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.

Re:Demo it?

[TrippTDF]

I bet you have a harder time selling the district on a free, less popular product than on an expensive, popular one.

Not a testament to M$'s programming, but it a testament to their marketing department.

Re:Demo it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, I have never encoutered anyone with such poor reading comprehension before - even on Slashdot!

The point of the post you were replying to was not to sell it on the basis that it was free; it was very clearly and very obviously to focus on demonstating its features. The post very very obviously saw being free as a disadvantage in the minds of the audience and something to be worked around.

Your response was simply idiotic. Yes, there are costs involved - how does that contradict his post? He wasn't saying "tell them it's free". He was saying "demo it before they know it's free so that the lack of price doesn't put them off".

Re:Demo it?

[swv3752]

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.

Re:Demo it?

[clickster]

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.

Re:Demo it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So in summary, you call the parent poster "a fool" and "a typical mindless free software drone" for having the audacity to suggest demoing the software before talking about price. You throw in some unrelated stuff about there being upgrade costs and somehow you get modded insightful??? WTF?

Re:Demo it?

[Anonymous Coward]

1 - Why? they have to come in special for that or get paid MORE for that?

2 - BULLSHIT. Office 2003 is a resource HOG the only microsoft Office product that is less than OO.o is office 97.

3 - Oh come on. it's not like the menus are all different and written in swahili. care to make up another excuse? Everyone that I have given OO.o install Cd's to say it act's just like office.

4 - None, RTF works fine. Tell the whiney professors to take basic computer operation classes if they are too uneducated to understand basic computer operation.

So stop being a puppet of microsoft (tell dave in the next cube there in the microsoft PR department I said HI!) and try telling us something you didnt just make up and pulled out of your ass.

Re:Demo it?

[niiler]

Jeez, most admins do all this remotely so it isn't such a big cost. Plus, the upgrades were going to happen anyhow.

As for format changes, most users I know (especially at the highschool level) only use the most basic of features. As such Abiword (no offense guys) and Siag could do the job as basic as they are. Heck even Wordpad would do for what most highschoolers I know need.

The resistance to OOo comes from people who see something slightly different and panic. Are there some real differences between MSO and OOo? Sure, but these aren't nearly as big at the introductory level. Also, I seem to remember a usability study which found that the two were just about equal for basic tasks. There is also this article.

Personally, I'm sick of having to be compatible with MS when plenty of other alternatives are there.

Former Word Perfect user - now OOo user

Re:Demo it?

[DrXym]

I use OpenOffice everyday, and although it's usable I wouldn't say for a second that it was a $300 competitor. It's not that it's bad, more that it's arcane. The UI is arcane, the functionality (aside from certain things like PDF support) is arcane. There's too many menus, the common things are mixed in with the uncommon things, the icons and L&F feel old etc. The drawing module is evil and essential features like outline mode don't exist at all.

But for what I use it for, it's mostly usable, albeit not pretty. It's fine for letter writing, or timesheets. But writing a technical document is painful due to the missing outline mode and nasty graphics.

I've used the 2.0 beta and some things such as drawing have improved massively even if there is still no outline mode. I'm still not sure I'd believe it cost the same as MS Office. To use the US vernacular, I'd probably say 2.0 is software "of $150 value".

Did I mention there's no outline mode?

Re:Demo it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I know everything about office politics etc., but since a brainstorming session is always good to bring up new ideas, how about:

1. Go to the above the tech support people. Despite the name, tech support people are amazingly a good collection of people watching their own interests. There are always exceptions, but my experience is, tech people dislike owning up that they don't know how to do things. They'd rather support products with 500 serious bugs they know how to deal with rather than admit they know nothing of working products with 50 bugs. They also get this self-importance thing going.

2. Identify administrators who are open-minded and cares about education instead of getting wined and dined by Microsoft. Prepare a good proposal with the comparative budgets to back it up and show that the money freed up can be used for other things such as libraries.

3. Go grass-root. Print up well-designed, well-written brochures and distribute them to the parents. Make them understand the advantages of using OpenOffice and assure them that in no way using OpenOffice prevents learning Microsoft Office should the product-used-in-the-real-world argument comes up.

4. Approach the superintendent. If s/he is an ardent MS supporter, you'd have a tough battle, but otherwise, try to convice him/her. Prepare a good presentation with proposals and budgets and good demos.

Re:Demo it?

[Just Some Guy]

Unfortunately, there is a BIG learning curve to teach the unsavvy anything other than what they are used to.

The article didn't mention which version of Office he'd be upgrading from. If it's something moderately old (maybe Office 97, which would be pretty reasonable given the governmental nature of the job), then I'd say that Office XP will require as much training as OpenOffice.

On the same note, my 45-person company was facing a group upgrade from Office 97, and our enlightened IT guy switched everyone to OpenOffice at that point. After the first week everyone just took it for granted and never really mentioned it again.

Re:Demo it?

[iplayfast]

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

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 .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.

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 :D

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?

[Robert The Coward]

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?

Re:Demo it?

[lahvak]

I have heard this argument many times. Give me a break! The differences between computing now and computing by the time the kids leave school and enter workforce will be far larger than the differences between MS Office and Open Office now.

Re:Demo it?

[swv3752]

When was the last time someone was provided on the job training for MS Office?

Re:Demo it?

[DickBreath]

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

OOo 2.0 (currently beta) is an MSI based installer. Maybe you can use Microsoft management tools to deploy it to a thousand workstations at once.

This code is a one time cost. Microsoft's "Revenue Assurance" licensing is an ongoing cost.


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

A good and valid question. Will this cost as much as Revenue Assurance licensing? After one hit? Two hits? Is it a better use of limited funds to upgrade hardware, than simply give the money to Microsoft to continue using the same hardware and software? Is it a given that OOo's resource usage is always higher than Microsoft Office? Even if so, is it necessarily true that their computers must have an upgrade to run OOo?


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).

Another good and valid question. A one time cost, vs. ongoing licensing costs. That retraining cost may not be as high as Microsoft fanboys would like us to think. I've read that it is actually very low for users who are not "deep" office power users.


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

OOo 2.0 (currently beta) has even better file format compatibility than OOo 1.1.x. Conduct some tests on some of the school's more complex documents.

Also, just because you deploy OOo on a lot of workstations doesn't preclude, for example, the administration people from keeping some copies of Microsoft Office. It does not have to be an exclusively ALL ONE or ALL THE OTHER situation.

Re:Demo it?

[cbreaker]

When we did the mixed Office 97/2000 upgrade at our company (6,000 users, global, etc) all we had to do was send out a few e-mails outlining the major changes.

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.

Re:Demo it?

[akeru]

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.

Re:Demo it?

[Bob MacSlack]

In high school computer lit class, they used Works to teach word processing, spreadsheet, etc. All the same basic concepts apply now, even though I haven't used Works in years (cause it sucks?). I say teach kids to use old versions of WordPerfect (or other somewhat obscure WP) and emphasize the basics behind it rather than the menus. Even better, teach them in one, test them in another! :)

Re:Demo it?

[ultimabaka]

When was the last time someone was provided on the job training for MS Office?

