20 licenses, forget how many they bought a year later and end up installing it on twice as many PCs.
Really want to seem some files that do not import correctly? What about viruses?
Fixed. But seriously though, are Microsoft Office VBA macros used widely in K-12 education?
Many places want Microsoft Office experience not all that many want OpenOffice experience.
Here, Microsoft's generic product naming strategy works for you, as you can list "office software" experience without having to list "Microsoft® Office software" experience unless, as afd8856 pointed out, they're looking for a VBA programmer where VBA doesn't mean GBA.
Aside from just file format, you might want to check ahead of time for compatibility of any powerpoint plugins that are popular in the educational environment. Breeze, Impatica, Robohelp, Camtasia, etc, may not work with the presentation tool in OO. Run through the process each teacher/student goes through, and you'll be able to see if it's a doable conversion.
First off, you are talking about a word processor. This type of application has been arround for some time and for all intensive purposes, they all do the same thing. I know many documentation experts and tech writters that have switched to Open Office, none of them have had any problems. None of them brag "This is so much better than Word!". But they all know it costs way less ($0).
I have had to call M$ tech support 4 time in my life. I always get the same answer: "That's odd, its not supposed to act that way. You can either reinstall the application or I can suggest a fix that might work. However M$ does not assume responsibility if this fix hoses everything and we do not recommend this fix for a production environment." Well, I don't need to pay for someone to tell me I am hosed. I knew that the minute I picked up the phone or I would not have reached for it. Having tech support for your DBMS, EMS, CRT whatever makes sense. You don't need it for a Word Processor, thats what your support staff is for. If they can't fix it (even if they are a bunch of 14 year old students) you are hosed!
Well, I did my graduate thesis presentation in OO.org 1.1.2 on my Linux box. Problem was students graduating had to upload their PPT files on a WinXP, Office 2003 machine.
Since my university was aware that PowerPoint presentations are particularly sensitive to Office version changes (let alone OO.org!), they allowed students to "test" their PPT files on the machine they would have used the next day.
My PPT was almost OK. There were minor issues: some font rendered slightly differently and arrows and graphs needed a bit of care. But it was nothing more than 30 minutes of work, and it was absolutely comparable with corrections people using non-MS Office 2003 had to do. I was pretty satisfied of OO.org this time.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
I faced this same scenario last year. I was on my town's school budget committee, and raised the open office issue with the school board. They all bitched and moaned "but its different, what if the students cant figure it out?" just retort:
ITS A SCHOOL !!! GOD FORBID IF THE KIDS ACTUALLY LEARN ANYTHING NEW!!!!!!!
I know that this is way down the list so unlikely to be read - however here goes - I'm running open office 2.0 on 4 computers I maintain for my family. I dumped MSOffice off of them months ago since it was starting to get really annoying to steal a copy with all the appropiate patches and stuff. It is a very powerful application which for the student of the house has been more then enough to allow them to complete their assignemnts, and the compatibility with MSOffice is better and better with each release. I have more problem opening an MSOffice doc in OO then opening an OO doc saved as MSOffice format in MSOffice. There is a number of tutorials online for the Open Office products as well to help people get started, though if you have used a word processor before then OO should be easy enough to pick up. For people who really want to tweak their word processor OO offers that ability by allowing you to modify menus and the design of documents, which is really usefull to hardcore writers.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Exactly, when I was in High School I used Lotus WordPro for most of my papers. When working on my senior research paper, I saved a copy every night in the wordpro format and in .doc but still just turned in a print copy, so I could have been working in just about any text editor.
The Internet couldn't tell a good bit from a bad bit if it bit it on its naughty bits.
first before talking software .. you need talk about file formats.
.rtf (rich text format) to make sure anyone can read it.. and maybe even use PDF as a distrobution form insted of powerpoint..
1 7c?V1=705170&PID=705170&PN=1&SP=10023&SID=50285&CU R=840&CID=190073&API1=65&API2=GOOGLE&API3=staroffi ce_exa&DSP=&PGRP=0&CACHE_ID=190073
you ned to explani to teachers and students that Microsoft is not the only wordprocesser in the world, and because of this they should be saving documents as
then a change of tools like from Microsoft office to Openoffice will not be as hard.
also the point that while openoffice has problems with some native microsoft office documents, Micrsoft office can not open a single OpenOffice native documents..
next step.. Support.. as a School you need it but students may not.
OpenOffice is the winner here.
you buy StarOffice from Sun for the school ($65 from sun http://globalspecials.sun.com/dr/v2/ec_Main.Entry
)
and give openoffice to the students.. (or better a live linux cd with it already there... sorry off point)
also changes from MS office to Star/open office and from front page to NVU will also help latter if you would like to change to Apple or Linux for desktops.. or even Sunrays with java desktop.. but you will gain more freedomes in choice when you start little things like change to RTF and PDF as any system can have the ability to read/write these for free.. even windows..
For example, some documents that are on one page in office might be 2 pages in openoffice.
I've read reports that Microsoft Word is just as bad about precise layout from version to version or even from printer to printer across the same version. Take a document formatted for US Letter paper and print it on A4 paper, and see what doesn't break. If you want pagination to be maintained, use PDF or any of several page-layout formats that represent the document exactly.
Focus on the cost benifits by making the costs tangible; if MS Office costs X$/unit, and they need to get YYY units, the total that could be shifted to other places would be increased (books, new computers, a few holiday parties for the staff plus gifts).
DO NOT focus on not spending the money in the first place. Government agencies do not understand not spending...only reallocating. If they spend less, they will not get as much later on...and that means they are even less important...leading to even greater losses in following years. It's a shame that it is the case, though I've never seen it happen differently.
Very odd. I save .doc (or .xls) documents with OO.org every day.
Geez, come on...Informative??
I believe that you've confused secondary education with vocational training.
Many secondary schools offer vocational courses as electives; however, that's not their primary objective. Indeed, a school could have a microsoft computer lab specifically for the purpose of teaching a vocational computer literacy course while running open source software on other computers. Slashing the technology budget (read software licences) could provide means for giving teachers a much needed raise.
The need to have Microsoft software running on every computer on the campus in the name of "vocational training" is a red herring.
Here are a few reasons off the top of my head:
* Download size. Firefox is under 5meg for Windows, OOo is approaching 100meg. Someone on a modem would download Firefox but most likely not OOo.
* "If it ain't broke". People visible see problems in IE thanks to popups, spyware, etc. MSOffice doesn't have the same problem.
* Piracy. IMHO most (home) users of MSOffice get their copy from friends or work, I've not known of too many people to buy it for themselves, even the educational version. With MSOffice perceived to be "free", why bother with something else?
* File formats. MS Office is considered the defacto standard therefore for interoperability reasons a replacement must offer perfect import/export support for its file formats. Public perception also plays a part in this, while OOo's importers have improved these past few years people may still think of what it was like two years ago and not consider re-investigating it.
* Laziness. People are lazy. If they perceive no improvement with changing then why should they put out the effort?
* "Oh-Oh-what?" How many people even *know* about there being alternatives to MSOffice?
Damien
Just go to www.mille.ca or search for mille.ca on sorceforge.
No sig for now.
When you consider how much support it will take to answer the "this doc looks like $%#@%$" wailing that your helpdesk and users will get
and considering that for Education office is SUPER CHEAP - almost charity pricing; i'd agree with the Don't Bother crowd
It's called a white lie. You answer yes, because you know that you can use it without any problems. If you have any hickups, just blame it on the fact that you are used to some other version of Office. On Windows there is 95/97/2000/XP and 2003 to choose from.
Aside from the "minor," bugs with OOo that this thread is bringing to light, there is another serious consideration as far as interoperability and cross-office compatibility: Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
Before anyone considers a migration from MSO to OOo, you must consider your existing use of VBA; if none at all, no problem. On the other hand, if you have administration using VBA to manage accounting information, and teachers using VBA to manage grades, and students using VBA as part of their curriculum, then OOo is definitely going to be a more expensive solution, at least in the short term.
On the flip side, VBA is one of the major featu^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity concerns; you could try to take that angle if you are using VBA extensively.
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
If only they could present it at a board meeting in terms of "Either we use OO or we will have to raise taxes".
Of course the public response will be to buy Msft products and cut taxes, just go deeper into debt like everyone else - because all those Msft products will make our students so globally competitive they'll pay off the debt incurred before they retire so, yeah, that's the ticket!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It gets close, but there are still many, many problems
Unsubstantiated. In fact, not even quantifiable (how many, exactly, is "many, many"). IOW, just plain ole FUD.
it still annoys me that on my 2GHz Athlon64 w/ 1GB memory and 7200RPM HDD that OOo seems to take eons to load
Are you comparing OpenOffice.org with Microsoft Office with each package's preloader turned on or off? Even so, one thing you can do is fire up a new notepad document and start typing your body text while OOo Writer loads.
Send all the students home with OpenOffice.org CDs and they can use OpenOffice at home as well as at school.
OSS is still a steaming pile of crap software
I don't see any good reason to use either. Why do we need to teach a big pile of integrated crap, and why do we need to teach a specific application, as opposed to teaching general concepts? If in terms of the 'format' of document accepted for papers/etc, then it shouldnt be tied to any specific applications - specify PDF and/or Postscript as the format.
You hit the nail on the head. I work on a company that I recomended Oo.o for 90% of the office workers which do not need M$ word, I was overridden by my 65 y/o supervisor, who believes that Open Source is of the devil....
If Kerry was the answer, it must have been a stupid question.
The UN - The largest "political" cause of death.
I had someone hear in the office I work at save a circular reference in her Excel file (where a formula in a cell either directly or indirectly referrs to itself).
Excel warns you whan you start up the file something like "Warning, circular reference in cell A34, please correct", but then the message disappears and the file isn't open. So was no way to open this file with Excel, even thought it says you can, but OO did it with no trouble. It just put "circular reference" in that cell, like fucking Excel should! Hooray, problem solved.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Even if you're definately not going to switch, it might be worthwhile to have a pilot, and make sure your MS rep knows how well it went. You know, just before you talk about prices.
Better yet, use competitive pricing as an excuse with your boss to do the comparison. If they love it, you're a hero. If they hate it, you still smell like a rose, since switching wasn't the "real plan".
Let the $ that would have gone to MS move elsewhere in the budgets of the office users a one time 'reward'.
Or are you pulling a Dell (AMD - Intel) as a negotiating ploy with MS?
This OOo VS MSO debate reminds me of something called Colibris (French). Colibris means "COntenu LIBRe pour Institutions Scolaires" which translates to something like "Free material (software) for educational institutions". My mother works in a school, and one day she got a bunch of CDs sent from Colibris with open source apps on then (OOo was there, yes). She showed it to some teachers and the dude in charge of the computer class, and some (if not all) computers have it installed and is listed as "an alternative" until they figure out if it's "better" than MSO. So there is definately room for comparison, but "Hey, it's open source!" argument won't cut it. People will use it if it's better, and knowing what we know, i don't think OOo, as much as i like it, can be better than MSO.
I just thought i'd throw in my exemple of popularization attempt.
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
Besides, the education license for MS Office is about $40 per seat. It's hard to argue that saving $40 per computer every few years is worth the headache that supporting OO will cause you.
I love this, all the replies so far are assuming that you are a "Bill Gates and Microsoft fanboy" just because you dared to speak against OSS and asked them to be more realistic.
As for those replying with "Stop sucking Bill's dick" type comments, you sure are not going to be winning anyone or proving anything.
Why don't people try being more realistic, and recognize and actually discuss the faults of OO in a more civil manner?
First ask them their requirements:
You give them a prepared list of requirements on which they can add/delete stuff.
Once you have this, you can put some word-processors next to it (make that in an excel sheet and make some graphs on it). Also put others in it like WordPerfect, Lotus Notes,
Don't forget pricing ofcourse.
Present a summarized report to them and probably OpenOffice will be better than MS Word according to THEIR requirement.
In that way, they have no point in resisting, and they will know it.
Good luck and let us know how it went!!
very simple solution really. Take a small fraction of that money that they used to spend on M$ Orifice and hand out copies of Open Office to any new student who doesn't want to download it.
Either way, make it the STANDARDIZED application if students are to submit work on disc or email.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
"So, I ask you, have you been successful in moving your education or business organization from MS Office to OpenOffice"
Nope. My facility had 5 old computers that were being replaced, so I got them put in my classroom.
I asked my supervisor about installing such products. I was asked
"Who will support it when you install it?"
Um, me.
"That's not your job, you're a teacher. Can't the IT department do it?"
So I asked them, and they said,
"We're starting to use some of that Linux stuff (?) but we're not allowed to install or support it."
I have yet to receive an answer as to why that is, but I have heard that someone in IT is afraid of the GPL. I find it difficult to believe that anyone in my company's IT department has READ the GPL, let alone understands it's intracacies.
Regardless, the idea got squished. No open source in the classroom, and no real reason why.
Because if you've already bought MS Office, it's admitting you wasted money to use OO.
Why are you letting a sunk cost drive your decision?
When I was a little kid WordStar was the word processor to use, with 75% of the market. Everyone used it.
When I got to high school the teachers were proud of their lab which was running WordPerfect 5.1 - the same thing industry was using, so my skills would be up to date when I graduated.
When I entered college all the computer labs were running Microsoft Word, the dominate word processor of the day. (On windows for workgroups)
When I got my first real job it was at a company standardized on Adobe Framemaker. (Running on SunOS and Solaris - as an engineer Windows was not a useable platform for engineers)
All but the last one were easily number one of the day, holding at least 70% market share, often more.
