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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?"
Actually, not entirely true. I've got a lot of MSWord documents, and I wanted to convert them to PDF.
Sure, I could buy a PDF converter, but I saw this as a good opportunity to give OO.org a try -- open the Word document, then save/export to PDF.
OO.org could not correctly display ANY of my Word documents; I ddin't even bother trying to save as PDF at that point. And I'm not talking about minor display differences -- some documents were basically unreadable, as OO.org seemed to randomly flow the text.
I think OO.org is a great idea, but OO.org supporters have to more clearly understand that it is HARDLY a drop-in replacement for an organization which has been committed to MSWord for a long time. The Word importer is far from a useable state. (I don't doubt it handles simple Word documents well, but just using Word's built-in templates permit even a novice to quickly produce a "non-simple" document. Case in point, my documents are not all that complex.)
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
That's the biggest load of bollocks I've ever read. I've never been able to export to .DOC without at least one formatting problem, in the best of cases. And importing isn't much better. That's with the lasted OOo...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ain't that wonderful! Because it's free software what's posted on their webpage as promotional material must be correct and accepted as fact! Fact is, OOo has shitty compatibility with Word, especially with embedded images/tables/objects etc as EVERYBODY ELSE in this thread seems to understand, except you. Fact is, as a sysadmin, if there's even ONE document that fails to render properly in OOo that did render properly in MS Office, that's the sysadmin's butt that's making the frying sound. And good luck retraining the 60 and 70 year old secretaries. Bet they'll be delighted to learn a whole new application and go through the wonders of verifying that all their templates and features they're used to still work. No thanks, it's worth a few bucks to save a major headache.
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.