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2-Year OpenOffice High School Case Study
Michael writes "NewsForge (a Slashdot sister site) is carrying a 2-year OpenOffice case-study on a Detroit high school who switched from Windows NT and MS Office 97 to Linux and OpenOffice. The results? Better than expected. In 2003, the school, who saved over $100,000 in the process, converted 110 Windows NT machines to Linux with OpenOffice. After several surprising developments, including OpenOffice's ability to open old Word documents that even the new Word versions were having troubles with, the school now uses it almost exclusively, has classes on it's use, and encourages students to use it whenever possible. From the article: 'While OpenOffice.org is now used by 100% of the faculty and students in the school (though some administrative staff still uses Microsoft Office due to specific software requirements), students are not required to use OpenOffice.org when working at home. However, a presentation is given to students at the start of every school year to advise them on the use of OpenOffice.org, the availability of free copies, and potential problems of converting from Microsoft Office formats.'"
This study was obviously funded by Open Office and Linux. I am so sick of Linux and Open Office "buying" the results that show their products are better than Microsoft's. This report is so slanted in its analysis that I can't even begin to chip away at all of the errors.
And yes, I do think I'm funny.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Does it run Office?
So it seems that the same thing that happened to propritary unix apps in the 80s and 90s is starting to happen now with propritary consumer apps. I'm refering to the stories of upon setting up their workstation or server taking a day to replace all the proprietary programs with the GNU created ones because they functioned better.
Always good to see open-source gain credibilty in the "real world".
First Post?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
But clearly not on proper English grammar.
Now that they saved about $100,000, what will that money be used on? I hope it gives better tech lessons to everyone.
From TFS:
This sums it up so well...
Actually, has anyone out there run into any issues with OpenOffice as a substitute for M$ Office? I'm considering switching everything over, especially after reading this article.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Yea, but none of my Anti-Virus programs run on Linux.
How long will it be until Microsoft comes in with some "free" software to bring them back into the fold? There were several schools around my area that received free software from Microsoft when they considered going open source.
Any word on when 2.0 will finally make it out of beta? Like it was supposed to in March or April or May?
99% of my use of MS word is as a spell checker, I'll type a comment (like this one) on a web form then quickly copy and paste in to word and back for spellchecking goodness.
OO.o's spellchecker just isn't as good as Word's. It works the same way, but the suggestions just aren't as good.
I'd also love a simple, notepad-like text editor that gave me online spellchecking and word line number. Anything like that out there?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What's that smell? I think it's smoke. Oh look, it's coming from Bill Gates' ears.
Technoli
"In 2003, the school, who saved over $100,000 in the process, converted 110 Windows NT machines to Linux with OpenOffice."
I hope the school teaches students that "who" is a pronoun that references people. "School" is a noun properly referenced by the pronoun "that" or "which" (in this case, "which"). Choosing "that" or "which" properly can require some fast thinking, but using "who" for a school is a real failure.
--
make install -not war
since microsoft office is a stagnant target (not too many innovations left to be made in word and excel), it is only a matter of time for openoffice to catch up - with the huge base of motivated programmers, they may even surpass ms office.
See, OpenOffice IS ready for prime-time! Highschoolers in DETROIT are using it, and we all know what discerning consumers THEY are! Given this revelation, I'm SURE it's only a matter of weeks before the Fortune 500 and top accounting firms switch over!
Hooray for OpenOffice! Microsoft can bite my bag!
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
If a school can save that ammount of money on software and have no ill effects on the education process then way to go . . . ;) allowing me to get my spanky new server)
100,000 can be spent to hire special teachers and improve the quality of education for all.
OO.org is perfectly useable and i have infact switched all my machines(home naturaly as they are all linux or os x and i dont own MS office for mac , but mainly work ) to using OO.org
I counducted a 2 hour training sesion in the basics for the employes, though it was uneeded mostly and we have never looked back
plowing the type of money that is required to fit all the computers in a school with the latest versions of windows and MS products is a major drain on revenue , infact for any company . If you for some reason need features not avaliable yet in open office then you have no choice . Though all things considerd i would rather spend the one time retraining costs than pay for an update to MS office.
(I have managed to switch a fair few clients at the office to linux too , which saved us more money
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The school "has classes on it's use."
Presumably they also have classes on the use of the apostrophe. (Sigh.)