I can't remember which function key was required to save in WordPerfect 5.1, but at one time my teachers made that part of my tests. Fortunately most of my class time was spent on writing papers. I still write papers today, and I still try for good grammar. Those writing and grammar skills are still important. The specific program doesn't matter. Do not let the school loose sight of the important part: teaching English skills.
I use OO on a LAN in the high school. Students are the only users besides myself. Staff don't know/don't care and the students love it. It has a mouse and a menu. A school could save big bucks if only thed students converted.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
The reason they didn't want it was file incompatibility.
One thing that is starting to be noticable is how much MS Office raises the price of a PC. Dell's cheapest PC is £241. MS Office SBE OEM adds another £235. It almost doubles the PC price.
I have migrated from MS Office.X for OS X to NeoOffice/J which is based on OO.o
.DOC file.
My experience has been that the interface is sophmoric when compared to the advanced and good looking MS Office.X interface. In addition, even basic Word formatting like bullets don't migrate with perfection from a
What I miss most are the Excel forumals which I use for all sorts of household budget calculations and other such needs.
Still, when comparing $0 to $500, I am happy to overcome the shortfalls.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
We looked at the possible switch 2 years ago I think and the major problem was no access and a lesser problem of not having publisher (which is used quite extensively here now especially with younger students) The compatibility issues are usually minor, but there are just as many between MS office versions if not fewer.
You can find pretty good advice at the OpenOffice.org forum. Especially on this and this threads.
Expert Java EE Consulting
Serious question, though I do admit I hate it, I'm willing to put that aside to ask: why? From what I've experienced, other programs such as Eudora can easily do everything Outlook does, often in ways that work far better for the user. Indeed, I have one friend that runs into endless little problems with Outlook on her brand-new Dell. I've even installed Eudora 5.02 on her comp, it works fine and does a few things that she was quite impressed with . . . and yet she still sticks with Outlook.
To put it in one word: WTF?
Can anyone here enlighten me? Where does Outlook dispense the crack cocaine from? What am I missing here?
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
It was an easy sell for openoffice in my school board. all office machines have MS office and every student/teacher has openoffice.
Maybe we see dupes so often because people tend to forget things previously posted.
So you deploy OOo...now what happens with proprietary formats? You get it approved for starting in the 06-07 school year and MS Office 2007 comes out (all the new Dells, Compaqs, et al come with MS Office preloaded). Good luck talking the students and parents into using compatible software...have you ever tried to convince them they need virus protection? HA.
It sounds to me like you need to determine the pros and cons of such a decision BEFORE you make up your mind either way. I feel sorry for the school board as well as the students who will be required to have MS Office skills (you can't deny it is the industry standard) as it seems like you recommend based on subjective fact. You need to do a little research and consider the impact on students (not just the bottom line) before making up your mind on recommendations. Maybe Open Office will be the winner, but please do your homework first and ignore the religous battle that is Slashdot and go with objective facts when making up your mind.
Any buisiness that actually does something like that will be checked eventually. Schools for one as well. Currently so many people are freaked out here because of recent server instabilities (HONESTLY! LINUX!), and virus attacks that they are unsure about Open Souce software.
Open Source is a great alternative, however too many people just don't trust it yet. If these things are to overpower purchased software then a trust-base must be built first.
For a business environment, I think OO.o isn't there yet.
I would be careful not create a Linux situation all over again. What I see as the bigest pitfall to Business adoption of Linux, and OO.o for that matter, is that Early adopters are too quick to recommend them as alternatives to Windows/Office.
If your company is like the one's I've worked for, they will be willing to consider alternatives with only a bit of arm twisting, but if the solution is deemed "inferior", then getting a second chance will be very difficult. Even OO.o v2 isn't "there yet" (IMHO) for those other than early adopters and so I would be careful not to be branded as "the guy who loves OO.o" because it will be difficult to be heard after said "inferior" lable has been placed.
Better would be to test out OO.o adoption with a cross section of the user base (admins, developers, sales, etc) and get their reaction. If they all like it, then you have more amunition. If they don't, then it is probably time to wait for the next release to poll the user base again.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Bill it as a free Web authoring tool. The school will likely add on a free web authoring tool, but will not likely replace MS Office wholesale without experience with it. If you can move oOo alongside MS Office for an alternate purpose, you are one step closer to reducing the number of Office licenses you require to run your school without problems in the migration path.
Who the heck moderates this crap anyway?
Some students likely have archaic computers at home just barely running word. Many wont know how to install openoffice. Some might have busted CD drives.
My point being you cant give a kid a disk and expect him to install software to run at home. Some might not even have a PC at home and instead use a public library computer or a friend's computer. Or their parents may type things up for them at work. They cant necessarily install new software on those computers.
People still associate price with quality. People assume that they'll get what they pay for
For people with an upside-down demand curve, there is a commercial distribution called StarOffice, which includes some proprietary add-ons.
If you are worried about support, go with the Sun version. Loads faster, various little tweaks. I have been running the 8 beta for some time and have had no more compatibility problems than exist between Office 97, 2000 and XP.
Common to both free and paid for, the issue of install for multiple users is fixed. It is also possible to configure the (XML) setup files to produce a deployable version that will by default save in MS format with all your other l10n preferences ready set up, just as with MS products.
You can do a number of fun things with OO/StarOffice relatively easily. Using the Java drivers, for instance, you can configure servlets (running under Tomcat, JBoss etc) to create web pages that will run database operations to populate spreadsheets with standard reports, and deploy those pages over your internet or the internet with HTTP over SSL. Without .net, using free tools, you can subtly take over the administrators by giving them access to their most important data in a familar format. (If capacity is a problem, you can use old boxes to run OO as, effectively, a server and so create a cluster of office document generators). You can also export those same reports as downloadable PDFs. In the same way, reports can be created in Word format by replacing embedded fields with data.
Having watched an educational administrator run database query after database query on successive spreadsheets, and then have to package them all up and email them all out (insecure, by the way), the time that could be saved on this sort of thing is enormous. By giving the little dears their data as Excel, they can play with it and convince themselves they are "adding value" by adjusting fonts and line widths and dropping in poisonously bad clip art.
So, don't sell OO as a cheap version. Sell it an an enterprise version that can be programmed to automate tasks just like .net, but with lower TCO and the ability to reformat and distribute documents with excellent security.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Try calling IBM and explain the situation, so they don't mistake you for a potential buyer of their products.
They might already now have some (a lot?) experence in moving from Microsoft to Open Source.
In a way it would be of their interest aswell, that more learn to use Open Source programs, and by that kill some of the myths.
It is worth a try.
Ahh.. So a school should also teach the students to lie at job interviews....
I do interviews for my company. I do give extra points for knowing OpenOffice and Linux. However if you put that you know Linux on your resume here is how it goes.
How well do you know Linux?
If I get the I know it very well then I ask a few questions.
What distro do you use?
What Kernel?
From the command line how do you find out the IP address of your computer?
What does 127.0.0.1 mean?
If you lie to me about anything in the interview. NEXT!
An honest I don't know is a good thing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's a bit late for THIS purchasing cycle, but you'll need to ante up to Redmond again in another 1-3 years, right?
It's time to PILOT alternatives, such as OpenOffice and AbiWord NOW. You might even be able to do this "skunkworks" without involving IT, at least not initually: Give OO or Abiword to students to take home and teach them how to save in MS-Word format. Give them the official MS-Office reader-programs so they can verify it will look OK when the teacher reads it using MS-Office. Teachers who have "install privilages" on their classroom computers can install it themselves.
By this time next year, or whenever MS wants more money, you'll be in a much better position to lobby for a cheaper alternative.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Not knowing exactly what you're using this software for as far as education I'd say to start by using both. Not only does this give an evaluation period to try them head to head it also gives some time to get some feedback from the students.
You're going to have a hard time pushing away from MSO when 95% of the professional office environments use it. The idea of this schooling is to get the student in the grove of what to expect in the real world. What's the chances of OO being the dominate or even having a large slice of the pie by the time they graduate? Pretty slim. By giving them the opportunity to use both you can at least expose them to alternatives. Who knows, a decade or so down the line you may even convince your district to convert.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
People are flocking in droves to OpenOffice. It just doesn't get as much press as Firefox.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That's what my school did. But i d/led open office onto their open SMB share and now i can use it whenever i want. (and thanks to the moron admins at my school)
The current version of openoffice.org runs on windows 95, and can do the latest Office XP formats. Even Office XP/04 won't run on Win95- at all!
Let me preface this by saying am a technology coordinator at a public school district. I like open office and I use it at home, but it is not quite good enough to be pushing on to your school district. Several of the schools in our co-op have switched to open office only to switch back to Microsoft Office during the school year. There are still a few to many little headaches that eventually turn into big headaches.
Of course you should bring up the price difference (tens of thousands of dollars vs. free, not considering tech support). Maybe this is too forceful, but you could also ask how they would defend themselves if auditing asked them to justify their spending of so much of the public's money on something when something equivalent was available free.
If OpenOffice never makes it as mainstream as Word, all that happens is that the school saved a boatload of money. However, if it increases in popularity and the school has wasted tons of money on the competition, some administrator might find themselves in a tight situation with their bosses...
Milan Schools in Milan Michigan (http://milanareaschools.org/) Runs Open Office on all their lab machines which are Thin Clients..Hope that helps
Open Office has way to many bugs for the average user to want to use it at this point. With the incredible discounts Microsoft gives for education, and the increased support costs for migration and training and troubleshooting Open Office, it's probably not any better a financial move to go Open Office.
It definitely isn't a user friendly move.
And, if you're making the decision based on ideology, then you won't be able to sell it to the powers that be anyway.
Novell, Inc. has already begun to use OpenOffice internally. This began last year and is continuing today.
A large portion of the employees have already made the switch and only the most serious of Excel users have the most issues. Their pivot tables and advanced macros are causing them the most headaches and they tend to move over to MS Office to complete their work.
The only other reason complaints filter into the Help Desk are because Novell's customers and outside contacts still generally use MS Office and as Novell employees make the switch the newbies have a minor learning curve to go through to make sure they save these docs as MS Office docs.
But for these issues, the switch has been going over nicely and continues to roll out to the remainder of the company world-wide.
I think the grandparent's point was that you can send the CD home with the kid without violating the Manufacturer's copyrights. :P
If they can't install it for your above reasons, ok, but they can have the software without worry regarding it being illegal to use it.
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One thing we are doing for an office I work with is doing a Pilot test.
We're going to give out customized Knoppix CD's to personnel, and ask them to check out the software, and use a web survey (the home page for the browser on the CD) to give us feedback about their experiences.
I'm all for moving some of our vanilla workstations to OO/Linux, but I think its best to get a good idea of user feedback before making the jump.
Then, when any concerns come up, we'll have data to back us up. The cost facet of making the switch is simple to argue - its generating a solid argument for user performance that is really the issue....
Best of luck!
--J
Abiword is much closer to the Firefox model. It's smaller, faster, feels more native on more platforms than OOo. But beyond cost, it offers nothing more (even less, in fact) than Word.
Faster is less? Try telling that to somebody who can't afford to buy a new computer.
Smaller is less? Try telling that to somebody who can't afford to buy a house in a geographic area that has residential broadband.
Sometimes less is more.
I work in a school, and we are running both M$ Office and StarOffice (free to schools). The reasons people want to stick with M$: clip art, Publisher, and problems with Star (or Open) Office.
M$ has a ton of clip art built in, and online. People love that. For some reason, they also like Publisher, though I don't know why.
And when people have problems with StarOffice, they complain. I think they're used to problems with M$ products.
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The way you trivialize the issue underscores your lack of understanding of the complexity of the modern office suite. There's much more available beyond simply clicking on file | open and starting to type. Effective office users know about things like mail merge and macros that can make them much more efficient than the "just start typing" crowd. As a manager, I know which type of worker I'd rather hire....
Whoa! I never have figured out the drawing piece, but I switched to OO *specifically* for the outline mode. This is not some vapid construct or facade over the editor, it's the ability to set the hierarchy mode (styles floating toolbar) and the ability to navigate to the heading of interest (navigator). This is IMO *much* easier to use than the Word alternative.
;)
I've never created a user guide, release notes, handover, admin reference, testplan, or any other of the artifacts which I may be forgetting in 2005 using anything but OO.
I distribute these as PDF since I can be more certain that the 5th person viewing the information is viewing the information I distributed, not some team lead's interpretation of 'what he must have meant to write so I'll fix it'.
Others have mentioned that schools must train students according to the expectations of the marketplace. True.
But I totally disagree with the corollary that they are unable to adapt. Several things my son did in a standard Computer Applications class (at a small 10k pop. town) were in advance of things I do day to day.
Aside from Powerpoint and Access specific tasks though, they would have been easily replicated in OO.
The way I *think* it should work is use OO for all the beginner to intermediate Office/Clerical/Computer classes and offer specific targeted 'Advanced' classes which use the specific features of MS Office which are absent from OSS alternatives.
And I BET that list gets smaller each semester!
You will certainly hear opponents of the move say that if students don't learn Microsoft Word then they won't be prepared for getting a good job in the business world.
I do not buy this argument, and you should be prepared to argue against this claim. You should promote the idea of teaching students how to use computers in general, and how to understand computer applications in general (not talking CS here, just more than rote memorization of a series of clicks). Anyone who understands how to use computers and has been using OO.org will have no problem adjusting to Word. This is perfectly in line with (what should be) the whole point of secondary school, teaching students how to think and how to learn new things.
