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

Demo it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not impossible but...

[MPHellwig]

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.

I don't know about you...

[gandell]

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.

Will it be useful?

[Monf]

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..."

Openoffice 2 is superb

[johansalk]

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.

It's a straight "savings" pitch

[winkydink]

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.

Compatibility

[ZephyrXero]

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...

I've found

[whackco]

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.

Evaluation

[davecrusoe]

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...

Re:It's quite simple really:

[American AC in Paris]

If it really is that simple, then why haven't people been flocking in droves to OpenOffice?

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?

Some important points

[Coryoth]

There have been a number of studies with regard to difficulties in shifting businesses over to OpenOffice, but it is important to remember that the school environment provides some key differences.

1. Training: This is significantly limited in comparison to a large company. Students and teachers are not going to use as much of the complex and or custom features, and the basics of OpenOffice are sufficiently similar that there isn't too much to learn. More importantly a school has massive turnover - students are constantly graduating and new students arriving. The majority of computer users (which is to say students) are going to fresh meat for training anyway. There simply isn't the large staff base that needs to be expensively retrained.
2. Features and Compatability: As already mentioned, an office suite at a school is not going to get the same work out as it will at a large company - custom macros, document tracking, custom styles etc. are all things that simply aren't going to get used. Compatability is also less of an issue. The majority of material produced on school computers is going to be students typing up reports, or using spreadsheets for assignments. These are transitory - it really doesn't matter very much if they can't be flawlessly imported into the new office suite after the report/assignment deadline has passed. There simply isn't the same amount of critical documents locked up in other formats as a large company will be faced with.
3. Support: Support can be purchased from Sun if you want, but at schools the majority of users are students who are, let's be honest, often left to figure it out themselves. As an added bonus OpenOffice runs on most operating systems, and the school can easily provide free copies for the students to take home and learn. At High Schools I've been to senior students who are interested are often drafted in to help with a certain amount of system adminstration (the same way senior students can volunteer to help in the library etc.) Given that OpenOffice is freely available even in source form, you can expect interested students to have a high degree of knowledge of OpenOffice and help provide support. Some of them might even be contributing code to OpenOffice!

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.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[Lumpy]

I wish that was true with microsoft office.

it will not open older Word documents in Office 2003 that were created in office 97 correctly. OO.o opens them far closer to the actual desired output.

yes, this is true, after upgrading marketing tyo office 2003 we had a rash of complaints opening word documents from 1998 was causing problems or looked wierd.

microsoft cant even be compatable with it's self.

L.A. Charter School 100% OpenOffice

[CoccaNut]

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...

Re:Hard one

[WhyCause]

I used to work in the computer lab at a community college. I couldn't stand all those stupid textbooks (they don't really deserve to be called that, BTW) that "taught" the student in terms of step-by-step click at the mouse coordinates kind of lessons. Nobody actually learned anything about computers.

I used to teach computer skills at a college level (Intro to Computer-Aided Engineering), and we didn't bother with a textbook for that reason. What we did was present them with a finished product, some useful tips (e.g., Need to change font color? Look under Format...), and then turned the students loose. It was my job to assist as they worked, and generally make sure that everyone was on track. If they had questions, I would generally say something like, "I don't know, but let's see if we can find it." The fact that I, the authority figure, also had to look for things really drove home that using software is just remembering simple rules, not remembering how to do everything in every program. I even got a nomination for the department's 'Teacher of the Year' award (not that I was elligible, being a TA and all) from someone in that class.

Of course, as we got into more complicated software packages, I had to teach them the basics of programming, Finite Element Analysis, and drafting as well, but by that time, most of the students had picked up on the fact that if they looked, they would find it.