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?"

Comments

Re:It's quite simple really:

[Swamii]

Not to flame, but #2 is a tad misleading. While OO supports .doc, exporting to the Microsoft .doc format isn't there, meaning people who only have MS Office (i.e. most people) can't open your document.

The default swx format can't be opened by MS Office either, which means there will be some trouble viewing student/teacher documents unless the defaults were changed (or if one was to teach everyone to export to some cross-office compatible format, but that's boiling the ocean...)

Re:Why does everyone love Outlook so?

[Anonymous Coward]

exchange, faggot nobody cares about your whore friends people use computers to make money and they use exchange to communicate and outlook works with exchange.