In the case of those students who really do need purely vocational training on a specific application, and from whom applying experience with OO.org to MS Word is too much to expect, well, they are unlikely to land a job that places high value on computer skills anyway.
The need to run it in X11 (at least in the Mac OS environment) makes it very hard to use in Elementary education. While there are many things that can be done to make it easier the fact that the users needed a second "program" running to make it work was hard to wrap their heads around. Look at NeoOfficeJ. YMMV.
From what I've experienced, other programs such as Eudora can easily do everything Outlook does
Except connect to Exchange servers whose inflexible administrators have turned off POP3 and IMAP access for alleged security reasons, right? And does Eudora have a calendar or can it share contacts with a popular calendar program?
I am the tech coordinator for a very well known LA Charter School. We recently completed a huge expansion project, and now have over 400 PCs on campus. Rather than paying Microsoft and other vendors thousands of dollars, we decided to transition over to a hybrid "Closed/Open Source" software model. That is, we run Windows XP (which came preinstalled on all of our machines), but primarily use F/OSS software otherwise (OpenOffice, GIMP, Anim8or, WorldWind, Celestia, etc). Doing so resulted in huge savings for the tech portion of our capital campaign, and (as others have mentioned), we're able to freely share all of our application software with our staff and students without worrying about copyright issues. It is with great rarity that anyone "complains" that we're using a non-MS office suite...
Hell with MS Office and OpenOffice. Why not use the opportunity to introduce your students to the use of vi and troff?
If you just want to teach your students word processing, Open Office is a very powerful suite that will do the job and doesn't cost you an arm and leg. If you want to teach them MS Word then you're best bet is to bite the bullet and shell out the thousands of dollars for the real thing.
I don't much like the idea of training high school students to use a particular products as they change. By the time your freshmen are ready for college, this years Word will be out of date anyway.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
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Maybe not pathetic but definately annoying. I'd consider crashes that can lose user data to be among the most highest on my todo list of fixes and I hope most other developers feel the same way. Visual glitches or even program crashes don't compare with lossing data.
This reminds me of an discussion I had the other day about why applications, usually, still don't backup user data frequently without needing to be told? It'd seem to have minimal impact on system resources and it'd be a lifesaver for many users who are unfortunate enough to have the program (or machine) die before they remember to save. It'd be great for users editing that make a mistake and want to back up. WHY don't apps do this? The user I was talking with was actually using a Mac and asked why, if Mac's JUST WORK(tm), they don't do this simple step? I couldn't agree more.. although I'd like to see open source developers make a push in this area first. Lead by example. This is the kind of little features that people get hooked on and then expect everyone else to offer too. Every app that deals with user data should do auto-backups.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I am slowly replacing MS Office with OpenOffice throughout our enterprise. Actually we are keeping XP, but switching to FireFox/ThunderBird/OpenOffice in order to cut down on virii, spam, malware, spyware etc. So far it has been hugely successful. Very few complaints and only a few instances where we had to leave an MS product in place because a particular feature was needed and not available in our preferred apps. If you use the new Beta in your demo, it's pretty much a done deal, it's so MS like that most users barely can tell the difference. Set every version to save in MS formats and open them by default and it's pretty seemless. Joe
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
I moved over to OOo 2.0.20050217 a little while ago, and I must say I was very impressed. There where two limitations that I ran into. (1) Lack of customer colors. I was able to get around this by manually editing the standard.soc file. (2) You can only apply page formatting to one page. In Word, you can have different pages formated differently. This second limitation was a bit more serious, but not a showstopper.
Furthermore, OO's interface can be extremely clunky. Have you seen America's children? The normal ones are dumb as dirt. They can barely do the SAT's, much less use OO's interface.
this is the same as gimp Vs. photoshop if u have the cash get MS Office otherwise OpenOffice is best free alternative ;)
The city gov't I work for actually promotes OpenOffice.org to our users. With Version 2 coming in July, it should become a nobrainer.
There is a very simple process that you can follow to introduce most new technologies to an environment. To introduce OpenOffice to the school I would expect it to take about 2 semesters to achieve success using this method.
1. First thing you have to do is find a teacher who will be supportive of your efforts. It's best of the person has been around for a while and has respect among the other teachers and decision makers. You have to convince this one person to give Open Office a try. Once you've done this you have someone who will help you meet your goals.
2. Your teacher is convinced that they should use open office. Great, now you have to get them to introduce it to their students. It's easier to get approval to do a trial run than make a permanent change. So ask the teacher to run with open office for one of their classes for an entire semester. This will give both the teacher, the students and yourself some really good experience with using open office in this particular environment.
3. If the trial when well, it's time to tell a few people about what you've done. Find a couple more teachers who would be open to the idea of a non-ms office suite. With the help of your champion teacher tell this new group of teachers what you've done. Tell them about all the success you had and the problems you had and how you dealt with the problems. Problems are OK to have, so long as you have a way to deal with them.
4. Now maybe you have a half dozen teachers that are ready to try using open office. Get them all to run trials in one of their classes. You've now run 7 or so trials of open office. You have lots of real word data to build a case with now.
5. Now you have to introduce the idea to the executives and decision makers. Make nice reports with lots of graphs and pictures. Make nice presentations for them to view. Get your teacher friends to help you explain to the decision makers why open office is a good choice. Explain to them that you've already ran trials and they were successful. Detail the problems that you ran into and how you solved them.
6. Don't buy any more copies of MS office.
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
Keep the "just like MS Office" points at a high level and keep pushing how much money it will save.
If this pitch works, and more educational facilities move toward Open Office, you can bet that MS will introduce a "Start Edition" of MS Office with the following limitations:
1) 3 pages maximum document size
2) Spell check only checks every other word
3) Page Up / Page Down keys are disabled
4) You can't turn off Clippy
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
If you're only using Outlook to read your email, you're not getting anywhere near the full advantage out of it. It is, first and foremost, a groupware application. You can share individual calendars across the company, to make it easy to arrange a meeting when all the relevant people are free. You can synchronise from Outlook to your PDA and carry it around with you. And yes, you can also use it to send email as well.
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Sheesh, I swear the majority of these folks on Slashdot work at very small three or four server shops.
There's no replacement for Outlook, really. That Ximian clone is pretty good, though. But getting your Outlook data into it might prove difficult.
And like the other guy down the line a little said, Access. It doesn't matter if OpenOffice Base is better - it will still be very painful to move access databases into it if you got some users they abuse the hell out of Access every chance they get.
It's not impossible but Word, Excel, and Powerpoint aren't the only parts of Microsoft Office.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
That alone would deserve an F for the course.
I had this happen with the latest Word at my college. A fellow student couldn't open her report. It crashed.
I hear this "OpenOffice.org opens Office document when Office can't" story a lot.
You may have already spent thousands on books for technology classes that only teach MS Office, so when the students open the book to follow along, OpenOffice isn't going to look the same.
Another example is college preparation. Many colleges want students already trained in the basics of MS Office because its part of their curriculum already, so K-12 schools also want to teach the same thing local colleges are teaching to give their students the advantage.
Don't get me wrong. I use and would love to use OpenOffice in my school district, but IMO the curriculum obstacle is the biggest wall that needs to be knocked down first.
People like me who respect software copyright laws. Besides, I got a big discount because I am a student.
It's not OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office.
It's OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Software Assurance.
It's like the "Insurance" that the wise guys sell. If you don't have every official license document for every copy of a Microsoft product you have on every machine (some of which may be donated), you want Vinnie Wingtips to be your friend; otherwise he might bust your legal kneecaps.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh, right, let's be serious, you don't know how to use MS Word extensively, that's why you say that. There are people who write whole books with MS Word, so why don't you shut your hole?
Be sure to take into account all the normal uses students might want, for example: dropping images from the web into a document
Watch out! Fair use isn't as broad as some people think. Is copyright infringement really something you want to be teaching your students?
I have Open Office on my laptop, which I have shared many times at meetings where PowerPoint presentations are projected. I have tricked people into using OO several times, and they don't even realize it until they go to a menu and see that it is different from what they are used to. Their slides show no such surprises.
BTW, I installed Office XP on it and it was never able to open any Word or PowerPoint documents for some bullshit reason, so I got rid of it.
Perhaps, it is just that we are not talking about it that much.
.sxw will be the primary format.(A teacher has no excuse for not having it, it is free).
I use Firefox, Thunderbird and OOo. I am a full-time student online as well as a writer for a weekly newspaper.
These are the issues I face with OOo:
Familiarity- I have been using versions of Word for so long, it is difficult to work with OOo just because some of the features are different.
-This should be no problem for a k-12 school district, kids learn very quickly.
Special Tools: The "word count" feature is more flexible in word. The spelling and grammar checker helps with grammar problems (OOo only does spelling). -This should not be a problem for k-12 either; it would be better for kids to learn their grammar than depend on a word processor to fix it for them.
Rendering: OOo sometimes fails to render Word documents correctly. This is a problem for me because my school has a contract with Microsoft, so their documents are primarily in MS format.-In a school district, this would not be a problem as students and teachers alike will be using OOo, and
Final Point:
Unless Microsoft wants to pay the school district to use their software (as Coke and Pepsi pay for soda rights), why would the district WANT their software? In this time of continually strapped budgets, this is a no-brainer. The money that would be wasted on software licensing can be used to buy other things (like updated school books).
When I was teaching middle school students the biggest problem wasn't money but psychology. And not the psychology of the bureaucrats but of the IT staff that serviced the district.
In that district the IT staff had an unswerving loyalty to all things Microsoft. It didn't really matter what MS did or how their products compared to others; so far as the IT folks were concerned MS could do no wrong. I got the distinct impression that some of the these folks had a shrine of Billy G. at their homes that they made burnt offerings to.
Any criticism of MS was roundly squashed. No attempt was made to review any competing product, open-source or proprietary, in anything remotely approaching an objective fashion.
Seems to me that their might be a correlation between general imcompetence and brand loyalty. The more fanatically brand-loyal a person is, the more likely they are to be imcompetent, and school district IT departments generally don't attract 'the best and brightest'....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
http://www.graphon.com/products/demo.shtml You can continue to use MSOffice, and upgrading will be much easier.
Unfortunately the "curriculum" usually includes MS office applications. Yes, the skills are transferable, but try to explain that in a PTA meeting where people think their kids need to learn programs that are used in the "real" world. I'd still try for OOo, but expect a lot of resistance for reasons you can't begin to imagine.
Which may work fine for you and many other schools. But is a non-starter for most school districts.
even though OpenOffice should more than satisfy all curricular needs and save the district lots of money
Your case is hopeless. From what I understand school districts are awash in a sea of cash - there's tons of brand new unused textbooks laying in storage, teachers have pushed away from the table refusing the extra dollars the administration has tried to give to them, taxpayers keep on voting for more school levy taxes to help educate their kids; administrators are clamoring for the federal goverment to impose more unfunded mandates because they have all the resources they need to push the envelope further than it is where the American primary and secondary education system is the envy of the world.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You almost have to use MS Office for education. Why? Every major business on the planet uses MS Office. If you don't know how to use it, you are officially screwed. MS' market control is that absolute.
"it's job is to instill critical thinking, knowledge, and ethics."
Ok, I know many education apologists like to give this line, but are schools really held accountable to these lofty goals?
Knowledge is a given, if you don't come out of school with SOME kind of knowledge there is something seriously wrong with you. But how can you possibly test if students have been instilled with enough (and the right kind of) critical thinking and ethics?
-------
Incite and flee.
Switching to open-office in a school enviroment is a great opportunity to show students a wonderful free alternative. Even if the school CAN afford office for every computer, that doesn't mean the students can afford it for home.
I'm using OpenOffice very successfully in an office that is very strictly MS Office only. Nobody is the wiser, except that my documents tend to look better, be produced faster, and produce very nice PDF files.
How do I get away with this?
First, I always distribute PDF files. In fact my practice of doing this has become so popular that a lot of other people installed PDFCreator so they could do the same thing from Office. As somebody else mentioned Office documents are often incompatible between versions.
Second, if somebody else will need to modify the documents that I create, I make sure to export an Office compatible version. Nobody has ever had a problem using these exported documents.
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I have successfully assisted my company to switch to OpenOffice. We started the venture with OpenOffice.org 1.0.1, and now use 1.1.4... The hardest part of the switch was making OpenOffice preconfigured for users, as we have a lot of ol' timers without the compacity to hit next without a major brain hemorage. I wrote a piece of software that runs at login time that copies a preconfigured (with default save types set to MS filetypes etc etc etc) OpenOffice workstation install to the users profile (for the specific version of OOo that is on the computer), replace all the usernames so the config files point to the right location, and voila, OpenOffice workstation installs with absolutely no user interaction. So for the cost of developing the software to make it work, it has been used for nearly 3 years as the defacto office suite for 250 workstations.
Absolutely one of the best features of OO that amazes everyone who sees me use it is the math type. OO, includes it as a method to type in math equations in a script like format. For example
X sub r sup 2 = left( matrix{ 1 # 0 # 1 ## 0 # 1 # 0 }right).
It takes this and spurts out beautiful math formated text. I love it! I can type notes in high level courses in realtime AS the professor writes on the board.
Another great thing is for PDF. PDFs are hella useful for printing and or sharing. In collaborative assignments its proved invaluable.
Here is the OOo Marketing web site:
o n/schools/
http://marketing.openoffice.org/
and here is the OOo Schools project:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/educati
Google is your friend...
I think Abiword and gnumeric are more user-friendly, especially for the new user. Why not mention them first?