Just last Wednesday, actually. I took an Intro to Access class and an Advanced Excel class at work, for two reasons:
(1) They were free. Free is an actually free - even got paid as if I was still working.
(2) Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I don't know very many people that really know how to use Access at all, and definitely don't know how to use Excel's advanced functions. Granted, I don't know all too many of the programmer type (anymore at least), so most of the rest of the people I've seen find using it difficult.

To get back on topic though, OpenOffice is an excellent program, and I hope he succeeds in switching them over.

Re:Demo it?

[Bert64]

But word links against a lot of libs which are already resident as part of the os, while openoffice loads all it's own stuff (out of necessity)
if you want a fairer comparison, try the mac version, word uses 44.3mb here..
Also theres the output files, open a word document in openoffice and save it out again in the openoffice format, every time i have done this the resulting file has been smaller, and going back the other way creates a bigger file again.

Re:Demo it?

[Bert64]

When your document gets over about 500 pages long, images no longer work properly and the spell checker stops working.. This annoys me, how do i turn it off?
Also when your trying to count lines with a macro, it ignores lines with bullet points... this annoys me too, how do i turn it off?
these bugs have existed for many years and have not been fixed.. if you find similar bugs with openoffice report them and see how long it takes before they get fixed..

Re:Demo it?

[darnok]

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

First off, I love OOo, use it daily, and think *all* schools should switch to it in preference to paying for another round of MS Office upgrades.

However, there is a reasonably big incompatibility that bites me regularly, and will almost certainly bite school users as well.

If I have a bunch of numbered paragraphs in a MS Office document as follows:
1.
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.3.1
1.3.2
2. ...
(i.e. three levels of "indentation"), and I load that same document into OOo, I get my paragraphs numbered as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
(i.e. everything gets "flattened out" into a single level).

This has been the case with OOo for at least a couple of years, and was still there as of the first OOo 2.0 beta a short time ago.

With school assignments frequently being numbered in the same fashion, it'd be painful to have to import old MS Office documents and fix up the paragraph numbering.

It's not insurmountable, but it's certainly a format incompatibility and it's pretty painful.

Re:Demo it?

[steveg]

*On the server* unzip the OO package and open a command line sesssion. CD to the package directory and type 'setup -net' instead of 'setup'.

Go through the regular installation procedure.

Then, when you want to install it for a user, *as that user on the client machine* navigate to the installed OO directory (in Program Files or wherever you installed it.) Click on the setup program in the network installed directory (not the one in the distribution package.) It will offer you the choice of a full install and a workstation install (as I recall) -- choose the workstation install, it's the smaller of the two.

It just installs some personalization files and you're good to go.

there will be hell to pay...

[tkavanaugh]

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

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:there will be hell to pay...

[KhanReaper]

I can already say that Open Office, for as nice as it is, cannot load MS Word files that have embedded jpeg images. Even the latest beta versions have this problem.

Outside of this problem, I have been able to use Open Office completely this semester for all of my word processing and data needs. It works really well, most of the time.

My only real regret was writing a full paper in the latest beta version of it, for the thing crashed consistenly when performing a File>Save, no kidding here, resulting in a crashed word processor with a blank saved document.

Re:there will be hell to pay...

[ZephyrXero]

I won't read MS Works files (yes, people still use it sadly enough)....but then again, neither will Word ;)

Re:there will be hell to pay...

[Detritus]

Who told the student to use Microsoft Office? No school system should require students to submit their work in a proprietary file format.

Re:there will be hell to pay...

[t35t0r]

I can already say that Open Office, for as nice as it is, cannot load MS Word files that have embedded jpeg images. Even the latest beta versions have this problem.

WTH are you talking about? I've been using MS Word docs with jpeg's/tiffs/png's/etc inserted into them since OOo v1.0.1 (that's my first install of OOo).

My only real regret was writing a full paper in the latest beta version of it, for the thing crashed consistenly when performing a File>Save,

What kind of idiot writes crucial documents with *BETA* versions of programs. I haven't used the latest 2.0beta of OOo so I can't comment on your problem. A simple bug report to the OOo bug website will get you a quicker reply than you could get out of MS. Especially with critical nature of your bug.

It's quite simple really:

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[lintux]

2. OpenOffice fully supports Microsoft Office file formats.

I just wish this were true... It gets close, but there are still many, many problems. :-(

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?

Re:It's quite simple really:

[cyclop]

Very odd. I save .doc (or .xls) documents with OO.org every day.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[AKAImBatman]

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?

My only answer is, that OpenOffice *is* experiencing tremendous growth. My wife actually converted before I did. She got tired of Word blowing up on her all the time and asked if I had something that would work. I sheepishly told her that I could let her *try* OpenOffice, and she agreed. She's never looked back. Shortly thereafter, I started using OO exclusively as well.

The reason why the growth isn't as noticable is that there isn't as big of a marketing push as there was with FireFox. (If you believe the marketing, FireFox will soon pass the 50% penetration range. Not. Quite. Yet.)

Re:It's quite simple really:

[DA-MAN]

While OO supports .doc, exporting to the Microsoft .doc format isn't there, meaning people who only have MS Office (i.e. most people) can't open your document.

Guess I must be using an ubber eleet modified version since I can go to "File -> Save As" and save in any number of formats including .doc.

The default swx format can't be opened by MS Office either, which means there will be some trouble viewing student/teacher documents unless the defaults were changed (or if one was to teach everyone to export to some cross-office compatible format, but that's boiling the ocean...)

Speaking of which, as OpenOffice adoption grows, when in the hell is Microsoft going to add support for those formats. I think it's already past time to do that since the last reports showed that OOo was used in about 10% of businesses.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[Enigma2175]

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

One word: Outlook

Re:It's quite simple really:

[Malc]

I haven't used it, but does OO allow you to track changes and insert comments in the same way that Word does? That would seem to me to be the best way for a teacher to provide feedback. If not, then the students should be providing their documents in PDF format and neatly side-stepping issues of cross application file format compatibility.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[MindStalker]

Bloat is another big factor, for me OpenOffice feels more bloated then Microsoft Office. The slimness of firefox is what really sold it.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[superpulpsicle]

Agree. There are only 3 things that I still must stick to windows.

1.) Outlook (not outlook express)
2.) Games
3.) Graphics Apps

Re:It's quite simple really:

[aichpvee]

You got to look on the bright side though. OpenOffice's microsoft office file support is quite a bit better than microsoft office's OpenOffice file support.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[16K Ram Pack]

Another word: Access

Re:It's quite simple really:

[MindStalker]

Speaking of which, as OpenOffice adoption grows, when in the hell is Microsoft going to add support for those formats. I think it's already past time to do that since the last reports showed that OOo was used in about 10% of businesses.

Umm never...
Microsoft included Wordperfect and other similar formats as an encouragement for people to try switching TO Word and not having to lose their documents. Few are looking to switch from OpenOffice to Word, and offering compatibility would switch more away than to. Microsoft is not stupid.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[MrNonchalant]

My interpretation was always that OpenOffice seems to lack in massive quantities the polish you see in Firefox. The user interface just feels clunky, the icons incongruous. There isn't padding in the right places and it doesn't feel native.

That was in many ways Firefox's advantage over Opera and Mozilla, it looked a lot better and cleaner. And don't lecture me on how software should be judged by quality instead of prettiness, I know that. You know that. But does the average user know that?