In particular you can get McCafee AV for Linux.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I have font issues when opening almost any PowerPoint presentation in OpenOffice. The bullets never look right, and the lines end up taking more vertical space so that what fits on a single slide in PowerPoint stretches below the bottom in OpenOffice.
Directly below the article:
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The entire point of high school computer classes is to teach to use things like this. There are consequences for you depending on your ability to learn it. Of course they got it.
Try to roll this out in a corporate environment, though, and you'd get very different results. Secretaries and businessmen are under no obligation to learn how to use the tools they use. If they can't figure out how something works the first time they just whine to tech support every time they want to do it after.
Over the many years (begining in the late 80s) most of my sources of pirated software has been from academic sources -- mostly teachers.
Knowing that as a high school / college student I could not afford the software, it's use was generously "loaned" to me. (I also had to borrow computers -- could not afford one of my own until a college loan specific for building one came along).
But with educational institutions very worried these days about piracy, having truley free software of good quality is the way to lessen piracy in the schools.
OpenOffice.org is a great suite, and has many things going for it that just makes sense, such as it being open source, free to distribute, and cross-platform, just about any student should be able to use it.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
The worst problems I have are with Powerpoint slides using OO Impress. For instance, it likes to mangle bullet points and never seems to get the sizes quite right. It also doesn't seem to handle all of the different ways that PP can imbed images and sometimes they don't show up at all.
That said, PDFs are a much friendlier way of distributing "slides" unless you need animations for some reason.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do any of you think the school's decision to make the switch had anything to do with lack of funds to continue running Microsoft products?
... and I'm glad the kids like it, but I won't even think about switching until it has a wonderful, cheerful, dancing paperclip to brighten up my day.
This is going to be a typical scene of geek masturbation, with a single common theme in mind:
It worked for me, therefore it must be perfect for everyone in the world
So it worked for this school. Good for them. Advising the students to use it is questionable, and the inevitable posts in this thread marking any Office user as a hopeless moron are more damaging to OpenOffice's reputation than helpful.
I don't see why these kids need openoffice. When I was a kid, nroff and troff were good enough for us, and I think it should be good enough for these kids nowadays. They're all soft. No wonder our education system is in the tank!
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
It can handle simple Word docs without much trouble, but introduce Excel macros or an Access mdb, and thinks stop looking so bright.
Anyone know? Do they have plans to? I think it's only fair that if a free application saved them tons of money the school pay back at least part of the cost saved.
that linux can operate effectively in an environment of old hardware and yesterday's problems. Why is this news worthy? People don't understand how the government works. If you show a cost savings they stop giving you funding because you've shown you can operate on a leaner budget. They need to start using XP and Office, and run up their support bills. If I was the schools administrator I'd avoid anything with the word "free" in it like the plague.
I've had some minor formatting issues between OpenOffice and Word formats, but nothing more significant than what you get between different version of Microsoft Office.
In fact, I used OpenOffice to fix a corrupt Word document created in Office2000 that consistently crashed in OfficeXP.
If I had the choice, I'd be using OpenOffice at work as well.
I'm eagerly awaiting OOo 2.0. It looks pretty solid and the database feature looks like it could give Access a run.
--- Dan
That's a damn shitty wage to be paying a teacher. And you still have to pay benifits. They can probably hire 2 teachers on the money they saved.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Damn...who'da thought Detroit would ever be at the forefront of ANYTHING ever again?
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
WinNT/Office 97 vs. (i assume) the latest versions of some flavor of linux/openoffice -- that doesn't seem to be an apples to apples comparison to me.
Every year the school has special classes to explain the differences, encourage kids to use it, and explain any problems they may have. How much does this class cost the school? How much time is taken out of fundamental education in order to teach this information? I'm not saying this is bad, but is $100,000 a real figure when you count the continued education needed of the students in order for them to become familiar with OpenOffice?
If you find yourself typing anything in another language for any reason, be prepared for a world of hurt. OO.o will intermittently switch to English at random intervals and start marking all of your words as misspelled until you select the whole text and manually switch it to the other language (through the ungainly interface of the font selection dialog, IIRC.) I haven't found much in the way of actual documentation of this problem, but I've seen it happen on a few entirely unrelated occasions with different people.