These are human beings pushed around by all sorts of people who tell them how to do their job better. Put some real thought into the human persuasion angle. If the money goes for Administrator's expense accounts then WTF.
Besides, bo staff skills and computer hacking skills are preferable to word processing skills any day.
Having done work with Salespeople who sell to schools, you'd best proceed with caution. I'd suggest proposing a trial, such as a single school or classroom. Then make sure you have metrics (things you measure) so you can get concrete data.
Proposing Open Source Software _will_ step on someone's toes (whether it's Microsoft or the reseller who makes money off the licenses). Don't give anyone an excuse to say "Oh Open Source...yeah we tried that and it didn't work". Grow your migration slowly and may the best solution win.
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Here me out:
While OpenOffice is a fine collection of software, it's not a replacement for Microsoft Office, if only because of the Microsoft market position. (Personally, MS Office is still better in my book, but that's not the point.) It would be grossly unfair to try to push OpenOffice on the students, as office application skills are fairly important in many fields. They deserve to know MS Office.
A high school is not the place to try to promote Open Office.
ascii art
Here's an argument I heard RMS make on TLLTS, and I think it's a good one:
Suppose you're running MS or other non-free software. Sooner or later a student is going to start asking about how it works, and you're going to have to say, "I don't know, and according to the license agreement, you're not allowed to find out." As an educator, is that what you want to tell your students?
With free software like OOo, you'll have access to everything, and teachers and students will be free to explore every aspect of the software. That's the kind of thing that should be happening in schools.
My mother's a very experienced teacher, and very experienced with computers. She's basically her school's IT expert. She told me "OpenOffice" is total crap." I'll have to take her word on it.
Keep the administrators on MS Office. they will no doubt need some of the stupid things that openoffice cannot do, like macro support for weird school system things.
And what happens when the admins need a file from a teacher and she sends it in OO.o format? Remember, file compatibility is a one-way street for OO.o/MSO.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
As much as I dislike MS Office, that's really what you should be using for high-school students - assuming that these are computers the students will be using - for the following reasons.
1. MS Office is a great job skill to have. Being competent with Word and Excel can mean the difference between a white collar job and working at Wal-Mart. This is very important in a time when more and more students are working their way through college due to high tuition costs.
2. Most of the colleges in the US use MS Office, and college professers who do accept digital submissions of work usually only accept it in MS Word format.
3. Because most of the world is standardized on MS Office, it's a safe bet that incoming teachers will know how to use MS Office and not have a clue about Open Office, which means that all the money you saved on licensing will be going to training and support for OpenOffice.
4. OpenOffice support for Microsoft formats is still imperfect and likely to stay that way as Microsoft continues to change said formats. This means that you'll still have to keep a few copies of MS Office around for any time a student or teacher needs to open an existing office document or create an office document for some reason. And that means there will always be a line to use the MS Office machines instead of working on the ones with OpenOffice.
Using OpenOffice in a high school would be a real disservice to the students, because you'll be teaching them a skill that is mostly useless in today's job market as well as in academia when they could be learning a valuable skill. Please be sure that if you are pushing for OpenOffice in the schools that you are doing it for a really good reason and not just for the sake of the open-source movement.
Tidbits from my experience working with public schools:
One response was, "We want to provide our students with real world business experiences. The real world uses MS Office."
Another difficulty with breaking away from MS Office are textbooks. The textbooks in our high school business department are written specifically for MS Office. Our teachers want to have the exact version of MS Office the text books are written to. (Also keep in mind that text book costs are much higher then computer and software costs.)
Before you can sell it as a replacement to Office, you have to do a few things:
/. people is not necessarily good for Little Susie who has to write her report on America's Founding Fathers.
1. Ensure compatability with Micosoft Office documents. I mean go nuts on this. Get every excel, powerpoint and word document you can from students and teachers. Load them up in OO and mark down any differences that exist. Also mark down where one product loads and performs faster than another. You'll want to do this with a few hundred files per Office program to make sure you have convincing numbers.
2. Find a few teachers to volunteer using OOo instead of MS Office for a 2 month period, have them keep a journal of their impressions. Do NOT let the computer course teachers do this, they're not representative of the larger population
3. Take a single computer lab in the district, probably in a High School and replace MS Office with OOo and observe reactions for a few weeks, randomly ask students questions. At the end of the test period, have teachers who used the lab survey their classes for feedback. Do not do this test near the end of the school year when everyone's going crazy on finals and projects.
The only way to sell any product is to have good solid data to backup your reasoning. Simply saying it's cheaper doesn't cut it. Notepad is cheaper than MS Word, but it's not a suitable replacement. The people making buying decisions haven't a clue that anything exists besides MS Office, so you'll have to present it to them in ways that make sense to them.
Most importantly, do NOT doctor the results from your study to fit some ideological preference. It may very well come out that OOo is NOT the right tool for the job. If you lie and convince them it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, you'll be exposed as a fraud pretty quickly... and what will they do when they find they suddenly have OOo on every PC and it doesn't do what they expected it to? They'll chew your ass out and fire you.
What's good for the
How about listing down and detailing the various "political and cultural issues" so they can be tackled in a straigtforward manner? Let's not beat around the bush and call a spade a spade. Is there money involved? Stubborn pride? Reluctance to move to a system where the incumbent administrators might be incompetent?
Perhaps this has been posted and I simply missed it in the thread, but just in case nobody has seen this... OpenOffice.org has a site for outreach/marketing type information, which includes a section for schools. You might find some helpful information, like a case study and such there. The link to their site is
/
http://marketing.openoffice.org/education/schools
How about Star Office, It is free for educational use and may not have some of the bugs or problems with Open Office. I have never used Open Office so i cannot tel you how much better/worse it is that OOo. Supports Macros too and comes with some sort of database app too
Perhaps I'm just insane, but I'd wonder whether LaTeX would be useful for the students.
Not the administrators, not the business types... but for those students who expect to go to colleges where reasonably high-quality papers rife with structure and citations are the norm, or who will be taking just about any course involving numerous equations, the beauty of being able to type something like
$y = \sum_{i=1}^{\infty} \sqrt{\frac{\log a}{\partial b}}$
or to do automatic numbering of figures, tables \ref{tab:ooga_booga} and references \cite{it_is_really_that_easy} will probably save a lot of head-banging-on-wall time. It's a hell of a lot faster than working with Word's Equation Editor or FrameMaker, both of which I had the intensely wonderful time using until I bothered to learn TeX.
And it lets people use their favorite text editor, while standard packages and classes such as 'book' mean less fiddling with custom margins or other non-meat-and-potatoes deals.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Like any software change that forces users to re-learn certain tasks they have done for years, it is generally easier for them to accept the change if it is forced by the executive and management.
For a school, I would present my arguments for the software change to the Principal and maybe even the school board director. Hopefully they can see the benefits of an Open Source solution and make the decision to go this route.
If you don't get their buy-in, then IMHO, those that don't want to change (often times these are the oldest and most entrenched people in the organization) will dictate what happens (ie. stay the same).
Never bathe in hot oil and Bisquick.
I know that in a small Finnish town they've set up school with 2 linux servers and 20 "dumb" workstations with no hard drive. They run OpenOffice for education.
It is a huge success and the teacher responsible is giving lectures on the subject (friend of mine went to one just today).
The total cost was if I remember correctly about 9000 euros for the total set-up. They say the money saved will be used to actually teach the students something.
The school servers children aged 7-16.
Hope this helps. The name of the town is Noormarkku and you can see the current set-up at this address http://edu.noormarkku.fi/ya/atkluokka.html
OpenOffice supports macros. Existing ones could be re-written for OpenOffice.
But the mean of 127, 0, 0 and 1 is 32.
I'm not sure how Microsoft site licenses work so... will the guy just be paying to keep using the version of Microsoft Office he has for another xx years or is he paying to "upgrade" to a newer version of Office?
The biggest problem we had that but a complete stop to the adoption of OO was that files could not be open by more than one user at a time. I don't know how any business's or organization with more than 5 people and a file server can use it. If you have to go and hunt down who has the file open or which computer it is open on it can take a while, especially if you have a number of general use computers which anybody could log into and leave it open.( a lot of users open files and leave them open ). This only gets worse with XP where more than one user can be logged on and have the user currently not working on the computer can have the file open.
This is one of the biggest reasons I can see for medium/large organizations not using OO. Luckily the problem became apparent in early testing before we rolled it out to a bunch of users.
I think OO is great and I use it exclusively at home, but I can't see it in an environment where a lot of file sharing is going on.
I successfully moved my sisters business from MS Office to Open Office (10 users). It took the staff about 2 weeks before they were completely comfortable with the applications. The only problem they experienced was an Excel spreadsheet with a password (This has been resolved in OO2).
Office 2003 all the way.
I'm sorry, but OOo just blows. I've used 1.1 and 2.0 (beta), and they both suck in a wide variety of ways.
Here's a few:
- OOo defaults to A4 on my distro. You have to recreate the damn template to get it to use Letter.
- OOo's spell checker has neither the comprehensive dictionary nor the excellent suggestions that make Word's usable
- OOo manages to use 171MB on my Windows system, and a similar amount under Linux. Compare that to 15MB for Word - more than a 10x difference.
- OOo's spreadsheet doesn't autofill well. For example, Excel's autofill doesn't muck with the unchanging "data" part of the percentile function. OOo's does. In addition, if you move an entire column in OOo, the cells often don't update properly.
- OOo doesn't use native file selector dialogs (on Linux) without buggy 3rd party plugins.
- OOo sometimes coredumps when I try to start a presentation under Linux.
- OOo's 2.0 beta doesn't have working spellcheck at all on Linux.
- OOo doesn't use native GUI calls, so every element has that "not quite right" feeling.
- OOo can't autosave to a temp file; it must save to the original file
- OOo Impress doesn't ship with any templates.
- OOo has no groupware integration.
- OOo's outlining doesn't work like Word, AbiWord, KWord, or practically any other word processor.
- OOo de-italicizes an entire word if you hit CTRL+I before typing the space.
These are not minor squabbles. They are major issues that add up to a product that feels buggy, bloated, and awkward. It's a suite that just doesn't feel ready.
Are they upgrading their version of office or just renewing a site license so they can continue to use the same version of office?
Just make copies of the Open Office disk and hand them out to all the kids. Make hundreds of copies. Then when the kids see how cool it is at home, they will be used to it and demand its use. Where to get the money for the materials? Have an raffle where the kids get to destroy a computer :-)
Seriously. 1.1 bites.
(1) The standard OO.o file format is going to cause a lot of complaints because it can't be read in Word, until everyone's phased over. Plus no one will recognize what .sxw
is in their directories.
Use .doc (which for 99% of the users' memos,
letters, etc. is
fine) at first and slowly phase in the OO.o format as its advantages
are eventually realized by more advanced users. But at the beginning the advantages will not
outway the drawbacks for novices, who will have enough other things
to struggle with.
(2) People will feel more comfortable with what looks like a "Windows" application, not something with its own fonts for menus etc., regardless of whether it is better or worse.
I like Open Office, but it doesn't have nifty grammar check like MS Office does. Also, OOo supports powerful, complicated macros, they just aren't yet documented much.
The problem is that I suspect the school in questions gets special pricing on each copy of Windows by virtue of the fact that they buy it as part of a discount bundle with Office. They may not want to switch to a free (as in beer) office suite if that means they lose the discounted price on Windows.
Unfortunately, this means suggesting not only a switch from MS office, but a switch away from Windows at the same time, which make the sell twice as difficult.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
For two years, I worked to have my school adopt OpenOffice- abject failure was the result, leaving us still on, of all things, Office 97.
OOo ultimately is too slow and users just won't make the switch. The kids sre fine with it, but the teachers? Oy.
IT costs are already budgeted in most schools, so there is not a compelling reason to switch away once the money is already there.
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Its a difficult question to answer. Personally, i have had many bugs with OOo, but find it more complete. OTOH, I dont use half of the features. My dad, who is slightly MS biased, but for good reason that I won't elaborate on here, says that using opensource, there are less professionals to help, you have no guarantee as to quality, and it really isn't a huge deal to pay for an office suite when you put it into perspective.
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For our office of engineers (that is, real engineers, not "software engineers"), we'd love to use OpenOffice. However, Calc just does not provide the flexibility we need, compared to Excel. Especially when you try to do graphs of data. I mean, generally speaking, Excel's graphs suck, but Calc's graphs really suck. Multiple data series on multiple X *and* Y axes? Multiple line types, some series without lines, etc? Bleh. And after reading up on the OO.O site, it doesn't seem like a priority to improve that. So ... no OO.O for us.
But we'd love to move away from having to install MS Office on every machine.
Ah well, it is to dream.
M>
Wordperfect office should be considered.
Let's make sure we teach our kids to deal with crappy, non functional software right from the start. Then when they compain, Slashdot can just smugly claim that OO is open source, and 12 year old Timmy is welcome to fix it himself, since, ya know, it's open source.
You might also discuss the legal and policy importance of procuring software using open file format standards, a subject discussed at length in the article. Microsoft Office's XML Reference Schemas, because of an overly-restrictive patent license, do not satisfy such requirements, which are critical to software interoperability in eCommerce and eGovernment. OpenOffice file formats do not suffer from that vulnerability.
There is also the important issue of vendor lock-in. OpenOffice, being cross-platform, is a giant step in the direction of freeing organizations from the necessity of using a proprietary operating system. Moreover, even should the school ultimately decide to continue using the Windows platform and Microsoft Office, it can likely receive a far lower bid from a MS Office vendor by using a specification that would allow selection of OpenOffice.