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.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[synthespian]

Good question. Here's my experience, which is bound to be modded as flamebait by /. OpenOffice fanboys:
I've stretched OpenOffice more than your average zealot, choosing it to write a full report, as I had no M$ system available and needed to interoperate with the general LaTeX-phobic population. It was a disaster, and this was when it was considered "stable" and not beta. In fact, it was beta software. It had a bug that, misteriously, corrupted all page numbering. And I couldn't get the numbering correct again, ever, having to deliver it like that, apologizing for a "bug in the software." Of course, that penalized me.
Also, inserting a large amount of color images almost brought it to grind...I was definitely pissed off...And there wasn't any time to be filling out bug reports.
Recently, I've tested OpenOffice 1.1.3. It had such basic bugs still, like (for instance) I couldn't write "São Paulo" (I need the til in my native language - Portuguese). Frankly, I don't care what people say, OpenOffice is below standard. You can hype it all you want, you can go bezerk with open source zealotry (*), OpenOffice is beta software, period. Now, please, if all you do is write 3 pages and save in .doc format, don't bother posting your opinion, thank you very much.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a Libre Software office package, but this isn't it. I'm hoping AbiWord will get there. I builds everywhere (unlike Java), and it has plug-ins, so I'm hoping it'll develop to be an interesting thing.

(*) Now, I'm not only pissed off with the bugs, I'm also pissed off with the Java dependency. This fixation on Java should develop in a C# (Mono) fixation because, frankly, I understand the point of avoiding C++, and Java is a no go in BSD (because it's not libre software).

Re:It's quite simple really:

[CausticPuppy]

And don't lecture me on how software should be judged by quality instead of prettiness, I know that.

"Prettiness" is one of many crucial aspects of software quality. I'm not talking about prettiness only for the sake of being pretty, don't get me wrong. But a well thought-out, consistent, logical user interface indicates that the whole package was designed well.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[freelock]

Why not switch?

1. Laziness
2. Ignorance
3. Word outlining
4. Powerpoint Presentation mode
5. Laziness
6. Never heard of it--no killer marketing campaign ala "Get Firefox"
7. Better the devil you know
8. It's not what people are comfortable with.
9. Envelopes. I still can't get them to print the way I expect.
10. Annoying type-ahead that's always wrong. (Yes, you can turn it off, but see reasons #1 and #5).
11. Data entry in Calc sucks. (can't they get Tab/Return to accept your entry, without autocomplete?)
12. Help sucks.

Why switch?

1. Save $$$
2. Cross platform
3. Encourages style use
4. Built-in bibliography
5. Save $$$
6. Bullets and numbering actually work (if you don't save as Word)
7. Great templating ability
8. Built-in vector drawing--can replace Visio for basic diagrams
9. Consistent UI across apps
10. Master documents ACTUALLY WORK, without LOSING DATA.
11. Page, frame, and list styles.
12. Word feels clunky, overengineered, and awkward after you get accustomed to OOo.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[jbolden]

here else would you have developed a compass for what is right and wrong with a GUI?

Personal experience in terms of learning curve. Prior to using iTunes I had used: Real, Windows media player, Winamp; Dell Juke box and Real seperate Juke box app. I could never figure out why you would want an .mp3 jukebox. I saw iTunes and the whole thing made instant sense.

That's good GUI design.

what about technical support

[AviLazar]

I am not claiming to be an expert on Open Office, but did you consider the tech support of it? Also the compatibility? 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.

THere are benefits to using industry standard programs.

Re:what about technical support

[AKAImBatman]

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.

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... ...such as being forever locked into their "standard". Welcome to illegal monopoly practice hell.

Re:what about technical support

[idsofmarch]

But most students don't turn in papers with 'custom work' rather they create documents that, except for some minor font changes, could have been done on a typewriter. OpenOffice should be a fine change in a computer lab, with a few legacy copies of Office kept around to ensure compatibility. Frankly, even with Word you can run into problems with students who are still using WordPerfect, WordStar or some other ancient program. There are benefits to using industry-standard standards, not programs.

Re:what about technical support

[16K Ram Pack]

The storage system of OOo files make so much more sense to me. If a corruption occurs, you've got a lot more chance of resolving it.

I've had Word documents corrupt in such a way that the corruption was only recognised later (it occurred when you scrolled to a particular page). All the backups had the same corruption because it was there but not spotted. So, we had to print, scan and OCR the files and then reformat them all.

Free = better for low income students?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is free. This means people don't need to shell out for software.

PC's can be picked up dirt cheap these days (I've seen 299 retail in the UK) if your child can get the software that the school uses for free it can only be a good thing.

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.

Re:I don't know about you...

[STrinity]

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.

Even with the quick-launch loaded, it takes OO.o ungodly long to open. And on top of that, the quick-launcher takes forever to load. I have 16 programs that automatically load on start-up (everything from my wireless network connection, to Folding@home, to my firewall, to Firefox and Thunderbird), and 15 of them are up and running within two minutes of logon; the OO.o icon usually doesn't appear for another two minutes.

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..."

Re:Will it be useful?

[i.r.id10t]

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.

Re:Will it be useful?

[CheeseTroll]

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.

Re:Will it be useful?

[PoprocksCk]

My high school (graduated two years ago) had Corel WordPerfect Office installed on all of its PCs. Could you not make the same argument against that, or any other "alternative" office suite?

The fact is, pretty much all office suites are pretty much the same. Most people at my school had MS Office installed at home, but they were still able to pick up WP just fine. No one ever had any problems with it.

I think the same thing would be true for OOo. Sure, it won't be able to deal with MS Office macros or VBA script, but is that really a reason for high schools to spend all that money on MS Office? Not in my eyes. I'd rather see the extra money saved, used on things that are much more important than little disputes about differences in office suites.

Re:Will it be useful?

[idsofmarch]

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.

Re:Will it be useful?

[SkippyTPE]

Good education will teach skills and not teach to a particular application.

I hate to be this way, because I agree with you (I'm fighting this battle at a community college at the moment), but most employers I've run into don't give a damn about your "skills."

Skills = profficiency in their package of choice.

If you can't convince the HR drone that you are proficient in MS Office, you're not getting the job. It sucks but it's true.

Re:Will it be useful?

[TheKarateMaster]

"...needs a serious firefoxing"

I agree very much. I think a first step would be to at least decrease the amount of Java it uses. I realize this would make some other things a little more difficult (ie. cross-platform compatibility), but if it was written entirely in C++, it would be much faster. I expect a few replies telling me why this isn't feasible/possible, and I probably won't dispute them, but Java is bad.

About eliminating features, I don't think this is a possibility. To remain competitive with MS Office, they need to keep all these features that MS has but nobody really uses.

Crappy Tech Policies

[suyashs]

My school district has the most backward Tech policy I have ever seen. Every computer is licenced for all the MS Office apps, many random apps, and one cannot buy anything from anyone unless that vendor is "approved". This leads to some interesting pricing issues such as $200 for a stick of 128 MB ram, $50 mice, and very expensive computers. Furthermore, the computer science classes are stuck with old 233 Mhz Pentium IIs while keyboarding classes are upgraded to new 2.8 Ghz P4s. It's a big mess and nobody seems to care.

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.