In my experience, LaTeX has been much nicer to me. I've pulled out a few hairs getting it working with e.g. MLA format (it doesn't seem to be very friendly to the formats used by the humanities in general, probably because it's much more commonly used for scientific or mathematical documents), but editing is much cleaner and faster without my having to worry about the format as I write the content, and it can be spellchecked with the full power of ispell---to say nothing of the fact that its output is nothing short of gorgeous. YMMV, though, and for all that might be wrong with OOo, it's undoubtedly better at least than MS Office.
thereby readying their students to compete for those coveted administrative assistant positions.
This is just the opposite of the Microsoft Get the Facts campaign.
That was $100,000 that was in their Capital and Operations budgets, which now that it's not being used, likely won't be available to them anymore.
I've found that bulleted lists don't display/work properly when I switch between Word and OOffice to edit a document. It's almost as if OO and Word use different and slightly incompatible internal notations to specify bullet lists. If I create a bullet list in one, it is virtually guaranteed to not display properly and not be properly editable in the other. The bullets themselves aren't the same size either, but I consider that the least of my problems. I thought this might be because of the document format I was saving to, but I can reproduce the problem whether I save the document as DOC or RTF.
Am I missing something?
If for nothing else, the school can , for less than one percent of the MS license fees, have OOo printed to CDs for every student, no more labs full of students working furiously in the labs at 7AM as we had in our HS because so many could not afford Office and didnt want/know how to "aquier" it. We that had it shared the wealth, but a lot of people saw it as theft, I saw it as needing to get my homework done.
"In 2003, the school, who saved over $100,000 in the process,"
should be
"In 2003, the school, WHICH saved over $100,000 in the process,"
The problem is that there are two ways to consider a collective noun like "school" or "Microsoft."
In Britain, one says "Microsoft are opposed to Open Source." The company name is a collective plural noun referring to the people within it. To be consistent, one would also say "Microsoft, who oppose Open Source, disagree with this study."
In the US, a company or organization is a singular noun. "Microsoft is opposed to Open Source," is consistent with "Microsoft, which opposes Open Source, disagrees with this study."
To those of us in Commonwealth countries, the idea that a company can, as a whole, do any single thing is ludicrous. Just look at Sony, which both sells music and devices for easily copying music. Those arms fight often.
Although this study was done in Detroit, the author may well have grown up with a non-American variant of English. As long as the usage is consistent, it's hard to attack it, except insofar as one's usage should agree with the editorial standards of any news organization for which one writes.
In short, using "who" for school is not necessarily "a real failure." "The school, who saved over $100,000, are ecstatic," is much better than "the school, which saved over $100,000, are ecstatic." "Which" does not agree with "are."
The new version 3 of the Google Toolbar has a spell-check feature for web forms. I think it's even out of beta now (which is a miracle considering how long Google leaves things in beta typically).
I've ben ussing it fer moonths and it's werks graet! (just kidding)
I'm a big tall mofo.
When I was using computers in school, in the "IBM Labs" (as opposed to the mac and apple IIe labs), with a bit-o-norton utilities, we could easily hide games in directories hidden by screwing with some fat table entries. This, of course, was only possible, because even with Novell in place, there wasn't a way to lock things down.
:/
With linux, I can imagine this will be completely different... until the kiddo's start watching bugtraq for local root exploits
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Because MS has a stranglehold on the groupware, OpenOffice can't be considered as a reasonable replacement for MS Office by large companies. It will take an open source competitor to the Exchange for the MS monolith to tip. Hello, Google...?
Bzzzzt. wrong.
It should be:
"In 2003 the school saved over $100,000 in the process,
I've discovered the same thing with bulleting issues between Word and OOffice. I'll be interested to see if anyone has a solution to this. Also, the reason I switched is because I'm a student running an older computer, and M$ Office would take several minutes to open up on my computer. For what I need OO.o is much faster and less bulky.
I tried the same sort of migration in a research lab, and it failed miserably. We had people who used TeX, and Jot on SGI to people using MS Office on OSX. It was a simple pain, most of the people jsut wanted to get there work done and pick up there kids from school. They used Linux for all there research and stuff. But everyone had a laptop ( OSX and or windows XP), and it was a mess. End result too many smart scientist folks were pushing there weight around. In the end the SGI guy always did everything on the SGI and write papers on Word on his OSX box ( he ran the Word under OS 9 emmulator or a long long long time ).
... trying to get nfs to work on XP :). Figruing out automounters on OSX. But the end result is that Open Souce software will be a gateway for people to use computers, maybe more effictively than before.