Drafting government specifications in such a way that only one vendor can supply the procured product, particularly in a time of shrinking government budgets, is wasteful and anti-competitive. You might consider developing or requesting an estimated cost comparison, using the previous MS Office licensing cost as the base. A substantial savings is likely, freeing funds for other purposes.
To ease the transition offer copies to staff to take home and install on their home machines and laptops. That ends the complaining about formats not being compatible with what they use at home (biggest MSFT fan complaint I've heard). And when you tell them they can install it on as many computers as they like without cost, that does warm people to the idea a little bit. And instead of mass training, hire someone to work one on one with the power users on how to do routine tasks (mail merge, macros, ect.). They'll then become the knowledge brokers for other staff. That superior knowledge will actually get the power users behind OO and that's what you really want.
You'll get a few mavericks who try installing their personal copy of Office on their work machine but that's pretty easy to hunt down. After the adjustment period they go back to getting their work done instead of complaining.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Simply because MS Office is the most popular, most wide spread, and that's what kids should be learning. :)
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I currently work at a university, and in our fiscal department, we can't even upgrade from Office 2k to XP because of these craptastic macros (there are literally thousands of spreadsheets that would need to be manually converted). So, don't act like its a problem with OO.
The source code is available. You could have students in programming classes tinker with it as part of their assignments. Then if you ever need a change/bug fix, you could go to them and ask for it. Of course, I would reward then in same way.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Microsoft Office just plain doesn't work. I have been dealing with importation issues re: office documents and engineering software FOR 5 YEARS DAMMMNNIITT!!!. Using Autocad engine and microstation. The documents DO NOT PASTE CORRECTLY. The results are the same in both applications leading me to believe the faulty code is in the OLE libraries. Windows just plain doesn't work. I have not tried open office with ole on these engines but after a bad week last week I will. I am planning on showing some people here my next laptop. AMD 64 running suse, with Blender as the drafting platform and Open office. I'll let you people know how my install goes..
Promise your critics a cut of the savings, and see how fast the shut up afterwards.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Switch to OOo and watch to see which teachers, administrators, and other staff have problems. Put "dumbass" on yearly evaluation.
In my experience, Open Office, while able to do most of the things that people do with office programs, is extremely clunky, slow, and generally not very plesant to use. I find it very frustrating to fight with, and not as clear as it could be. MS Office isn't great, either, but it's light-years ahead of Open Office.
I've just started using Apple's Pages (part of the iWork'05 "suite" of two apps), and while I've been very impressed with it, it doesn't do much good for those who need things like spreadsheets and databases. (Yes, there are both kinds of products available for mac, but not in one package.) Once iWork has gone through a few new versions and fills out the suite, it'll definitely be something to keep an eye on, but it'll be a while before that's the case.
Are there any other commercial suites of note? There's MS Office and StarOffice, but I can't think of anything beyond those two that's still around.
I always have trouble with the response from educational institutions about "the learning curve" for teachers and administrators to learn new or different versions of software.
Shouldn't teachers and educational admins have the ability to still "learn" in the manner they expect of their students?
If the software is comparable and free, doesn't the system win twice by educators "learning" and "teaching" themselves new systems, ideas and software that they can teach the students too. And their saving the system money to be spent on programs other than sports.
Shouldn't we all be open to learning something new.
By the way, both pieces of software do the same thing, so nobody is truly learning something new. The method, controls, and maybe names of processes and procedures may be different, but their isn't really anything that new in a word processing document, spreadsheet, drawing program or presentation software.
Above all else - BE HONEST. Let them know what shortcomings exist with OOo and how to address them. I wouldn't try some stunt like fooling them into believing it was MS Office (PHB's HATE that sort of display because it makes them feel foolish); however I *would* compare them side by side in something like 'Impress' and then conclude the slideshow by saying that it was prepared using OOo.
.DOC is NOT a standard! Prove it to them with examples. Not every student at home has office - some have Works and thanks to Dell, some have NEW versions of Wordperfect (go figure). Standardizing on OOo (or StarOffice for support in-school) is a way of circumventing this without stepping on a lot of toes. In fact, OOo now imports WP/.DOC as well as exports in Flash, .DOC, and .PDF (a real standard). Compare this to MS Office and OOo becomes more compelling.
.DOC as the U.S. OOo revels in it's worldwide usability.
.DOC documents. Use examples from your school and be truthful with them. If something breaks, be honest about it. To this end, do use 2.0 because it now supports tables in tables (required for decent .DOC compatibility). HINT: 2.0 hasn't broken a single .DOC here yet! Yay!
.DOC was in the minority. Use your own school's history if you can. Example: Before we standardized on OOo we had Word: XP/2000/97/95/DOS, Wordperfect Win/DOS, XYwrite, Notepad, Edit (yes, I'm serious), and a few others I can't remember. All this in only the last 10 years!
.DOC is not a standard. It varies between versions and changes at MS's whim. Some administrators may remember a row with Office '95 - a truly horrible version for those who are in the least concerned about compatibility.
.DOC is damn good now.
Here's some more things you can do:
1) Demo it by giving it away to those who are making decisions as well as to the teachers. Before OOo 2.0 I would have said not to because of installation hassles, but even the 2.0 beta makes this a thing of the past. Be prepared to answer questions on usage and comparisons to MS Office. I would recommend using 2.0 beta since it's release is imminent and it is far more polished.
If you can wait, I'd wait until The OpenCD w/2.0 OOo is finished before handing them out, but if you can't, then by all means give them the beta anyway.
2)
3) International concerns? Some private schools wrestle with the fact that Word 2000 in Asia and elsewhere, does not produce the same
4) Prove compatibility with existing MS
5) Use the past to point to the future. Point out that there was a time back in the 'elden days' of computing where
Remember this mantra:
Mayhap some of your administrator's remember a conversion process long ago with Wordperfect or some other format. Remind them that this process would not exist for OOo for two reasons:
a) Import of
b) Export of pure XML data is assured with OOo.
And finally, mention that it's FREE. Better still, preface this with the fact that StarOffice's terms for schools are outragiously good. Tell them that in standardizing to OOo, your teachers, administrators, students, parents, whoever wnats a copy from the library (you DO have some in there, right?), can have it free of charge. Remember: 'Free' should be the LAST thing you mention, not the first.
Let them know how the world is changing. Show them examples of who and where OOo is already being used full time. Convince them that they could grasp the brass ring before most others have. After all, isn't embracing new technology and learning new things what education is about?
Again, be honest about what OOo can do for you, and how it will improve compatibility and document longevity. You can win this battle (I did at Linden Hall School), but you have to 'sell it' for the right reasons and be prepared to help in the transition.
Good luck!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I am somewhere in the middle when it comes to being computer savvy. I'm a heckuva lot more technology adept than the average computer user, often end up doing technical support for many other people (on both Mac and Windows platforms). I've been using Mozilla for years because of its cookie control and have become quite partial to Firefox (and AdBlock. You gotta love AdBlock). I think nothing of ripping computers open to upgrade hardware and use many OSS programs on my personal computers. However, I'm nowhere near the league of most of the people who read and post here. Writing code is way beyond my level (unless its HTML or very basic, GOTO basic).
I am the person responsible for keeping the computers in our office up and running. As an advertising agency, we're pretty much a Mac shop. (Which is a pain when it comes to accounting or interacting with telemarkting firms or tracking firms or media placement companies, since they're almost all driven by Windows...)
Being a small office, we haven't gone to the expense of upgrading all the computers to OS X. The benefits at this point do not outweigh the expense for our office. I do run OS X on the computer I use because I run the creative services department. All the software on my computer I have provided myself rather than force the company to pay for it. Again--the expense of the upgrade is obscene.
Recently, I have been trying to come up with a cost-effective strategy for upgrading all the office computers to OS X. As part of that process, I downloaded NeoOffice and test drove it on my computer, trying to determine if it would be an alternative to Microsoft Office and help drive down the cost of upgrading. Unfortunately, after being frustrated for a month by the slowness of NeoOffice and its frequent crashing--in addition to its odd way of rendering RTF files that made them format strangely in Word--I finally had to switch back to Office. This was not a case of my not being willing to learn the software. It had to do with an interface that slowed me down (the open dialog box with its linear folders was a throwback to DOS that slowed me way down vs. OS X's columnar option), with the molasses-like speed with which it saved spreadsheet files with multiple sheets, and the frequent crashing--especially following the last two patches. (I wish I had the time to figure out how to roll back the patches. NeoO was much more stable foor me before the patching.)
I really like the idea of FOSS. I wanted to be able to introduce NeoO into my office. But, I had to accept that if it was difficult for me to tame, the others in my office would be hopelessly lost.
It's too bad. I really, really wanted to like it.
If we're really so concerned about having students learn concepts, rather than specific tasks, then we should be teaching them on multiple platforms.
Everyone babbles about how we should switch over to a pure open-source setup, and how that'd keep our kids from growing up learning one way of doing things, but the OSS solution is just as much of an issue, it just doesn't have a price tag.
If you spend all of your time learning on an OSS word processor, that's the only one you'll know. Frankly, the source is irrelevant in this case. To do things right, we should be having the kids rotate platforms. For example (albeit a slightly extreme one), force the students to use MS Office one day, then OpenOffice the next, then StarOffice, then something else. At that point, they won't have a choice but to learn how the concept works rather than just memorizing menu options. It also allows students to later pick which suite fits their work style best, rather than having them butt heads with a program they don't like.
Granted, this is a bit of a maintenance nightmare, so administrative work should be standardized, but the educational value is pretty clear.
I'm not a particularly experienced Excel programmer, but I've heard that the open-sourced Gnumeric is "as good as" Excel. Have you investigated this program? Or was it the spreadsheet in OOo?
Official Pi Ambassador -- inquire for details!
Hi, I am the Co-Leader of the Spanish community in OpenOffice.org. We have been focusing on migration and have produced some documents about large migrations like the Novell one.
f erence/slide s/02-April-2005-OOo-Migration.pdf
What we have come as a critical point for the migration is assuring that you have the infraestructure to migrate your documents and your people. This mean support the users to migrate versus migrate your documents.
You can't really save money on this deal because you will need serious investment in supporting this migration of documents and people.
The gain is really on long term, as you are not gonna need to renew support on a large scale after the migration is over.
Also you can push it as a measure to respond to push local business and avoid money being wasted outside of the country (yes those companies have to eventually pay MS).
My bet is to get consulting companies with the infraestructure to support the migration. Sometimes free is just too sketchy for people to understand so just introduce a well thought logical plan to save money instead of an all out -- hey is free 'chant'.
here are some resources:
http://native-lang.openoffice.org/con
That is what you will hear over and over again. I have been in your exact same shoes and I had a very hard time getting people to even look at Open Office. This misconception will be your largest struggle. What ever you do, when you demo it, do not tell them it is open source and do not tell them it is free until they start to like it. Remember that the Microsoft reps have been working on administrators and teachers for years that it is vital to have Microsoft products to produce learning. They are told nothing else will prepare students for the future. We all know this is a bunch of bull. If you need educational theory to convince the hard core people, take a look at Jonassen's Computers as Mindtools for Schools - http://www.prenhall.com/jonassen/index1.html. He makes a great point (that all of us know) - it is not the product that you use, but how you use it that produces learning.
A barrier might be openoffice's inferior spreadsheet capabilities.
I find excel is much better at creating nice looking one-page graphs with best fit equations than openoffice.
Don't talk in exclusive terms. There may be good reasons why some of your administrators still need MS Office for example. OOo can INTEROPERATE and fit in with your organization. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and shouldn't be presented as such.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
or borrow an install CD from work?
Umm... Assuming that a school employee is the one installing MS Office, wouldn't borrowing the school from work imply borrowing the CD from the school? And if the school didn't purchase a copy, then.... following where I'm going with this one?
Agreed- It may take some time to get a system set up just right, but it is easier to "ghost" them once you do. I just tweak the masters once a year, at least, and re-image the others. Of course, it can still be a pain to ghost dozens or hundres of machines, but if you have enough PCs to make it a hassle, you should have enough clout to be able to get a staff member (or even a student) to assist. I've mentioned my views on MS vs. OpenSource in the classroom in the past; http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140414&cid =11769514
I'm not sure how it would fly in a public school system, but I do know that for what I do, OpenOffice just doesn't suffice... among other things, I very frequently need to work with scientific papers and presentations, and the MS Office equation editor is vastly more usable than the OOorg 1.1 editor.
For another matter, load times are better- the strategy of bundling OO into a single mamoth application makes loading it almost physically painful on an older machine.
And then there's the matter of the presentation program. I mean, have you ever used the presentation maker in OO? Sad but true, Powerpoint does give more options and more flexibility, and I've found that it's often more trouble than it's worth to transfer presentations btwn OO and MS Powerpoint, since many things break and need to be reworked.
For a school, I'd think that the three big catches are slow speed (they tend to have obsolete hardware), powerpoint pains (annoying the teachers), and the fact that the native file format isn't read by Office at all, which could make bringing your work home that much more tedious until students catch on about saving it as another format. Especially since the format picker in OO lists EVERYTHING, and it's a hassle to go down the whole list every time.
.DOC IS NOT A STANDARD.
.DOCs correctly than MS Office itself does.
Problems include differences between versions, international issues, and confusion with 'Works'.