OpenOffice of course

[PenguinBoyDave]

I use both. At work I just have too many instances where the compatability just isn't there. However, I believe you should use OpenOffice in schools. Why? The biggest problem with people adopting open source in my mind is that they are afraid to try something new. Introduce them to something new in the beginning and they will use it. Chances are they will stick with it. If they move to Word later, at least they gave it a chance.

Re:OpenOffice of course

[MisanthropicProgram]

At work I just have too many instances where the compatability just isn't there.

I'm really confused, now. What did you find that wasn't compatible?
I'm seeing two different attitudes here: OO is fully compatible with MS or OO has some incompatablities.

I'm not trying to flame or anything, it's just that I really want to know why there's two differing opinions. Is it a version issue?

Re:OpenOffice of course

[PenguinBoyDave]

It really comes down to font issues really. StarOffice corrects 99% of this. I get resumes all the time at work that are done in OpenOffice (and look good in OpenOffice) but when you read them in word, the formatting is all off. This may have changes in OO 2, but as I said, StarOffice takes care of most of this. Also, Power Point has major issues with anything created in Open Office. I have to use Power Point to create the presentation and then show it in Open Office. At least I know when I create it in PPT it will be viewable on either product. Not the same if created in OO.

Re:OpenOffice of course

[geekee]

"The biggest problem with people adopting open source in my mind is that they are afraid to try something new. Introduce them to something new in the beginning and they will use it. Chances are they will stick with it. If they move to Word later, at least they gave it a chance."

Yes, Indoctrinate them into your belief system early.

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...

What is used at home

[mauriatm]

I think an important question that needs to be asked is: what do students use at home? I remember countless frustrations when I was in high school (back in the day) regarding compatibilities with AppleWorks, Word and Wordperfect. What made it worse was people who insisted on using graphics and fancy formatting. Simply put it is not enough that the educational institute uses it, but also important to try to "educate" people at home to also use it.

Tough sell

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

Re:Tough sell

[crunk]

All the benefits of OSS except price will likely fall on deaf ears

I believe you are underestimating the price benefit considering how cash-strapped most public schools are right now.

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.

Re:I've found

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

doesn't this imply that MS Office is actually HARDER to use than OO.o?

we just went through this ...

[Triumph The Insult C]

our choice was more of choosing between MSCA (pay $X every year, 'free' updates) and MOLP (pay $X once, use the software as long as you want, new version comes out, you have to pay for it)

we have spent $22k over the past 3 years on MSCA. this year was the final straw, since MS changed the licensing and is hitting us up for many more things (we are a smaller unit in a big .edu)

so, this is the last year we'll be doing MSCA. we have decided that for the next year, we will be educating users about OO (and Firefox) and encouraging them to switch and letting them know that next year, they'll be on their own for MS software packages

Segragate your users!

[zulux]

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

Re:Segragate your users!

[tOaOMiB]

What do you recommend for people who can't spell?

... use Excel like a pseudodatabase ... Word's horribly random ...
custom grading scripts, tables.

Does Abiword have autocorrect, or at least spellcheck as you go? Can you compose your /. messages in it? Thanks!

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...

why?

[bcrowell]

First, you have to convince them that OOo doesn't suck. That's going to be a problem, because OOo does suck. In particular, it's slow.

Then you have to convince the people who hold the purse strings that this will save money. That's going to be a problem, because it won't save money. The cost of giving a secretary Word is negligible compared to the the salary you're paying her to be productive. There are also going to be training costs. This may seem ridiculous to Slashdotters, but this really is an issue. Where I work (at a community college), some of the secretaries and office managers (mostly the younger ones) are very smart and adaptable, but some of them are not. When we switched from WordPerfect to Word, our old office manager was completely unable to handle it. This was a lady who had trouble with cut and paste in the first place -- she would usually retype things rather than cutting and pasting, because she claimed it was faster and easier. They kept scheduling her to go to training classes, and she would always fail to show up.

And then you have to ask yourself why you want to do it -- is it to strike a blow for open source? Well, OOo is a badly designed, bloated project that has very little involvement from developers outside Sun, and can't be built using free-as-in-speech tools. It's hardly the poster child for the free-information movement.

Pros and cons

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Re:Pros and cons

[gurps_npc]

Case #2 is NOT prevalent in a student environment. Students tend not to work at home if they can avoid it. And the ones we really need to give the most help to generally can't afford a computer.

For those that actually do work at home, as it costs $0, they usually can afford buying it.

So basically, the only problem is getting the brighter students that do homework and own a computer to install it as a 2nd option. But, being brighter students that do homework and own a computer, the school should encourage them to learn how to install OO.

Finally there is a subset of smart students who can't afford the most up to date computers and therefore have an OLD copy of MS at home that can not load the newest MS doc format. You are leaving them out in the cold, while if you give them a freebee copy of OO, you help them out.

The question is, who do we try and help: The lazy well off kids that own MS software at home but are whiny about it taking work to install OO? Or the hard working, poor kids that don'town MS software at home and are happy to install the free OO software?

Re:Pros and cons

[casualgeek]

...this documents looks like @*#& on Word, it's all your fault, it worked before!!"

OOo can export documents to PDFs. With PDFs, you are sure that everybody will get the document displayed correctly, and you will never get blamed for people screwing up your documents because its a read-only document format :)

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Re:I GOT A GREASED UP YODA DOLL SHOVED UP MY ASS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be "A greased up Yoda doll up my ass, I have"?

Migration to Open source

[Princess Tarja]

While I have no experience in this sort of migration I feel that while "we" may see the light & benefits I have to say that when concerning something like a school district it will be a very hard sell. The feeling of dealing with a brick & mortar company is a great relief to people when it comes to support and the like. I think there also may be a feeling of "if they give this stuff away for free then it can't be all that good" They may also use the "kids" card. Just like politicians when they say "it's for the kids" knowing that their bill cannot stand on it's own, they use the kids as a means of playing on the parents feelings.. Whatever happens I wish you all the luck in the world on this endeavour

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Appeal to the teachers.

[Talinom]

Tell the teachers that "every dollar that goes to Microsoft takes away from the salaries they deserve." This should break past the FUD that Microsoft spreads.

1. It appeals to the "help the community" group by knowing that they are looking out for their teachers.
2. It could be used to pressure the school board. "They are sending money to Microsoft rather than to our starving teachers."
3. 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.

Re:Appeal to the teachers.

[chshrkt]

Great idea, but if most districts are like the one my fiancee works at, even when the district has plenty of money, the teachers do not even get consistent basic COL pay increases. Unfortunately teachers have very little pull in issues like this at most school districts.
For the most part, local media just accepts the press releases that the school board puts out, and ignores the teacher's attempts to bring discrepancies to light.

At the VERY LEAST...

[Doverite]

Use this as a barganing tool. MS does NOT want thousands of school kids learning OO.o and finding out about free software. If you can't get them to make the switch at least get them to blackmail MS into practically giving them the licenses. If they won't do that then someone getting kickbacks somewhere.

Re:It's quite simple really: Not all that simple.

[magarity]

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.

Why not Star office???

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun licenses the Staroffice product to educational institutions for the same price ($free). All you pay is a one time media charge ($25 last I used it) or just download it instead.

Same stuff, just has the added functionality (I think spell checker, some additional translations, etc.)