Then one of the windows fan just tried to do science and research on windows but his laptop would barf and die at times making him loose his data. Then people wanted to get access to there files in this muti cultural environment and the windows guys were pissed at the OSX guys whou could nfs mount the directories etc.. Then they had printer problems. All the Linux boxes were pretty standard and could print ( except for the mail server ) to the 25 printer in the lab. But the windows guys and there laptops would never be able to print to these printers for what ever reason and they would make pdfs of there images and bring them over to Linux and print them but the OSX guys had it easy with the printers though.
Then there were the vmware grad student using Linux nuts, that was another chapter in torture and instability.
End result controlled chaos. The whole place had a mixture of 6 different operating systems, scientists that were from back in the day when punch cards were cool, and way too powerful Linux boxen ( dual Opterons with 4GB of RAM) for the normal users. Who had the most complex screen savers ever running so the machine would be doing something...
One thing to learn from this story is that implementing open source ideas in an institution takes more than a Linux hippies zealousness. It requires good planning and the ability for the people to accept this change. It is more of a social problem than a technical problem. People are resiliant to change. They will fight it with a passion. But as Mahatma Gandhi says, " Be the change you wish to see in the world." My Linux nutness caused many of the users to switch to Open Office, ( I think it was 2 users ). But it was great fun all the time
Younger computer users are naturally more adaptive while adults are more set in their ways. I do acknowledge that there were some adults (teachers, administrators) who succeeded in this study. Still, could I teach all the "old dogs" at my workplace the "new tricks" of Linux and OpenOffice?
The author of this article claims that he "needed" to upgrade from Office 97 to something a bit better. He seemed to think his only to real choices were Office 2k or OO.
But here's my question; if this is educational is OO a better choice than Office 97?
I'm just thinking that I'd want my students in an environment that they're going to find useful in the future. I'm guessing that 95% of all office environments are running MS Office. So, would an older version of MS Office measure up better to "the real thing" than OO? I have doubts about the educational validity of the project.
I figure that this is the same reason they don't teach the slide ruler in schools much anymore. It's not because the technology isn't valid and useful, it's because the pros in the field no longer use it. Why teach something that just isn't going to be used in real life?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The reason they went with open office was to prevent hardware upgrades not software. Unless Microsoft is going to give them a free version of XP to run on slower computers, there's nothing they can do to satisfy that requirement.
OS X is faster, stabler, more secure and is written and maintained by an American corporation that employs professional American progrogrammers. In short, there is simply no reason for anyone to use that rat-hole of uselessness that is Linux anymore. OS X is the present and the future. Think different. Think better. Think Apple.
I know you're trying to be funny, but in my opinion (and I think in the opinion of a lot of other people here on /.) there is nothing worse than someone who learns computers by memorizing. It is far better for someone to learn the concepts of software and be able to apply them everywhere. Even if they go on to work in positions where OO.o is not used, they will probably begin to see the concepts and become better computer users as a result.
> How long will it be until Microsoft comes in with some "free" software to bring them back into the fold?
My school is regularly sent free software to keep it update, I remember most recently Microsoft sent us their new security program, MS Blast.
I tried Open Office, and basically liked it; however, the resource budget for running it on Windows boxes made it start to really drag after 2 or 3 days of constant use. Maybe it's gotten better since then?
-Styopa
- how much more postage is going to cost them because secretarial staff can now write more letters per day? Things like this add up and can cost big money that isn't represented in this report.
- Not having to retype old documents means that staff can afford to take more breaks -- That's Lost productive time that I don't see taken into account.
There's lots more, but I have to go to the beach (to get my hair cut -- honest!).Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The school had about a hundred older computers running Microsoft Office 97 and Windows NT, and some kind of upgrade was clearly required.
I'd love an explination of "clearly required". Why was some kind of an upgrade "clearly required"? Did all of these computers stop functioning? Were there some features that Office 97 was missing?
OO and MS Office will soon be commodities and interchangeable and good enough for the majority of users, but MS is always going to pushing the envelope in areas like speech recognition and, now, it seems, self-checking programs.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I've found open office to be ok at best with word97 docs and abiword to abysmal to the say the least.
I know it's not their primary focus but how hard would it be to be close to 100% compat on a document format from 1997?
I focus on word97 as a lot of offices have stuck with office97.