Believe it or not, OOo 2.0 does open more
Go figure.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It must be remembered that there
is nothing more difficult to plan,
more doubtful of success, nor more
dangerous to manage than the creation
of a new system. For the initiator has
the emnity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old institution
and merely lukewarm defenders in those
who would gain by the new ones.
Machiavelli, The Prince, 1515.
*click**beep**beep* Scotty, One to Mod up!
Both Publisher and Word have had issues with formatting with spaces or tabs. Change a printer or version of the software and everything goes out of whack.
We learned this fact the hard way when our old secretary left and we upgraded the new scretary with a new computer / version of Word. She put spaces in EVERYTHING (Table? What's a 'table'?) and the formatting was DESTROYED!
Besides, with table in table support, OOo 2.0 is putting a lot of this compatibility stuff to bed.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
And that's an understatement. There are plenty of stories which have been posted here, usenet, and any other forum which isn't prone to "someone's" leverage.
Generally, the story involves MS's push to the school|district|corporation to remain or go to MS software. When the door has been shut & sealed, it's been made in no undercertain terms they might as well be present at "oh-dark-onehundred" for a unit-by-unit inspection for any license in arrears.
The only problem will arise from the fact that people are stupid and lazy. They will look for something at the location it was in Word or whatever and they will not be able to find it. But I think every school district should do that. It makes sense; instead of spending money on proprietary software that will cost a lot of money, spend the money on the teachers, the students, the supplies. But don't put my tax dollars into Bill's pocket by licensing his product just because it's 'the industry standard'. It's not a standard, it's a program and file format.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Over the last year I assisted in leading a migration of approximately 70 analysts and auditors from MS Office to OpenOffice. Although the migration was a success, translating our VBA macros to OpenOffice BASIC required a substantial chunk of time. I was also surprised by the end user resistance to the migration. We surveyed our users two months into the migration and found that while 96% reported that they felt comfortable enough, 87% of them also felt that they would benefit from additional training. Five months later we conducted another survey and found that our end users still complained over missing features. At that point only 23% reported being as comfortable in OpenOffice as they had been in MS Office. 40% reported in the anonymous survey that they either still used Excel or wished they were. I realize that my group is probably not representative of typical spreadsheet users. For the number of features that we use, we may more rightly be classified as power users. However, I do suspect that most large organizations will have pockets of users with similar experiences.
You do have a valid point there. My argument is a little skewed...it's about the managers of the departments who go complaining to the administration saying that they don't have what everyone else uses. It's about employees who complain to these managers about the fact that when they email attachments to a different county, the SXW file doesn't open in the other guy's MSWORD.
There's more, but essentially when the IT department approaches the guy signing the check, he's already been approached by people who are demanding MSWORD.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, or that I approve. I'm simply stating that this is what happens...people go over IT to administration, and they get what they want. And sometimes even saving money isn't enough to get them to move!! My supervisor (the head of our IT dept.) took a plan to set up a T1 via fiber to our administration. The plan would be saving us money right now, but because of the ignorance of the administration, it was shot down. Those in power will do what they will, and no amount of pleading from those who know better will change their minds unless they are willing to change them.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
the problem is not choice, it is the lag time, many years, between using software in schools and the evential use of software in the workplace. Complete generations of software come and go in the time that a student moves through the education system.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Well for a school you got one very good "selling" point. Tell them open source is about sharing knowledge. That's why a school should promote open source and teach the students to use open source products.
I think this is a great idea. Open Office works on MacOS X and Linux. Linux can run on basically any computer (including things like PSP and iPods). If public schools adopted an open source first policy, it would save taxpayers huge amounst of money on software licensing and enable schools to aquaire more computers (pratically any computer will do). The same schools could offer classes in maintaining Linux, IT, and programming. Students could graduate HIGHSCHOOL with enough skills to get a good paying job. The teacher hired for the position should be a skilled IT person to maintain the schools system (double usage!). As he fixes computers, he could teach the students what he is doing.
"So, I ask you, have you been successful in moving your education or business organization from MS Office to OpenOffice?"
After upgrading our Solaris boxes (with Windows pc cards running office) to Linux boxes, we experimented with using Open Office. The general consensus is that people here hate Open Office. These are engineers too, with no particular allegiance to either OSS or MS. OO is not very compatible with MS Office in rendering documents. We've decided now to run Windows under vmware on the Linux boxes, and are pursing this avenue in hopes of improving our productivity.
Vote for Pedro
1 - How much will it cost to reinstall everything? That's IT time, == $$$.
Coming from years of work in the private sector, this is how I recognize IT architecture changes. Recently, I started working for a state agency. In the state govt. there's "no expense" associated with people doing work. Like staffing is a seperate budget that doesn't get screwed with. All other assets, now those are budget line items. Department heads, in this economic climate, are eager to slash any cost off these budgets.
This is what can really help with the adoption of open source technology. For instance, we just switched IDEs from CodeGuide to Eclipse for all developers.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm running Open Office 2.0. Well, it's actually 1.9.79~ the 2.0 beta, on a 2.8Ghz P4 with 1GB RAM running the preload QuickStarter program. Writer takes 15 seconds to open a blank document for the first time. Closing Writer and subsequently re-opening a blank document takes 7 seconds.
Dual booting the same machine into Windows XP with Microsoft Office and running Word, I am able to type in the blank document in three seconds. Closing the document and subsequently re-opening the blank document, it opens instantly.
It may not sound like much but, there is an enormous gulf between opening instantly and waiting 7 seconds. Open Office feels like an obese pig in comparison to MS Word or even WordPerfect. It's still a great program but, like the original poster said, it feels FAT!
Look i love open office, but Microsoft Office simply outshines it in user friendlyness, not to mention a much improved spell checker. OO isnt for everyone. its for advanced computer users who hate the paperclip and are willing to sit down and learn (and configure) something new.
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
I am the admin at a K-12. We had thought about using OpenOffice, but we get state grant money for software. The licensing for MS Office is more than covered, so we go with that. Why not?
Most of the faculty and staff still hold the idea that "the students should learn the application they will be using in the workplace." I don't agree, but it's a hard point to argue against.
Plus, OpenOffice is still a little rough around the edges. Funny, I bet if it "looked cool" they would be a lot more receptive...
I don't see why this switch wouldn't be as easy the other way.
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
I used to go to Gould Academy, right before I graduated a few years ago, they migrated from Windows to Red Hat Linux, and also Open Office. If you want some suggestions, I would e-mail the IT people, search the website for either Harry Dresser, or Derek Dresser. I am sure they would love to talk to anybody about how they got support for the migration! http://www.gouldacademy.org/
Regardless of the MS Office vs Openoffice question, I'd have to ask why exactly you're spending money every year just in case Microsoft release a new version. Many, if not most, commercial companies don't do this, and if you're not using collaborative features such as Sharepoint it would be hard to justify anything beyond Word / Excel / Access 97 on a "features" basis.
Actually, I used Open Office 1.1.4 for writing my masters thesis. It has all the features I needed. People around the world must really be wasting their money on MS Office. No matter what price they pay for it.
At a nearby High School they had StarOffice for a short period of time. Students and teachers were complaining about the interface being different than MS Offices. For compatibility reasons the default formats were those of Microsoft, but instead of that solution I think they should have offered a free disc with StarOffice to all the students (it was allowed by the license). A High School do not have the need to use a widespread format for a task as simple as writing a paper. StarOffice was soon replaced with MS Office again, not because MS Office was better, but because people knew how it worked. In my opinion they should have stayed with StarOffice a little longer to force people to get used to it and maby have offered some courses (but that is expensive).
If there are computer resource (memory, space, etc.) problems with OpenOffice, there are always a few free alternatives, although there might be some legal issues with the free version of the 602 PC Suite.
Too bad the version of Openoffice packaged with fedora core test 1 & 2 bombs as soon as I try to open a word processing document. There is no way these guys are going to bite into M$ unless they make stability their primary concern in all of their ventures...
Outside the CS program there is a computer literacy requirement for all students. But computer literacy is defined narrowly. Not just "know MS Office", but "know this way to do things in MS Office". The test for that course does not even use Office - but instead fakes it and counts "incorrect" keystrokes and mouse clicks.
I'm trying to figure out how to change this, but it is so deeply ingrained that any suggestion of change is treated like the plague.
MS Office is more than just Word & Excel. If your school or company uses Outlook with an Exchange server, Office becomes a total work environment. We used to use Thunderbird where I work, but when they switched us to Exchange, I realized Outlook was the real cement that ties us to MS Office. Now the intergration between Office 2003 & IE 6 is even more complete when you use Outlook - so I gave up on Firefox too.
In terms of total functionality and usefulness, I am completely happy with Office 2003. I don't like the alternatives. I don't even like Office 2004 on the Mac. For me to switch to anything else means I loose in overall user satisfaction.
Sorry, but I hope my school never tries to save money by going to OOo.
However, if you don't have Outlook/Exchange, and just use Office for Word & Excel, I'm not sure if it matters.
Have the "powers that be" use OpenOffice for a few weeks. That way they can see for themselves that a free product can do just as much as the alternative. I'm not saying the school shouldn't "donate" some funds if they are using it on every workstation, however.
....save $600....blah blah". Keep in mind, I deal with small businesses and individuals mainly so $600 (or whatever the cost actually ends up being) is literally enough of a savings for them to buy another computer from us instead of software in most cases.
The way I get people excited about OpenOffice is quite simple. When they say, "oh and we need Office Professional too". I ask why and it's usually because they need spreadsheet abilities or something minor like that. I say, "Let's just do it this way. Try this first since it's free. If that doesn't work out for you, we'll get Office for you and move on with our lives. I'd rather you atleast give this a try for the $600 you're going to save."
From the looks on their faces I can tell all they really hear is "blah blah blah blah blah
Point being, you have to hit them where the wallet is. Take the time if you have to, and show them how to use it a little. Show them that it's not all that different and can do anything that they would need as studies have shown that 90% of Office 2000 users still use it the same as Office 95.
"What advice do you have in selling this to tech coordinators and administrators who are not enlightened by Open Source?"
I don't know how to sell it to tech coordinators or admins, but I _DO_ know how to sell it to your math department.
Type '{-a +- sqrt{b^2 - 4 a c}} over {2 a}' (no quotes) into Openoffice, select it, go Insert>Object>Formula and watch it turn into a pretty formula right in front of your eyes. The only thing MS Office has that's remotely close to this (MS Equation Editor) is very slow, because it requires you to constantly alternate between the mouse and keyboard
Since it is free, you can give away copies. Therefore you can argue that you can give every student a copy regardless of what type of computer mom and dad have at home. I would imagine that you could even make a customized version that is called AnySchool High Office with the school's name and mascot all over it. Schools seem to love that kind of school spirit stuff. By every student using the smae program you don't have to worry about incompatability and you aren't forcing parents to buy expensive software to use at home and you don't need to worry about if you are doing something "legal" with it or not.
You could also talk up the educational opportunities in it since the concept of free software and "free as in freedom" could easilly be used as a theme for a schoolwide unit on freedom and democracy where each subject somehow ties into the theme, which is another thing that is pretty big in educational pedogogy.
Finally, you could also bring out the Word macro virus scare tactic, but i'm not sure how honest that is since I don't think that is a very serious problem any more.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I don't agree with the migration but this one is easy to solve....
And what happens when the admins need a file from a teacher and she sends it in OO.o format?
There is no reason the admins can't have OO on their systems as well. Remember with extensions when she double clicks on the document OO will automatically start. So, she opens OpenOffice and exports it to Word if she needs to.
I am a teacher and can share a similar experience:
.doc, .xls, and .ppt. OO.org won't do a good enough job on those. plus, asking teachers (and I am one by the way)to learn something new is going to be impossible, no matter how close the two really are.
.sxw it might be a start.
1) district tech people will get freebies er, um, demos, from microsoft. you know, windows server, visual studio, etc., to "tryout" as it were. gonna influence their decision
2) people will already have 1000's of prior docs in
3) "if it's free, it can't be good" and "it's what they use in the real world" will prevail. schools are no longer institutions of learning, but exist simply to train workers. i could cry. we don't read nor write nor think anymore. sorry to kvetch. but, there is a mindset about "Office" and you're just a salmon.
4) teachers get a copy for home. so they think they're getting a steal. kinda hard to overcome that.
5) here's the glimmer of hope. set up a small lab with OO.org. since the really expensive thing for schools is hardware (software is actually pretty cheap. they want to get the kids hooked.) set up a linux thin client lab, or a linux lab with older computers. then use OO.org there. the other thing is this: since you can't give Office to the kids, but you can OO.org, make a technology plan to have a "give the kids a CD day". perhps if the kids turn in work in
6) another alternative. since much school hardware is OOOOLLLLDDDD, try abiword. it's small and fast. that'll get them interested in OSS.
look, I've been a teacher for ten years and been excited and shot down too many times to tell you. am I cynical, sure. you're going up against a beauracracy who doesn't care about saving money. remember, they have to do budget burning too. saving them money screws that up. sad but true. i hope you get this far down.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
A school should by law go for the cheapest acceptable solution that all students can use at home, regardless of if they have Windows, Mac or Linux.
I like MS Office myself, and I would not recommend a commercial private business to change to OO, but public education is a completely different matter.
I think this is the killer reason. The schools can give out cd's with OO (and maybe some other Open Source software) students can take it home and have THE SAME software they are using at school.
This turns the everyone-is-using-Word argument on its head. You can create a micro-environment where the same tools are used, not only in the school, but at home and in other school related organizations (after school, youth centers, etc).
I mean really, teach the little buggers to *think* and show them LaTeX. That's the stuff baby!