And it comes from a large software company. That can be enough sometimes to get past the stuff shirts...

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Re:The real question

[philipgar]

Honestly are the computer skills really that different. Most companies hiring kids out of high school aren't expecting the kids to be masters of MS Office. Most schools teach kids the basics of office. Such as writing letters, changing fonts, making a presentation, etc. If the school teaches it properly, switching from using Open Office to MS Office is about as difficult as transforming from using office 2000 to xp. Its just not a big deal, the concepts are the exact same.

Now of course there are exceptions to this general rule. There are some advanced features in MS Excel that I have yet to be able to do within open office. However I doubt the high schools are coverning those things in the first place.

A company hiring kids out of high school is not generally expecting the best and the brightest (as those students are generally going to college at least in the USA). They may expect computer skills, but to the extent that they know how to check things on the web, use a mouse, type documents etc. Hell for the most part I think schools should scrap half the computer stuff they teach kids. Do they really learn anything when they play with putting a million clip arts in a document? They'd be far better off just teaching them to type as well as business skills. they'll go much further than knowing how to make hideous word documents with flashy graphics, or worthless powerpoint presentations with a million sounds and transitional effects. Stick to the basics.

Phil

Re:A Common Question, with Answer

[bcrowell]

One solution I heard suggested is to burn a whole bunch of OOo CDs and distribute them to the students; that way, they can install it on their home computer too
I've tried that. It was a very disillusioning experience. I handed out bootable Linux CDs with lots of cool apps on the first day of my physics classes, along with a brief sales pitch on how great open source was. I got absolutely no response. Not a single student even mentioned having stuck it in their box at home to try it. They see Windows and Office as being free -- typically the parents bought whatever computer the kid uses, and the kid couldn't even tell you whether their copy of Office (a) came bundled with the machine, (b) was bought separately by their parents, or (c) is pirated. It's not even a concept to them. They just know they "have Microsoft."

Tried it, hated it, went back

[Raul654]

When I got my new laptop in September, I decided to try it with open office instead of MS office. As a graduate student, I deal with LOTS of powerpoint files (both making them and reading others'). I was sincerely disappointed by the experience. First, the files it produced inevitably had formatting errors (if someone else tells you they are fully compatible, they are lying). Graphics tended to display differently, with different color schemes, 'etc. Second, it was so slow as to make it unsuable. On a top-of-the-line Pentium 4, there was a 30-45 second load time for the program, a 10-15 second lag between slides, and a really annoying 1-3 second lag between mouse clicks. After a semester, I gave up and went back to MS office. I'll be staying put until I see these issues resolved.

We use Star Office and Open Office

[eric76]

Three years ago, everything we had used Microsoft Office. We now use Star Office and Open Office on PCs and don't even bother with Microsoft Office.

The way this came about was I started using it on my own. Whenever someone new came in, I'd set up their PC with Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. Earlier this month, our accounting clerk, the final holdout, asked to switch.

Now the only Microsoft Office we have is on the Macs. And they are using a really old version of Microsoft Office because of one particular feature available on that version.

I've talked to many of the school board members about OpenOffice and Star Office. They keep complaining about the school district being short on money but they still haven't seriously looked at switching.

Apple office

[andy753421]

I don't know what it's called, but my High School used all macs (running os 9) and we learned word processing and everything on whatever the apple version of office is. It made me really mad that we were learning something and that we would never be able to use it because not very many people have macs. If we had used OpenOffice I probably would have been much happier because that would have been something that I could have used at home on my computer because it will run on Windows as well. As a side note, as I look back on it there's really not that much difference between OpenOffice and any other. Sure all the buttons are in different places, but in high school most of the time was spent on learning basic concepts such as what 'margins' are and what a 'table cell' in a 'spreadsheet' is. Those are all universal and most of my classes didn't really teach anything beyond that. If you're going to be having classes on things like VBA macros or advanced stuff like that it might be beneficial to the students to use MS Office (as well?), but if you're just going to be doing word processing I'd say go for OpenOffice. Perhaps you could have OpenOffice on everything and then just have 1 or 2 labs where you do advanced stuff with MS Office.

Having worked in a school system for several years

[defore]

Having worked in a school system for several years, I can tell you that anything you can get for free is a good idea; however; So many schools are hellbent on teaching using MSOffice because that is what the industry is using.

This is my biggest compaint. Instead of teaching the skills neccesary to create professional documents, they are teaching the knowledge neccesary to do this. Yes there is a difference. Instead of teaching word processing they are teaching MS Word, or instead of teaching spreadsheets or databases, they are teaching MS Excel or Access.

To Answer your question. I don't think it will be possible to completely convert your users over to OpenOffice. I would start by deploying it to your labs and various other student desktops. Your Administration and some of your more proficient users will not want to switch. This is not something that is going to happen overnight.

Cheers,

Matt

Where is SpellCheck on this thing

We're all just meat....

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

My Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 -- get Sun involved. They offer StarOffice at no charge to K-12, colleges and universities. Its one thing to go into a meeting and say "try this free thing!" and quite another to go in with representivies from a known major tech company (in person, on the phone, in writing, whatever..)

#2 -- Clearly define the requirements. What features are being used in the existing productivity suite? What features are wanted? Does OOo meet these requirements? Are there any exceptions?

#3 -- Clearly show the benefit of the switch -- cost savings, standardized across all school systems and student home computers (if applicable)

#4 -- Get some case studies or contacts with others who have already made the switch.

Basically your job is to demonstrate that the new product can meet the needs fo the users, that the new product brings benefit and that it is already established and the risk of switching is minimal. If your able to do this, there is a strong chance of getting OOo.

Paper size?

[tepples]

some [of my Microsoft Word] documents were basically unreadable, as OO.org seemed to randomly flow the text.

Did those documents use hard returns to terminate the lines?

Sometimes if you take a Microsoft Word document from a machine with one printer to a machine with a different printer, even Microsoft Word will screw it up. Have you tried setting the default paper size in OOo first? (It defaults to A4, a size used more in Europe than in the United States.)

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.

Results: so-so

[Kristoffer Lunden]

I've seen it tried. It didn't really work out, mainly because more than half the students promptly pirated MS Office instead. In many of the cases without even trying out the provided alternative seriously, but rather dismissing it right away.

On the other hand, for some parts of the suite, like for the presentations part, the MS variant is still so much better interface wise that it saves a *lot* of time using the real variant - we are talking hours and hours here. And yes, doing presentations are a large bit of what the students do around here.

It doesn't really handle MS documents all that well either, in the sense that almost anything opens, but the formatting is often distorted and the same thing the other way around, plus that the warning everytime you try to save something back to doc can be really scary to the average user. To those who say that formatting shouldn't matter - it does. We are not talking about just being readable, but papers and mateial that should look a certain way, if only because the student wants it to look that way. And we are not talking advanced stuff either... a simple image can be enough to throw it off.

Personally I do use OOo exclusively, but then again I'm not the average user; I'm a geek. No amount of gentle education, helping out or poiting to similarities will get the average user to even try something new if it doesn't behave just like they are used to - at least that is my experience. A real pain in the ass.