Here at my shop and at hope we/I use OpenOffice exclusively. Especially with the new 2.0 Beta (1.9 something) we have had absolutely ZERO problems. We also use Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4 and have had no problems with it at all either. Well, outside of using Sieble which requires IE but thats a different subject.
MadOgre.com
An upgrade cycle is about 3 years so we're talking $100,000 over 3 years, $30,000 per year or about 1 teacher or lots and lots of books and equipment.
Still a very handy saving though.
Deleted
It was the staff who converted -- and (to their surprise) found that it was way better than they expected. Learning curve for the staff is quite relevant, since they all probably knew MS Office before hand.
On the other hand, you still have a learning curve for every new version of MS Office too... Probably about as much as the difference between MS and Open..
and kept MS Office for some of the administration stuff, probably because they couldn't afford not openning certain documents.
MS Office couldn't open some MS office documents, and OO couldn't open some MS Office documents -- so overall, I'd say we're about equal here.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Why is it FUD when Microsoft does it, but not when the OSS crowd does it? What the article is basically summing up is that Microsoft Anti-Linux tactics are acceptable. Another case of "If you can't beat them, join them"?
End of Line.
it's is only for the contraction not the posessive.
OOo is quite similar to Office, and I doubt most people will find the differences to matter in business. Frankly, if students do learn these differences and are able to adapt to Office, then they will be ahead of the tech curve by knowing more than one interface and thus being able to generalize, making them more effective at learning new features/programs rather than being paralyzed by change. It is the fear of something different that makes OOo and other MS alternatives unacceptable, not any practical business or money-making rational.
I don't know a single person I'd call technically competent who is only able to use one word processor, spreadsheet, IDE, CAD tool, whatever to the exclusion of all others. The tech curve is not static, and knowing one thing (even if it is the most popular) is to handicap yourself when that curve moves beyond what you know.
MS Tax or no, I consider this to be doing the students a favor.
The enemies of Democracy are
I use in my qmail mail server the F-Secure AV, great response time for new viruses, among others they use the kaspersky antivirus engine to search for malware. (They also use the lavasoft engine to specific scan for spyware in the beta products)
Anyone else here seen kentuky fried movie?
I have had nothing but trouble with MS Office opening any documents. In fact, I just can not get it run on my OS390.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Let us know your e-mail and/or IP address. We will all be happy to send you programs that run first on your windows box that you can then try on the linux box.
I was the webmaster of my high school NJROTC unit when one of our computers crashed and we were forced to wipe the hard drive. We were able to get a copy of Windows (my suggestion to install Xandros, Mandrake, or some other user-frienlty Linux distro didn't fly). Unfortunately, no one had a copy of MS Office at home. We could have purchased a copy or licensed one from the school, but the cost to the unit would be astronomical. The "powers that be" (read: those who don't know that there's an alternative to MS Office) decided to just leave the computer without an office suite and just use WordPad for everything. Eventually, I got sick of not having a "real" office suite on the computer and installed OpenOffice.org. It went great! To this day (I'm graduating today, this was at the beginnign of the year), I have encountered no compatibility problems and everyone who has used the computer instantaneously picked up the new program (and most of the users weren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer).
/., I cheer my heart out. It's time we get free software like this into a high-school setting to expose kids to this kind of stuff early.
Experiences I've had like this goes to show that OpenOffice.org is one of the most useful free, open source products available to home users (with the exception of Firefox). The interfaces of OpenOffice.org and MS Office are so similar that a user can pick them up in a second. When I see stories like this on
Ride the skies
I read in a couple of posts about osX spell checking service. Is there anything similar for gnome/kde?
Maybe I can help a bit with the educational point of view. When teaching children to be productive and "employable" members of our society, schools usually survey their local businesses to see what productivity software is the most used. They then base there software purchases on the results of the audit.
But keep in mind that MSOffice & the alternatives are an extremely small part of the software equation for public schools. Most IT directors is school districts would seriously consider Linux as a viable OS for classroom PC's if a resonable selection of academic software were available. For Linux, where is my math software, skill builder software, pratical application software, frog disection software, test generating software etc. etc.
Linux distributors should seriously consider working closely with the manufacturers of the 50 top "curriculum" software titles if they ever hope to have a prayer at the multi billion dollar educational market.