Because if it's the home users you are talking about it's pretty much hit or miss. Remember that Dell is primarily shipping machines with Wordperfect and Works. OOo would be a way to get the best of both worlds without having the students trash what they have already.
At least not right away...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_P ro
The last thing any corporation (especially MS) needs to be portrayed as being the evil corporation to a "broke school district trying to save money by using low-cost software". They'd be domonized pretty quickly.
I think MS is more likely to throw in VERY low-cost software (beyond current educational rates) to ensure they stay in the schools. As another poster put it - what kids use now, they'll be familiar with and use as adults...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Ontario, Canada...
7 million seats
Big enough?
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
My wife has been using Open/Staroffice and Linux for about 7 years, exclusively for about 4, and she couldn't answer any of your questions correctly because she is a user and not an administrator. Of course, the job she would be interviewing for would reflect that.
This space intentionally left blank.
I attempted a calculus project with Word at school and OOo at home, and the mathematical formulas created by Word were mutilated by OpenOffice.
Starting this past September, Ontario Public schools have been moved to StarOffice. This is not only saving a lot of money but is also allowing students to use the same application at home and school.
5 7&tid=102&tid=146&tid=185
Here is a slashdot link http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/08/03282
As far as I know the transition went smoothly. As far as features the only thing I have missed is the graphing wizard, in openoffice that is. I have taken a look at the version two beta and this seems to be fixed.
I am currently finishint my second year at university and have been using star/openoffice for at least 4 years and other then compatability there have been no problems.
With all of the schools using staroffice compatability in the education system is no longer an issue.
Good luck.
Burn Bright or Fade Away
6. "Teaching kids IT" in such a way that they can only use one specific word processor from a company that has been convicted of monopoly practices is simply unethical. As an ex-teacher myself, I consider a teacher's responsibility to be greater than just choosing whatever is easiest. And, of course, OpenOffice really is close enough to Office that there is no real difference for most purposes, so you also have issues such as wasting tax payers' money.
If your position is such that you can convince them to switch from MS Office (showing the speed or lack thereof of the most recent version on any hardware a school district would have should do the trick), I'd strongly suggest NOT to just install straight Open Office. Most of the time, the word processor is the most-used application, and OOo is simply massive and clumsy if all you're doing is word processing.
I'd suggest installing OOo without Writer, then installing AbiWord (www.abisource.com). It's much smaller, sleeker, and more "finished" feeling. For the number of times word processors are used compared to the other suite tools, your students will thank you for the quick startup. It's also really easy to rescue data in case a file is corrupt: the file format is a simple straight XML, which can be opened in Notepad and text copied and pasted out. No compression or concatenation to wrestle with. It also (for many tasks) has a better Word importer than OOo.
(Disclaimer: I help out with Windows QA and other things for the project at times. I joined it for a reason, though...)
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
You have no Idea do you?
MSOffice training is a HUGE international business. I can personally attest to hundreds of people comming to our neighbor's offices (Executrain) to be trained in MSOffice.
Hell, they send the same people every year to get re-trained.
Training is a must foreverything in big organizations. The fact that you dont need training doesnt mean companies dont spend gazillions of money exactly for training in MSOffice.
NO SIG
Have you ever been involved in contract negotiations like the GP is describing?
No. To me, a contract is take it or leave it (software licenses, mobile phone contracts, web site TOS, etc), but I see only the consumer point of view because I haven't been in the work force long enough to ascend to management. I apologize.
Lawyers could send these documents back and forth 10 or 20 times (or more), with minute changes each time.
Looks like a job for wiki software more than anything else. In particular, MediaWiki can easily show the edit history of a document and the diff between any two versions of a document.
You can't expect every student to install OOo on their home machines, so compatibility issues are going to come up.
Even less can you expect every student to install Microsoft Word on their home machines. It's a lot easier for a K-12 student to save up his or her allowance for a $10 OOo disc from CheapBytes than $120 for even the student edition of Microsoft Office.
When I produce a toddler I'm going to set them up with the latest version of Linux and open source apps and teach them the basics of computing on it. They will start computing with a different outlook on how a computer operates.
The kid will know more than any other toddler... Not only will they know how to draw using a mouse, they'll be able to mount drives, set up their httpd, etc. :)
I can't wait until they come back home after visiting their friends. This is similar to how my parents raised me... They raised me on religion then let me discover the other avenues of life for myself when I went to college. :)
I single-handedly moved my elementary school to OpenOffice two years ago. I did it because we were previously using MS Word 4.5a as our standard (on the student systems), and we were having problems with kids who had MS Office at home. At first I added OO to the existing software mix, and steered kids who needed MS Word compatibility to use OO; two school years ago, in September, I simply stopped using Works and made its icon harder to find, starting kids with OO from the beginning of the year. We've had some minor compatibility issues w. kids working on presentations on Powerpoint at home and on OO at school- mainly due to differences in special effects. Other than that, compatibility has been good. While we were using MS Works, we purchased copies of MS Word (97 or 2000) or Word Perfect for teachers who wanted them on their systems... I didn't replace those. Clerical staff continue to use Word Perfect. Education pricing for MS Office is about CDN$85; pricing for MS Word by itself is about CDN$45... not too expensive-- but we have about 100 systems altogether; $8500 is far more than we can afford to easily pay. My school district may be looking at District-wide software recommendations next Fall-- I'm going to try to be on the committee making the recommendations. By the way-- if you're demoing OO to your staff, you may want to show off the version 1.9 beta; it has a more professional look and feel and some modules (such as the presentation package Impress) are quite different from the 1.1 version. Hopefully 2.0 will be out soon, but I find the 1.9 beta quite stable and usable.
I may be doing something (or many things :) wrong, but it sucks to write any big document in word (or OpenOffice.org :) as compared to latex (or I asume docbook or such).
Ensuring consistency is a mess, pagination is a mess and oftentimes there is some little thing that doesn't work as it should.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html
I've said it before:1 45831&cid =12225756
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=
I charge to fix computers. My rates are 35/hr with a 3 hour minimum. For spyware, I just charge my minimum. That allows me to throw in a few perks.
Every spyware infested computer has these programs installed: FireFox (with ieview), Thunderbird, GIMP, PDFcreator and OpenOffice.org 1.1.
I tell them the reason why they want to use Firefox is to prevent most of the spyware from infecting their computer and remove the icons for IE. I also give them a book: Sams Teach Yourself OpenOffice.org All In One. [a1books.com]
This book is Mom tested. I gave her the 501 things different about OOo book and she didn't like it. But she liked the one "with all of the pictures, it helps me see what it's talking about".
I might have to wait until a good book comes out for OOo 2.0 once it comes out. Some users might not deal well with the book describing the old interface.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
To be called an MS fan boy here. But i have no problems with Office 2003. I can do everything that I want, Outlook does everything I want and thats the program I use most often being open 24/7. I wouldnt want to waste my time learning a new program, switching to something new and having to press differnt buttons, learn new logo's etc download install it, id rather spend all that time wasted doing somehting else like drinking beer, flying on Vatsim or coding. If OO can give me something that MS Office cant, then I might think about it, but untill then, I am happy with no complaints
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Well, I also work for a school district, and we have gone through this exact headache. Let me tell you about our experience. .doc for 'maximum compatibility', or better yet, as .pdf! Yeah, let's see MS do that without a ghastly expensive 3rd-party app or an inconvenient "PDF Printer". Besides, OOo is the same on any platform. We suffer from OS Diaspora, and each different one requires a different version of MS Office. In addition, on OS X, it's totally different again! So save some headaches and a whack of cash. If your admins want to spend the money, get them to buy LCD monitors or low-profile PCs that use less power.
Back when our IT program was in its infancy and money was very tight, we got by with donated antique computers, and as much Free software as possible. The ONLY thing we licensed was Win98SE. Everything else from POP clients to word processing was Open source. Frankly, it was great. But then our Board came into some serious money (read: First Nations School District) and suddenly we could afford to buy the "best" so we "had" to. That meant, obviously, switching to MS Office. Why? Because we could afford it, and hey, it's the standard, isn't it?
Here's our current situation: 4 or 5 computers in every classroom with Win98SE and Office 2000; Computers on every admin and secretarial desk with WinXP and Office2003; and Apple iBooks in the hands of every secondary student with Office for Mac. A headache? Damn right! But hey, at least the file formats all work...don't they? Uh-huh. In addition, we have a special font for our language, since it has some unique glyphs in it. To make the font work on the PCs, we had to use a keymapper program, since Microsoft is not too keen on standards like Unicode (I guess since they didn't get to market it, right?). On the Macs, the font works great, but NOT in Office (of course!), so generally we just use TextEdit. Works fine. After all, for students, it should be all about learning mad keyboard skillz, and not about maximum file compatibility. Oh, and of course it works in OOo...but will they switch back? *ahem* Yep, in a couple years when we can no longer afford to pay for M$ Select Licensing.
My recommendation, for what it's worth: Go with OOo now and save yourself the grief. MS Office is more common, but so what? Save your files as
One useful solution is to put just one copy of MS office on a computer running VNCserver. Then, in the occasional event of someone really needing to use MS Office, they can just connect via VNC. It's a good backup option.
Also, if you want lighter-weight/faster, especially for older machines, try abiword/gnumeric. Abiword is available for Windows (and there is an initial port of gnumeric too).
So what you're saying is that everybody should use M$Word for the rest of eternity because everybody uses it already?
Change, fortunately, happens. By the time these school kids hit the interviewers OpenOffice 4.0 should be well known, everybody at home will be using it because it's cheap and freely copyable and companies will be using it because the people at home are using it and are trained in it. The cost of OpenOffice training is grossly exaggerated.
---
Are you a creator or a consumer?
Strictly speaking:
Up my ass, a greased up Yoda doll, I have.
I will switch to OpenOffice only after Physical Review Letters and other well-known journals start accepting documects prepared using it.
Actually, I tried this approach -- switched all students and teachers (~175 users) from MS Office and Windows to StarOffice and linux. The transition has been surprisingly smooth. Initially, the toughest part of the change was convincing parents that learning the concepts used to create documents, presentations, and spreadsheets was more important than the rote learning of the discrete steps required to accomplish these tasks using a particular piece of s/w. I left administration and staff on Windows with MSO, but as I reflect on that decision, I see (at least in the school I provide my volunteer services to) that there really are surprisingly few "power" users for whom any incompatibilities would be a problem. More evidence that your average user does no more with their wordprocesing s/w than they would with a typewriter.
We use Both Apps to teach the basic knowledge of what a word processor does. Basically the simple rules to find things you need to format the text and such.
Not even in latin.
I'd be careful tossing around the word idiot.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
If you think your school would want some support initially or long term consider StarOffice. SUN has a deal where schools, students, researchers, staff, or faculty members can download StarOffice for free from Sun's Software Download Center for computers the school district owns, otherwise use OpenOffice.org. The marketing information is at http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/soluti ons/staroffice.html
and from there you can go to links for free training resources for both students and staff. There is a charge for regular phone support. In addition, the link has a link to K-12 lesson plans using StarOffice. Note the lesson plans have a break down for grade levels, subjects, and for some states teaching to the state standards.
Note StarOffice has a train the trainer initiative. It is stated as a 3 day curriculum taught by teachers who use StarOffice. http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/soluti ons/staroffice/leadership.html is the link. There has to be a catch if your district isn't close to another one with trainers, but I am missing it.
If you still want to try OpenOffice.org use the information and contacts on OpenOffice.org's website for the school initiative http://marketing.openoffice.org/education/schools/
I would probably push for StarOffice first (includes filter for WordPerfect files) and then if more budget cuts come and support is all online or better price for OpenOffice.org switch to it. As for the grammar checker issue, proofreading a document is good practice for young kids/adults and most standardized tests won't let students run their essays through a grammar checker. Sorry to skip the proofreading.
I've been doing tech support at college for some time already. I've tried to make them install OO.o in some labs and guess what; there are as many people who complains about compat problems on OO.o and MSOffice. What I mean is that OO.o is more compatible with MS formats than MS is with different versions of their own format. Not all students have the same version. And if you compare OfficeXP opening Office2003 documents with OpenOffice opening the same documents, you'll realize that OO.o does a really good job!
It isn't harder to use any alternative. Once you know how to do somethin on one, you can almost easily figure out how to do it on the other. But the thing it to do changes gradually, install OO.o without removing office. Show teachers the resemblance between both both alternatives and impress them with cool and unique features. Make OO.o gain the heart of the people and you'll win you case.
But remember the important is not assimilation; it's more about choice.
They modded up the grandparent post, who is talking about what OO dreams of being, and modded down the parent post, who described what OO actually is like.
Vote for Pedro
What you need to do is show everyone how much money will be available for sports programs if they use OpenSource instead of Microsoft. Put it in those terms, and you'll have plenty of backers. Backers that will have way more pull than the IT people.
Its terrible how bad some teachers are. If they get a problem or something they go back to the book to look for every damn problem. I dunno. Buying the best and then not knowing how to use it is pretty insane. I would much rather use Open Office. It it just as easy to use as microsoft word. But the thing is that they dont want to learn a little. Thats why no one wants to switch to any of the apple os's. They are scared of the unknown.
Nobody was ever fired for buying Microsoft.
It really is that simple. Unless the district has cash problems (and all of them do with the silly spending sprees they go on for their favorite hobby-horse "vision" du-jour) then it is pretty solid that it'll be Microsoft. And they will count the education discount as "savings" too. Bet on it.