On the plus side, we don't use doc as the internal format, we use HTML or in worst case PDF instead, which makes the situation a bit brighter. :)

Re:Compatibility

[DA-MAN]

MS Office - 100% compatibility with MS Office documents

Not true! Many documents don't open properly in different versions. The 4 most used right now are 97, 2000, XP, 2003 and going between these is still a royal pain in the ass. I'd say MS Office is closer to high 90's than 100% despite Microsoft's claims.

Open Office - 99% compatibility with MS Office documents

For Word Docs it's pretty close to real Office. It doesn't, however, handle Excel macros and a bunch of other different types. As a guess, I think this is closer to mid 80's in compatibility. Still really good, but not perfect.

It's the 1% that's going to go against use of OO in educational establishments.

I think you overstate the improtance. There are already major incompatibilities within Microsoft's own software. For example most budget machines ship with MS Works, which can't properly be read by MS Word at school. Besides any student can just download a copy of OO.o and install it on their machine if they want consistency. If they're on dialup, they can get a usb key and order a free cd from Ubuntu with OO.o included.

Not simple at all

[October_30th]

Are you saying that figure placement and text layout is irrelevant for school use?

Use Word to prepare a document in a two column format, add some text, a couple of JPG images, figure captions and a couple of equations. A typical report. Then, import it into Open Office. You'll be lucky if the images aren't all over the place and equations are not complete gibberish because of some font incompatibility.

So far I've tried using Open Office at work twice. However, when even the simplest of legacy documents won't import/export, there's really no other alternative than to keep on using MS Office.

Also mention the big corporation behind it

[mindaktiviti]

You should also mention Sun Microsystems as the big giant behind it, also the creator of Java. And I'm sure in a high school environment the language kids learn on is most likely Java or something similar. If you just mention "Open Source Office product" then the administration will think it's something unreliable ("how can something free be high quality?"), but if you mention it's from Sun then there's more of that corporate culture that they're used to.

Get a plan!

[metoc]

First of all do you have sponsor for your idea? Someone who knows the organizations ins and outs. If you don't find one or forget it.

Two. Make sure you factor in the conversion (old files still need to be accessible) and retraining costs (users and support), including time and effort. Many users will complain loudly to their bosses if you give them a new app without training (easy to learn apps and well written user guides don't make a difference).

Three. Compare the cost of subscribing versus the cost of upgrading when the next version of office comes out (that you want to upgrade to). I know of a few organizations that skip releases because of the upgrade (mostly time and effort) costs.

Four. Consider reducing the number of copies. Doesn't always work if it drops you from a high discount category in a low discount one.

Five. The time may not be right. Microsoft is entrenched and people have to be ready to switch. You probably need a multi-year plan to slowly bring OpenOffice (and Linux for that matter) onto peoples desktops, and make the decision to dump Microsoft a natural decision.

Last. Make sure you don't end up on the pile with others who have made unpopular decisions. It just means your are no longer able to influence change.

Re:Since when does Office cost anything?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Who actually pays for MS Office?

Those who can realistically expect a visit from the BSA. That's everybody who isn't an individual at home.

Re:Since when does Office cost anything?

[generalpf]

Companies are much less likely to download Office than individuals. It's more likely that a company will buy 20 licenses, forget how many they bought a year later and end up installing it on twice as many PCs.

It impressed me instead

[cyclop]

Well, I did my graduate thesis presentation in OO.org 1.1.2 on my Linux box. Problem was students graduating had to upload their PPT files on a WinXP, Office 2003 machine.

Since my university was aware that PowerPoint presentations are particularly sensitive to Office version changes (let alone OO.org!), they allowed students to "test" their PPT files on the machine they would have used the next day.

My PPT was almost OK. There were minor issues: some font rendered slightly differently and arrows and graphs needed a bit of care. But it was nothing more than 30 minutes of work, and it was absolutely comparable with corrections people using non-MS Office 2003 had to do. I was pretty satisfied of OO.org this time.

Re:Hard one

[michrech]

Schools don't (or at least shouldn't)pay that much for MS products.

Educational Resources (I believe there is one for each state -- I know there is one for Missouri and Iowa) takes care of schools.

They buy the media (usually betwwn $50 and $200) one time then buy licenses that can range from a few bucks per machine into the $20-$30 range (depending on the software).

If the schools aren't doing this, then the TC's of those schools aren't doing their job properly. There are many district and state related mailing lists that the TC's can get on that will provide this type of information.

I'm not saying that OpenOffice isn't a good thing to switch to -- I use it in the shop. I'm just saying that schools don't spend anywhere near what individuals (and even businesses, unless the business is very large and constantly threatens to go to other software to get a better deal) pay.

US Letter vs. A4 is just as bad

[tepples]

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.

Re:US Letter vs. A4 is just as bad

[LadyLucky]

I agree. Since I live in New Zealand, we use the One True Paper format, or A4 for general documents.

Word never seems to understand this. It's one thing to default to A4 when you create a new document, but another entirely to play nice with US Letter.

We have a printer at my work that has A4 paper. That's it. So if I get sent a document from America, I do not want to print it in US Letter. Please don't make me tell you every single time. Thank you.

A few reasons

[DamienMcKenna]

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

Re:A few reasons

[KagatoLNX]

Actually, I'm constantly amazed by the number of people who don't know that there IS Microsoft Office.

A lot of the "civilians" that I help out have bought computers bundled with Office and have Office provided at work, so they don't understand that it's not PART OF WINDOWS (if they understand that Windows isn't a fundamental part of the computer, which lots don't).

Recently Office has been yanked from the more competitive PC options from Dell and the like, so more people I know buy a computer and freak out when they find out that they have to buy Office (and then freak out again when they see the price).

Worse yet, there's still a middle ground option with Works Suite (which bundles Word), so lots of people are still getting this broken impression that Office is Windows is computers!

At any rate, anyone considering OOo absolutely MUST download the new Beta. While the new Database component of it is certainly Beta quality, the Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentation stuff is still rock solid. That said, there have been light years of improvement since the last version.

The OOo beta handles layout better than 97 or 2003 for many documents. This is no small feat, since, at least in Office 97, there is quite a lot of variation even within Word as to printing layout. It may not be common knowledge, but Microsoft uses almost the same Win32 API calls to print as it does to display on the screen. This has the interesting side effect that things that mingle the two (Word) can be affected by switching PRINT DRIVERS!!! I've even had bad print drivers cause crashes when certain documents are displayed (had to change to a different printer on another machine to open it there, changing back to the same printer caused the crash, new driver version replaced that bug with other ones).

Crashing aside, switching printers often causes layout changes. Professional printing shops HATE this "feature" of word. The mantra is usually "come back with a PDF or sign off on a crappy proof". I had hoped we left this behind with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but not so!

Re:It's quite simple really: Not all that simple.

[jabuzz]

It's called a white lie. You answer yes, because you know that you can use it without any problems. If you have any hickups, just blame it on the fact that you are used to some other version of Office. On Windows there is 95/97/2000/XP and 2003 to choose from.

Solid problem w/ OOo over MSO

[bsdbigot]

Aside from the "minor," bugs with OOo that this thread is bringing to light, there is another serious consideration as far as interoperability and cross-office compatibility: Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

Before anyone considers a migration from MSO to OOo, you must consider your existing use of VBA; if none at all, no problem. On the other hand, if you have administration using VBA to manage accounting information, and teachers using VBA to manage grades, and students using VBA as part of their curriculum, then OOo is definitely going to be a more expensive solution, at least in the short term.