One of the best quotes I've ever seen on the whole OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office debate:
Well, normally it isn't too hard to pick out the flaws in an MS study. The first is usually when they claim the study isn't an MS study but rather "independent" where "independent" means "researchers who are paid by corporations to conduct studies for them".
If you can see any obvious flaws in this study that should give anyone considering the results to see if they should try it themselves, I welcome you to do so.
The enemies of Democracy are
If anything, the school ought to be given credit for demonstrating, to both students AND faculty, that you don't have to follow BillG around like a bunch of sheep following a bellwether. The best part is that you can survive the experience quite handily.
So maybe these students won't be able to say they have "MS WORD experience." Big deal. Do you think it's that much of a leap to sit down in front of MS Word and learn the basics within a couple of hours?
I think there should just be 2 teams. These 2 teams will try their best to "hack" or do whatever it takes to break down the infostructure of the other company.
...we could do this from any stand-point, be it, by physical violence, handy-dandy computer tatcis, or even by publicity stunts like this one.
Who do YOU think will win?
The latter subject inspired his latest work, a fully checked formal proof of the famous Four Colour Theorem, using the Coq proof assistant developed at INRIA
Well according to the above quote from the Microsoft page - the software that actually did the proof came from a publically funded research institute not Microsoft - who merely applied it to the 4-colour problem. Both researchers appear to work at INRIA (French national institute of research in computer science) and one of them is associated with Microsoft.
Just the facts ma'am - just the facts...
100K/110 workstations = about 910 dollars
last time I checked the most expensive version of the office suite was 500 dollars. Now you can usually find XP or whatever for under 200 dollars. That is 700 dollars, how the hell do they get 910 per computer for software? On top of that most schools get discounts for software like this.
Im sure they saved some money with this intitiative but they are definately inflating the cost of software.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
>Macros typically will not work,
But what about the huge installed base of viruses? How will they run?
hawk
2.0 beta is much better than 1.x, but there are still scores of issues that still keep me from using Open Office as my primary suite:
1. Word/Excel Documents often do not fit in the same number of pages. If you have lots (I have dozens) of forms, templates and other documents pre-created, you will likely have to readjust margins, tables, font sizes, etc., to get them to fit in the same space.
2. Power Point animations are attempted, but not satisfactorily reproduced. They get jumpy, or do things at the wrong speed or in the wrong order.
3. You cannot specify a header row when sorting spreadsheet data.
4. In general, document/font display is not as accurate nor as aesthetically pleasing as it is in MS Office.
5. On my work PC, MS Word takes about 5 seconds to load when I double-click a document. Open Office Writer (2.0 beta) takes about 25 seconds, and that's with "Quickstarter." Hopefully there is still some optimization to be done before this goes gold.
But, you can remote OOo without a user being logged in. That's crucial to me and a "bell and/or whistle" that MS never seemed to bother putting in.
All's true that is mistrusted
Since no-one else appears to understand what you are talking about I thought I'd chime in with support. I also remember the timeframe when more an more UNIX admins always installed the GNU tools to supplant whatever the system provided. The concept of a owrd processor is pretty stable nowadays, it's easy at this point for OOO to move in an refine pretty much everything a word processor can do. Then most of the remaining work is just on file format filters, which can be kept up with...
The switch is coming, the benefits in cost and document longevity are just too clear to ignore.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's great to have Linux skills, but what happens when these kids go out into the Windows dominated work force? I don't like the idea of schools limiting themselves to just one OS. Reallistically, they should be teaching a mixture of Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc.
I suppose that I could look up the exact tuition, but $8k is in line with other Catholic high schools in major metropolitan areas. That means about $8M a year in tuition, of which $100K is 1.25%.
Or, $100/student.
(That $8M will not be the entire school budget--the Jesuit order heavily subsidizes its schools, even moreso than many other Catholic schools).
hawk
In the two schools my son has been in I doubt more than 5% of the teachers could even tell you what an office suite is. They seemed more concerned with their subject areas than with playing on the computers. At his previous school, teacher were able to check out computers for temporary use. Most only used for emailing parents.
With zero knowledge, I'd argue the learning curve is about the same, with reduced clippy induced foul language (another bonus).
Both of these products will still torque you off with the auto indenting/bulleting by default.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
So they switched from a 10 year old OS and an 8 year old office suite to a modern OS and office suite and had favorable results.
Who wouldda thunk?
It's kinda like trading in your '64 Chevy Impala for a 2005 Toyota Camry and concluding Chevy sucks.
