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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.