Been there.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I see three issues with converting to OO. The first issue is Access, the second is Macros, and the third being external program that rely on office for output. Segmenting users is the key here.
Your user base is one part students, one part teachers, and one part administration. Each group has different needs.
Students: Students often do not use the advanced features of modern text editors. The students are also less likely to make use of pre-existing macros than other groups. (This may not be true of all students, as some teachers may have pre-made macros for specific lessons.) With the little use of pre-existing Macros, you might be able to get Open-Office in the school door. At least on the Student-used computers.
Administrators: The Administrators ARE likely to use documents with extensive macros, Access Databases, and 3rd party programs that expect MS office for output. You are not likely to get Open-office in the door if any of these conditions exist. Accept it as part of your migration plan. "Yes we need to keep MS office in certain places, but we will free $$ by using OO in all the student lab computers."
Teachers: The Teachers are mid-way between the students and the administration in terms of advanced MSO use. Much of what the teachers deal with is not complex, and does not have Macros. A few of the power-user-teachers will have more advanced use, and many may have Access. Additionally, the teachers will need to be able to open the student documents so compatibility is key. I would suggest that the Teachers computers have MSO and OO. If the OO-Base (2.x) program is more compatible with Access (Not likely considering the formula conversion in spreadsheets), many of the teachers who have grading databases may be able to use only OO. I would not count on it. Teachers should be assumed to have both office suites.
In this way, you will not alienate anyone who really wants MSO. Administrators stay with what they like, and perhaps need. Teachers use two systems: MSO, and occasionally OO if a document really does not format well. (With luck, the teachers will spend most of their time in OO; use it at home to save money on their next hardware update cycle.) Students, who probably use >50% of licences have their license cost dropped. (OK, it's academic pricing - but it's still a cost.)
Most importantly, you need to do a survey (at least preliminary) to see how MSO is used. Some users from each group can prob. be switched to it, and some likely cannot. If someone cannot be switched, do not force the issue.
Firstly, to overcome FUD, stress it's similarity to M$ office in terms of ease of use and function. Not that M$ should be the benchmark, but that it is due to its omnipresence.
Secondly, allow me to relay a brief story about my aunt...
She is not stupid. She owns and manages a small business that has a few million USD go through there every year, and does this quite effectivly. However, I was astounded when I was called in to 'fix' the computer - typical spyware / system performance issues. She could not understand why these things (spyware) were happening, and hasn't run ad-aware etc. even though I showed her how. She thinks that you are not on the internet until you click the 'blue E' on the desktop. I explained why this was not so. She doesn't understand how to type in http://www.whatever.com without searching, and couldn't find hotmail after her homepage was no longer MSN. I've seen others, after changing portals during an ISP change, not be able to find Google anymore because Yahoo is now on their homepage. 'Google is gone!' For these people in the business world that use computers only as tools, that resist change, and that don't want to understand technology because it's not what they do, changing from one office suite to another is a daunting task. I so wanted to install Firefox to prove that the 'blue E' was not how you get online (and to hopefully add extra security so I don't have to return as soon to fix). She has no firewall. I almost turned off the 'worm protection' in Norton Antivirus 2005 because it was confusing her due to receiving 'you are being attacked!' type messages.
What is my intended moral of the story? Basically, we need to expose children/teens in the public schools to CHOICES that don't look identical. Knowing that 'bookmarks' and 'favorites' are the same thing is critial. 'Oh no, my favorites are gone because they blocked the blue E with some firehydrant thing! What are bookmarks! This red fox thing is bad, I want my blue E!' The more diversity we have in software choices, the more opportunity we have to encourage students how to find the soultion to the problem instead of point-click-repeat. Software will change, and we need to prepare students for that change by teaching them to understand how to use software. I don't want another generation to grow up expecting to click the blue E and have everything handed to them. We don't have to all be hackers, but the lack of BASIC (no pun intended) knowledge on the part of so many M$ users astounds me - really.
I did jokingly suggest changing to Ubuntu, but she was only interested in the lack of the blue E. *SIGH*
Meh
The focus in schools is teaching kids. If its not, we have a bigger problem. So, assuming that your school offers even a basic typing/word processing class we need to examine what that class is teaching students.
If the class is there to teach students to use MS Office then sticking with MS Office and having them memorize and regurgitate those patterns to accomplish a task is the way to go.
If the class is designed to teach students to create, modify, and present documents in an educational and professional manner then OpenOffice could be used. Instead of training them what tools to use to accomplish a task TEACH them to LEARN and DISCOVER what tools they need to accomplish a task.
By example:
-If I want to do a mail merge in MS Office, I start by clicking the insert menu, then clicking 'mail merge', then clicking.....
-If I want to mail the same document to multiple people without retyping each one I should look for a tool or template that will allow me to do this. I would first start by skimming the menu options for some likely candidates, then use help or the software manual to make sure that is the right tool. Once I do that, I will probably have to insert something to tell the word processor where I want names and addresses to appear.
I think that addressing it as a cirriculum and educational issue rather than a cost/philosophical issue will get you farther AND benefit the students. Teaching them problem solving skills rather than task skills will take your students much farther.
You try toteach them ethics and thinking. If the kid does or not deens on how smart and/or moivated the child is. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
If you aim for the starts, you may just reach the moon.
You might want to look into the efforts of Bob Kerr from the Edinburgh Linux Users Group in getting Scottish libraries to carry the OpenCD.
Of course there are people who write books in Word. But writing a book is such an easy task that it can also be done in notepad. It doesn't even touch the advanced capabilities. Well, maybe you could use styles, indexes and history tracking, but beyond that...
And I am beyond simple word processing with Word. I have programmed Word (both through VBA and COM interface) and I have 2 years experience in profesional typesetting (Quark Xpress & PageMaker), so I think I pretty much understand what everything related to word processing and typesetting.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
I was work in one school were we migrate to Linux since 5 years, in first time we use StarOffice like office suite, but later we start to use OpenOffice and all things go so fine. You could enter to the school site http://www.gfc.edu.co. In this place you will find so much informatio about or experience with Linux.
Cool, I drive past the Linden Hall School every now and then; nice to meet someone from a similar geographic location.
In an effort to stay on-topic, though, just as a thought I wonder how much less open a public school would be compared to your private school example. I know at my alma mater (I worked there part time for a bit as well) they were pretty much locked in to Apple as much because the IU (a conglomeration of schools grouped together by county which provides training and support to the 'member' districts) was (AFAIK) all Mac as well. That started to change a few years ago when they got a single PC lab, since then they've added two more but those are primarily for learning Office and learning to type; all important research and typing is still done on the Macs. Anyway, my point being that there were other external factors keeping them on Mac (all their support at the next level was Mac based, their software was all Mac and the costs were shared, all their old documents were ClarisWorks format...things have been changing, but at that point it would have been hard to jump to Windows without any of that)...I wonder if there's a difference between private and public schools in the regard of choosing OOo/Office. There *shouldn't* be, but I've been removed from the scene for a few years so I don't know what's been going on lately. And obviously a platform jump would have been much harder than a jump from Office to OOo.
Cheers!
Plugin for making Latex Equations in OpenOffice:
http://www.fyma.ucl.ac.be/wiki/~piroux/OOo+macro
You misunderstand; I was *given* an Excel spreadsheet that had to be used. I didn't make it and it was too complex for me to simply dash off an emulated one with OO's macros.
I really don't understand it. I used Microsoft Office all my life until I tried out Linux a few years ago, and then I became an OpenOffice user. Seriously, it does everything MS Office does, heck I even like the interface more! It's beyond me why people are still even using MS Office in workplaces, schools, whatever, it's such a huge payment to pay for something you could get for free.
Long live open source!
Get me free Opera! Just one click!
At my workplace, the current system build is Win XP, MS Office 2003 (that is, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Frontpage and Outlook) ... and Access 97.
- Chuq
I do interview for support techs. The biggest problem we have had are techs that will not seek answers but instead just make them up. I often ask questions that I figure they do not have a chance in hell of knowing. I am seeking that honest I do not know vs. making crap up :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
However, as the unofficial tech support person for my extended family, I know where the making crap up stuff comes from. My family all knows I have only run Linux at home in many years, and only use Windows as a smart terminal to log into the Sun machines at work. They still ask me questions about WinXP, which I have never used. I answer them honestly with an "I don't know", but they won't accept that for an answer. They press me until I make my best guess, which is usually close enough for them.
This space intentionally left blank.
$350....free....hmmm, which would you choose?
Hail fellow Pennsylvanian!
Well I'm not sure about the differences. Certainly those school systems with a Mac emphasis will have a more difficult time with this and that's due to these reasons:
1) There is no officially supported version of OOo for the Mac. Yes, there is Neooffice/J, but there is little or no support from the OOo project for what they are doing. At one point, OOo's 2.0 was to have a Mac release but it was canned. My guess is that Sun wasn't too interested and Apple's outright snubbing of the project wasn't making that any better either. The other thing was that with Neooffice doing such a good job, I think the team felt that a separate effort was no longer necessary.
2) There is no StarOffice for the Mac. And that's a crying shame. Again, with no official corporate support, that makes it harder to sell to those who are concerned that the OOo/Neooffice/J projects can't match what MS has done with Office:Mac. Now if MS was to drop Office:Mac, that would be a different story. But with Apple's new word processor/desktop publisher (and other office-type software possibly under development) and MS's effort, Neooffice/J is a harder sell simply because of support.
I believe what needs to happen is Neooffice needs to offer a 'professional' edition of Neooffice/J. Something with direct support options at a price comparable to StarOffice.
It is my goal to insure that Linden Hall School is platform agnostic. I've been finding that it's a really hard thing to do, but it is possible. If a student wishes to bring a Mac (which I prefer actually - less chance of spyware/viruses), a PC, or something w/Linux on it (now THAT would be interesting!), it is my responsibility to see that it can be used in this environment. A lot of other schools make their students buy a particular machine but that's a lot more difficult when you have international students from all over the globe who may not have access to a specific brand or model.
Anyway, great hearing from you!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
This is an honest question. Why isn't OpenOffice experiencing the same explosive success as Firefox? What is keeping these same Firefox "switchers" from getting their hands on OpenOffice, as well?
It took me a while to understand this one. I have converted a number of my clients to Firefox with no push-back. If they don't use tabbed browsing, there is no change to the way the menus work. A URL is a URL and favorites are favorites.
The same users have screamed and had me reinstall MS Office. The menus are dramatically different enough that you can't just muscle blindly through reformatting forms and formatting.
With Firefox, the learning curve is about five minutes. With Open Office, you really need to snuggle up with documentation for a couple of hours to get really comfortable.
Here would be my suggestion for part of the solution: If there was an installation option in OO of "MS Compatibility Mode" where the menus mimicked MS Word, then we would have a fighting chance.
Don't underestimate the power of inertia!
Also, the issue of spreadsheet macro compatibility is enough to turn off most of my clients who are accountants. Many have developed or purchased so many macros over the years and have no motivation to even investigate converting these things.
So for now, I have both MS Office and OO on both home and work PCs. My kids have OO. My CPA wife won't even let it on her PC.
Oh well.....
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Finally! a Slashdot topic on this issue. Part of my job is to administer a 30 PC (plus a few Macs) lab at a large state university. The department I work for is in the sciences, and the largest usage of the lab workstations is by freshman and sophomores taking introductory level courses. The state contract price for each seat for MS Office 2004 is around $50 (30 x $50 == about the same a new AD server). So, throwing caution to the wind we tried OOo (1.1, I believe at the time). BIG MISTAKE!
.DOC file. THEN, when saving that .DOC in OOo in the future the application will prompt the user with a cryptic message about .DOC not being able to save all the features that can be contained in the StarOffice format. This is VERY confusing to the users (which BTW, can't use the StarOffice format in other campus labs, which is a very real reality I'm sure you will all agree). From what I could find there is no way to override this behavior.
I use OpenOffice.org personally, it's not what I would consider fully-featured, but one expects that from open source (yes, I said it!). THE big issue that the end users (freshman, sophomore college students) had is that the default file type is the "StarOffice" format. One HAS to override this everytime a new file is saved to a
The other issue is that (forgive me if I'm out of date, but I've let OOo fester for a while in Open Source land before trying it again) the spreadsheet functionality is woefully inadaquate. The research graduate students had a horrible time finding the trend line equation. Yes, I know there is a work around, but it's TOO HARD.
So, one day I enter my lab for my weekly maintenance duties to find that some industrious individuals had scribed the words "WE NEED OFFICE, NOT FREE OFFICE" on every white board in the room! We made the $1500 purchase for MS Office 2004 the next day.
The user experience in OOo is not close enough to the user experience in MS Office. If OOo decides it wants to take a "Firefox-level" market share away from Microsoft, or even approach it, the important functionality in OOo has to be very very similar to MS Office.
There's a problem with this story: it requires the acknowledgement of those obnoxious persons (i.e. most of Slashdot) to admit they are, in fact, obnoxious and pushy when it comes to open source software vs. closed software.
The way I did it with my wife was to show her the benefits of one over the other, then I let her decide. Mind you, I wasn't pushy, nor did I mock Outlook or IE or go on zealous rants about how Microsoft is supposedly evil. The end result is that she now uses Firefox instead of her AOL browser because she "can't live without tabs".
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
2 reasons:
- as certified geek somehow, a lot of system administration falls to me. Specially firefox advocacy falls in that category.
- At work, a sound open source awareness makes it easier for me to bring some OSS components being in, and believe me, and now the manager uses firefox, that is a lot easier.