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:there will be hell to pay...

[Y2]

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

Guess what?

If you're used to using other office suites - such as Microsoft Office - you'll be completely at home with OpenOffice.org 1.1. However, as you become used to OpenOffice.org 1.1, you'll start to appreciate the extras that make your life easier. You can of course continue to use your old Microsoft Office files without any problems - and if you need to exchange files with people still using Microsoft Office, that's no problem either.

http://www.openoffice.org/product/index.h tml

If the punk brings a wordstar file, to heck with him.

Re:Demo it?

[t35t0r]

1 - How much will it cost to reinstall everything? That's IT time, == $$$.

Openoffice has this thing called *network install*, once it has been installed on a main server all that is needed is to install small user files, if you can click next, next, next then you can do it in less than 10 seconds. I can install OOo on 50 computers in less than 45 mins.

2 - How much will it cost to upgrade some computers, since OOo is usually more resource-hungry than Office?

OOo can be made to load up on boot so that it loads almost as quickly as MS Office. If the computers are automatically turned on in the morniing before school starts this shouldn't be a problem even on a pentium running win95.

3 - How much will it cost in money and grief to retrain everybody (yes, there are people who just get by with Word provided you don't ever change anything to their computers).

An idiot can learn how to use Openoffice. Especially if the idiot has used MS Office. In any case school is for learning. I'm not just talking about the students either, that goes for the teachers as well.

4 - How much grief will the remaining file format incompatibilities with Office bring to the school?

I challenge you to list any format incompatibilities you may think *school* kids may come across when converting from MS Office to OOo.

Re:Demo it?

[qkslvrwolf]

Actually, we tend to prefer that people be able to use computers. You want people that can use whatever you throw at them.

So instead of teaching people "click precisely here, then here" you teach people to actually read the file menus.

It really isn't that difficult. Its all in how you explain it.

Open Office has all of the word processing features you'd need at a high school. While many of those secretaries do use things like mail merge quite effectively (which exists and is easy to use in OOo), they're not likely to be using some sort of powerful, complicated macro, which is the only reasonable reason I've seen to not switch to open office. Its like teaching someone to fish vs giving them a fish. You can just show them how to do what they want in [input specific program here], or you can teach them to read menus and dialogs and help files and cover their computing needs for life. So get used to using a computer instead of a program, grow up, join the twenty first century, and stop using the bandwagon peer-pressure approach.