On the flip side, VBA is one of the major featu^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity concerns; you could try to take that angle if you are using VBA extensively.

Re:Give copies to the students

[Macrat]

Send all the students home with OpenOffice.org CDs and they can use OpenOffice at home as well as at school.

Use both!

[east coast]

Not knowing exactly what you're using this software for as far as education I'd say to start by using both. Not only does this give an evaluation period to try them head to head it also gives some time to get some feedback from the students.

You're going to have a hard time pushing away from MSO when 95% of the professional office environments use it. The idea of this schooling is to get the student in the grove of what to expect in the real world. What's the chances of OO being the dominate or even having a large slice of the pie by the time they graduate? Pretty slim. By giving them the opportunity to use both you can at least expose them to alternatives. Who knows, a decade or so down the line you may even convince your district to convert.

Why do you think they aren't?

[Just Some Guy]

I've already upgraded my friends and relatives. My office has completely switched (except for a person or two that relies on years' worth of VB automation). Our local city government is considering it. My oldest kid's school is looking into it and talking about handing out CDs to parents.

People are flocking in droves to OpenOffice. It just doesn't get as much press as Firefox.

OO.o works on WIN95

[bach37]

The current version of openoffice.org runs on windows 95, and can do the latest Office XP formats. Even Office XP/04 won't run on Win95- at all!

Re:Why does everyone love Outlook so?

[thebdj]

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.

Re:Hard one

[gordo3000]

yeah, but the great part of OOo is that there isn't much of a difference with MS office. Anyone who uses MS office for anything basic can definitely sit down and do the same stuff with OOo in exactly the same way. That is the beauty of pretty much cloning the basic parts of the layout. It means for what teachers uses this stuff for, there is very little retraining needed. Those teachers that are more apt and therefore use the computer for more things are probably going to be less affected by the switch because they usually do well in learning new things quickly. At least that is my experience with teachers that really use all the options on MS office.

Exchange compatibility?

[tepples]

From what I've experienced, other programs such as Eudora can easily do everything Outlook does

Except connect to Exchange servers whose inflexible administrators have turned off POP3 and IMAP access for alleged security reasons, right? And does Eudora have a calendar or can it share contacts with a popular calendar program?

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...

Office?

[mmjm]

Hell with MS Office and OpenOffice. Why not use the opportunity to introduce your students to the use of vi and troff?

how new technology adoption works

[psin psycle]

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.

Re:Same with Word

[BackInIraq]

I hear this "OpenOffice.org opens Office document when Office can't" story a lot.

I have no problem believe that OOo can open some Office documents when Office can't...especially when you're talking about different versions of Office.

However, I think much more common, but less commonly reported, is the "OOo royally screwed up the formatting in my Office document when I tried to load it up. This blows!" story. The reason you hear so much of the former is that it is unexpected, while the latter is no real surprise. This does not mean the former is more common than the latter.

I know we all want OOo to be perfect, so we can convice the world how much better than Office it is. But let's be honest with ourselves. Hell, you can even chalk it up to MS using proprietary formats and not releasing all the specs. I don't care. But OOo's support for Office documents is very far from perfect. And as long as that is the case, there will be serious resistance to switching in most organizations.

Is this another tactic MS uses to protect their monopoly(ies)? Of course. But that still doesn't magically make OOo's Office document support better. Just makes you want it to be.

Oh, and yes I have used OOo to open Office documents, both .doc and .xls. No, I have not had one .doc containing more advanced formatting that center or right-justify come up the same in OOo as it does in Word.

OO.org's Marketing Site for Education

[phyjcowl]

Perhaps this has been posted and I simply missed it in the thread, but just in case nobody has seen this... OpenOffice.org has a site for outreach/marketing type information, which includes a section for schools. You might find some helpful information, like a case study and such there. The link to their site is

http://marketing.openoffice.org/education/schools/

Biggest Problem that stopped us

[baggins2002]

The biggest problem we had that but a complete stop to the adoption of OO was that files could not be open by more than one user at a time. I don't know how any business's or organization with more than 5 people and a file server can use it. If you have to go and hunt down who has the file open or which computer it is open on it can take a while, especially if you have a number of general use computers which anybody could log into and leave it open.( a lot of users open files and leave them open ). This only gets worse with XP where more than one user can be logged on and have the user currently not working on the computer can have the file open.
This is one of the biggest reasons I can see for medium/large organizations not using OO. Luckily the problem became apparent in early testing before we rolled it out to a bunch of users.
I think OO is great and I use it exclusively at home, but I can't see it in an environment where a lot of file sharing is going on.

Microsoft Office

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Office 2003 all the way.

I'm sorry, but OOo just blows. I've used 1.1 and 2.0 (beta), and they both suck in a wide variety of ways.

Here's a few:

- OOo defaults to A4 on my distro. You have to recreate the damn template to get it to use Letter.

- OOo's spell checker has neither the comprehensive dictionary nor the excellent suggestions that make Word's usable

- OOo manages to use 171MB on my Windows system, and a similar amount under Linux. Compare that to 15MB for Word - more than a 10x difference.

- OOo's spreadsheet doesn't autofill well. For example, Excel's autofill doesn't muck with the unchanging "data" part of the percentile function. OOo's does. In addition, if you move an entire column in OOo, the cells often don't update properly.

- OOo doesn't use native file selector dialogs (on Linux) without buggy 3rd party plugins.

- OOo sometimes coredumps when I try to start a presentation under Linux.

- OOo's 2.0 beta doesn't have working spellcheck at all on Linux.

- OOo doesn't use native GUI calls, so every element has that "not quite right" feeling.

- OOo can't autosave to a temp file; it must save to the original file

- OOo Impress doesn't ship with any templates.

- OOo has no groupware integration.

- OOo's outlining doesn't work like Word, AbiWord, KWord, or practically any other word processor.

- OOo de-italicizes an entire word if you hit CTRL+I before typing the space.

These are not minor squabbles. They are major issues that add up to a product that feels buggy, bloated, and awkward. It's a suite that just doesn't feel ready.

Re:Hard one

[DevNull Ogre]

The number one reason we are sticking with Microsoft though is textbooks. The textbooks are written for Microsoft Office. The buisness teachers, for the most part, are not savy enough to explain how to find similar functionality in a different program. If they follow the step by step in the book and it doesn't work, we get a call. Anyone know of any good textbooks for Open Source software?

Sounds like you guys (well, the business department anyway) should be looking for good textbooks period--even if you stick with MS Office. (Though I don't know if any exist in that genre.)

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.

No learning meant that students had questions, which meant less time for me to play Doom. And they were always stupid questions. My favorite was the time when somebody brought the book and told me they didn't know how to do it. I read the book back to them and they walked away contented! If only all problems were so easily solved.

Government procurement by brand is illegal

[marbux]

You might point out that government procurement specifications may not lawfully specify software brands, but must instead be specified by standards of performance. See my article at Groklaw, section 4. The international Agreement on Government Procurement applies to all levels of government in the U.S., including school districts.

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.

Let computer students change the code

[slapout]

The source code is available. You could have students in programming classes tinker with it as part of their assignments. Then if you ever need a change/bug fix, you could go to them and ask for it. Of course, I would reward then in same way.