Now how they managed to "save" $100,000 by switching 110 machines when the cost of NT+Office per machine x 110 is less than $100,000 is beyond me. I'm sure the machines magically migrated themselves at no cost either.
Microsoft FUD got nothin' on me!!
I don't really read Microsoft fanboy websites
What Microsoft fanboy websites? Seriously, do you know of any? (other than www.microsoft.com) Maybe there's a reason that there isn't much support for Microsoft products or business practices. Maybe it's because there's something fundamentally wrong with their products and business practices.
(Slashdot is a Linux/OSS fanboy website, if you didn't notice)
It sure is. However, you seem to be implying that the praise of linux is not deserved. As if the preponderance of pro-democracy literature somehow invalidates democracy. Maybe there's a reason that all these people are supporting this thing. Maybe there's a reason that all these tech-savvy people keep saying the same things over and over about linux security, stability, and power.
I think the relative lack of MS fanboys, and the comparatively large number of linux fanboys is telling you something. I'm not arguing that public opinion determines reality... Having lots of fans doesn't make a person or thing "cool" or "great" automatically. Then again, having lots of fans doesn't make a person or thing automatically "bad" or "wrong." Maybe you should take a hard look at the arguments people are making before you dismiss them baseless rhetoric.
Mail merge is not so hot in the newest OO version. Specifically, making a set of labels out of 408 addresses would kill the computer I was running it on. So if you use that feature a lot, I wouldn't recommend it. Office on the same computer did the job simply without using up all available RAM and virtual memory.
I'm a GUI/Usability guy, so this is my professional ability to play "dumb user" speaking:
The ZIP I downloaded had a cryptic name "OO_...something..." with lots of letters and numbers. The zip took a long time to download, so when I later saw this file on my desktop I didn't know what it was. This was confusing, it should say something "OpenOffice.zip" or better yet "OpenOffice.EXE".
I opened the zip (would "dumb user" even have WinZip on their system, or know how to use it?) -- the zip contained dozens of weirdly named files, and at the very bottom of the list I found a setup.exe. I ran the setup exe, and from this point on the installation process was clean and simple.
The file I download should have been as small an EXE as possible -- perhaps a small simple app that downloads the big file for you in a friendly way.
Luring new users over from the dark (MS) side is like trying to get a tiny squirrel to take a peanut from your hand. Any weird gestures and they'll bolt. I'm afraid the big download, weirdly named zip, and the hunt for the setup.exe would likley have caused the timid squirrel to run away.
Then I went to launch the app, and the icons in the OpenOffice folder on the Start menu confused me. I could not find an icon with a blue W representing the word processor, so after a moment of confusion I tried clicking on "Open Document" which let me browse to my *.doc -- whew it worked, but "dumb user" wasn't sure he was doing the right thing, and almost didn't bother to try.
The doc file opened easily, the Word Processor is pretty and obviously very mature and full-functioned. I could read and print (!) my doc easily with no trouble at all. Very nice.
The BIG POINT HERE is Sun needs to do their best to improve the initial download/install experience to ensure switchers don't get confused. Also, emulate everything MS does so MS Office users do not have to stray from their pre-conditioned clicking behavious; you will loose new users at the first moment of confusion. A "Blue W " icon needs to represent the Word Processor, a "Green X" icon for the Spreadsheet.
Hope this helps, looks like a good product, really.
Sam
The envelope printer thingy in OOo Writer consistantly mis-prints (2-3 inches off in seemingly random directions) on my Brother laser printer. No clue if it's a problem with OOo or with the Brother PPD.
As annoyances go, I've certainly had worse.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Yes, there's KSpell that does basically the same thing as OS X's system-wide spell checking service. It comes with KDE's base package (kdebase3).
Although, I'm not too sure how similar they are, because I've never used Mac OS X, but from what I understand from previous posts, both are fairly similar.
Ok, great, Linux, I know. But how about easing the transition? Just OpenOffice, then maybe Windows as well. I know you can't go Windows -> Linux without bundling them, but maybe a slower transition will increase the acceptance ratio?
Of course, hearing that it worked well is awesome, keep it up! =) I love OO.Org, and 2.0beta kick ass(even w/ Java, which I know I'll never be able to get it to work on FreeBSD without spending hundreds of hours of trying to get Java to work).
That's exactly what I was thinking. