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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?"
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 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.
...such as being forever locked into their "standard". Welcome to illegal monopoly practice hell.
The issue you're seeing is not relavent in a school environment. Students will regularly start with a blank page, or a template created specifically for the course. They will NOT have three hundred page manuscripts that describe... actually, what the heck DO people put in those 300 page documents? I have never figured that out. The only document I've ever had trouble porting was a resume I did with Word 97. The formatting got screwed up in OpenOffice, but then again it got screwed up in MSOffice 2000 as well. *shrug*
THere are benefits to using industry standard programs...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
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
Good education will teach skills and not teach to a particular application. For what 90% of people use something like Word, WordPerfect, or OOo Writer for is really basic, and how to do it really doesn't change much between programs.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- 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
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.
I certainly hope my kids will learn more in high school than how to be good secretaries. I wrote school papers with pen/paper, and later with AppleWorks, yet I have somehow managed to move on.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Oh not this little bourbon again...a school's job is not to teach people to be little software drones, it's job is to instill critical thinking, knowledge, and ethics. Furthermore, the kid if properly taught will be able to quickly adapt to the brand-new MS Office which is somthing employers are really looking for: intelligence and adaptability. If a graduating student cannot get a job simply because he does not know Office than we should abandon the school system entirely and just simple hand-out MS manuals. There is more to knowledge than knowing how to dismiss Clippy with the right combinations.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
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.
They will be upgrading Office regardless of whether it is MS or Open so most of your points are moot. The last one is a problem of compatibilities regardless of whether it is different versions of MS or thirdparties.
Stop being the typical MS fanboy and apologist and start being more realistic.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I look at it as a testament to human laziness. Since OOo can be given to the students to install at home for free, you shouldn't have a problem there. Pre-existing forms can be recreated. Not every MS document is supported by a later version. Things change. Sure, sometimes an OOo document looks like crap in MS Office, but sometimes and MS Office document looks like crap in OOo. Unlike businesses, schools are tax-funded and have a fiscal responsibility to choose cheaper alternatives if they will work - even if it takes some actual work in the beginning.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
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
1 - How much will it cost to reinstall everything? That's IT time, == $$$.
.doc they can. If they want to gradually move over, they can do that too. If they want to do a massive change (By reading files, then writing them out) they can do that to. It's not that difficult.
:D
This time would be the same time that it cost to upgrade to a new version of Word. (That's IT time too!)
2 - How much will it cost to upgrade some computers, since OOo is usually more resource-hungry than Office?
Do you really think that upgrading to a new version of Word will use less resources?
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).
It will cost what it costs... Once. Then whenever a new version of OO comes out there will be no cost. However if they were to upgrade to Word, they would have the almost the same cost, cause there's new features there too!
Also as it was pointed out in an earlier post, it's easier to move away from Word to OO then the other way around.
4 - How much grief will the remaining file format incompatibilities with Office bring to the school?
None. OO can read and write both formats. If the school wants to stay with
So please stop being the typical mindless free software drone and start being a bit more realistic.
So please stop being the typical mindless MS drone and start being a bit more realistic.
(and to think I've got you marked as a friend too
You obviously haven't USED Outlook. Eudora is light years behind it. Eudora is closer to Outlook Express, that crappy free thing they give away to you. The only program I have used an liked outside of Outlook is Evolution which is what I tend to use in Linux.
Try really digging into Outlook and compare it to Eudora. The interface is a lot cleaner and more refined (especially in Outlooks 2003). The organization capabilities far outway Eudora. Calendar, Tasks, Notes, they all work great and if you have a Windows based PDA you HAVE to use outlook just for all the stuff you lose otherwise. As a PIM it is excellent. Eudora is far from being a true PIM since it has minimal if any real compatibility with either Palm or Outlook.
If you ask the true die hards though which program is the most powerful they'll tell you it is Lotus Notes. Having used Outlook/Exchange, GroupWise, and Lotus in business settings I will state that Lotus is the most powerful probably but it seems to diverge a bit from the norms setup by Outlook and GroupWise (that evil program from Novell).
I haven't used Eudora in ages, so feel free to enlighten me if they have actually added useable Rules, Spam Filtering, and cleaned up what was one of the worlds ugliest interfaces for a long while.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
10 Years ago it was Word Perfet. I Think it is a real deservice to not teach childern how to use serveral word processor and spreadsheet so that get a feel for the basics so in 10 Years when Office ZZ or openoffice 600 are given to them they wont go what the hell I am suppose to do now?
When was the last time someone was provided on the job training for MS Office?
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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.
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This is just plain wrong. K-12 education (even in the US) is not about "training". As a coworker likes to put it "We teach concepts, not applications". The skills they need are "Word Processing", not "MS Word". Teaching to a specific application, or, more accurately, a specific version of a specific application, is short-sighted to say the least. Particularly in K-12. Even 12th graders will likely be in school 4 more years before their "MS Word" training becomes useful. By then, the version of Word they learned on in high school will be woefully out of date as will their training.
Kids don't need skills to be competitive in the corporate space as corporations don't hire children (for jobs that might require word processing skills). And, any application-specific skills will be outdated by the time they get to the "corporate space", no matter what application is used.
People are clearly only taught rote monkey skills and are unadaptable as everyone where I work is still using the same OS and applications they learned in high school. All of our servers and desktops are Apple II's. Except for those stuborn people who refuse to give up their Coleco's and PDP-11's.
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
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.
I've heard that idiotic argument used before. The fallacy is that kids should be taught how to use specific applications that they'll find "in the real world." Wrong! They should be taught about how to use and truly understand computer technology. By the time kids in high school now are graduating from college and getting their first real jobs, MS Office may well be a thing of the past. Honestly.. do you think in 5-8 years that OpenOffice.org will not be just a tad more attractive to businesses? (or some other project if not OO.org) Or how about modern web-based document management / production systems that eschew the silly, outdated "word processing" concept that keeps today's businesses tied to inefficient workflows and excessive paper waste.
And before you say, "Yeah, but what will they need to use in college?" consider what you used in college. Was there anything that OO.org in its current imperfect state could not handle perfectly well? Typing essays and reports? Including a simple table or chart of your chem lab results?
The problem with most schools is that they focus all their energy and resources in providing students with the "best" facilities, equipment, etc. and then miss the whole point of properly educating with an eye on the future.