Yes 'Demo it' - Here's what I'd do / have done...

[Chordonblue]

Above all else - BE HONEST. Let them know what shortcomings exist with OOo and how to address them. I wouldn't try some stunt like fooling them into believing it was MS Office (PHB's HATE that sort of display because it makes them feel foolish); however I *would* compare them side by side in something like 'Impress' and then conclude the slideshow by saying that it was prepared using OOo.

Here's some more things you can do:

1) Demo it by giving it away to those who are making decisions as well as to the teachers. Before OOo 2.0 I would have said not to because of installation hassles, but even the 2.0 beta makes this a thing of the past. Be prepared to answer questions on usage and comparisons to MS Office. I would recommend using 2.0 beta since it's release is imminent and it is far more polished.

If you can wait, I'd wait until The OpenCD w/2.0 OOo is finished before handing them out, but if you can't, then by all means give them the beta anyway.

2) .DOC is NOT a standard! Prove it to them with examples. Not every student at home has office - some have Works and thanks to Dell, some have NEW versions of Wordperfect (go figure). Standardizing on OOo (or StarOffice for support in-school) is a way of circumventing this without stepping on a lot of toes. In fact, OOo now imports WP/.DOC as well as exports in Flash, .DOC, and .PDF (a real standard). Compare this to MS Office and OOo becomes more compelling.

3) International concerns? Some private schools wrestle with the fact that Word 2000 in Asia and elsewhere, does not produce the same .DOC as the U.S. OOo revels in it's worldwide usability.

4) Prove compatibility with existing MS .DOC documents. Use examples from your school and be truthful with them. If something breaks, be honest about it. To this end, do use 2.0 because it now supports tables in tables (required for decent .DOC compatibility). HINT: 2.0 hasn't broken a single .DOC here yet! Yay!

5) Use the past to point to the future. Point out that there was a time back in the 'elden days' of computing where .DOC was in the minority. Use your own school's history if you can. Example: Before we standardized on OOo we had Word: XP/2000/97/95/DOS, Wordperfect Win/DOS, XYwrite, Notepad, Edit (yes, I'm serious), and a few others I can't remember. All this in only the last 10 years!

Remember this mantra: .DOC is not a standard. It varies between versions and changes at MS's whim. Some administrators may remember a row with Office '95 - a truly horrible version for those who are in the least concerned about compatibility.

Mayhap some of your administrator's remember a conversion process long ago with Wordperfect or some other format. Remind them that this process would not exist for OOo for two reasons:

a) Import of .DOC is damn good now.
b) Export of pure XML data is assured with OOo.

And finally, mention that it's FREE. Better still, preface this with the fact that StarOffice's terms for schools are outragiously good. Tell them that in standardizing to OOo, your teachers, administrators, students, parents, whoever wnats a copy from the library (you DO have some in there, right?), can have it free of charge. Remember: 'Free' should be the LAST thing you mention, not the first.

Let them know how the world is changing. Show them examples of who and where OOo is already being used full time. Convince them that they could grasp the brass ring before most others have. After all, isn't embracing new technology and learning new things what education is about?

Again, be honest about what OOo can do for you, and how it will improve compatibility and document longevity. You can win this battle (I did at Linden Hall School), but you have to 'sell it' for the right reasons and be prepared to help in the transition.

Good luck!

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.

OO isn't Office

[jimharris]

MS Office is more than just Word & Excel. If your school or company uses Outlook with an Exchange server, Office becomes a total work environment. We used to use Thunderbird where I work, but when they switched us to Exchange, I realized Outlook was the real cement that ties us to MS Office. Now the intergration between Office 2003 & IE 6 is even more complete when you use Outlook - so I gave up on Firefox too.

In terms of total functionality and usefulness, I am completely happy with Office 2003. I don't like the alternatives. I don't even like Office 2004 on the Mac. For me to switch to anything else means I loose in overall user satisfaction.

Sorry, but I hope my school never tries to save money by going to OOo.

However, if you don't have Outlook/Exchange, and just use Office for Word & Excel, I'm not sure if it matters.

I have similar experience

[b17bmbr]

I am a teacher and can share a similar experience:

1) district tech people will get freebies er, um, demos, from microsoft. you know, windows server, visual studio, etc., to "tryout" as it were. gonna influence their decision

2) people will already have 1000's of prior docs in .doc, .xls, and .ppt. OO.org won't do a good enough job on those. plus, asking teachers (and I am one by the way)to learn something new is going to be impossible, no matter how close the two really are.

3) "if it's free, it can't be good" and "it's what they use in the real world" will prevail. schools are no longer institutions of learning, but exist simply to train workers. i could cry. we don't read nor write nor think anymore. sorry to kvetch. but, there is a mindset about "Office" and you're just a salmon.

4) teachers get a copy for home. so they think they're getting a steal. kinda hard to overcome that.

5) here's the glimmer of hope. set up a small lab with OO.org. since the really expensive thing for schools is hardware (software is actually pretty cheap. they want to get the kids hooked.) set up a linux thin client lab, or a linux lab with older computers. then use OO.org there. the other thing is this: since you can't give Office to the kids, but you can OO.org, make a technology plan to have a "give the kids a CD day". perhps if the kids turn in work in .sxw it might be a start.

6) another alternative. since much school hardware is OOOOLLLLDDDD, try abiword. it's small and fast. that'll get them interested in OSS.

look, I've been a teacher for ten years and been excited and shot down too many times to tell you. am I cynical, sure. you're going up against a beauracracy who doesn't care about saving money. remember, they have to do budget burning too. saving them money screws that up. sad but true. i hope you get this far down.

Re:I wouldn't use OpenOffice for a school

[Ogerman]

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.

A School District That Has Done This

[ratboy666]

Ontario, Canada...

7 million seats

Big enough?

Ratboy

General problem using WP for big documents

[curri]

I may be doing something (or many things :) wrong, but it sucks to write any big document in word (or OpenOffice.org :) as compared to latex (or I asume docbook or such).

Ensuring consistency is a mess, pagination is a mess and oftentimes there is some little thing that doesn't work as it should.

Cirriculum should be looked at too

[NevarMore]

The focus in schools is teaching kids. If its not, we have a bigger problem. So, assuming that your school offers even a basic typing/word processing class we need to examine what that class is teaching students.

If the class is there to teach students to use MS Office then sticking with MS Office and having them memorize and regurgitate those patterns to accomplish a task is the way to go.

If the class is designed to teach students to create, modify, and present documents in an educational and professional manner then OpenOffice could be used. Instead of training them what tools to use to accomplish a task TEACH them to LEARN and DISCOVER what tools they need to accomplish a task.

By example:
-If I want to do a mail merge in MS Office, I start by clicking the insert menu, then clicking 'mail merge', then clicking.....
-If I want to mail the same document to multiple people without retyping each one I should look for a tool or template that will allow me to do this. I would first start by skimming the menu options for some likely candidates, then use help or the software manual to make sure that is the right tool. Once I do that, I will probably have to insert something to tell the word processor where I want names and addresses to appear.

I think that addressing it as a cirriculum and educational issue rather than a cost/philosophical issue will get you farther AND benefit the students. Teaching them problem solving skills rather than task skills will take your students much farther.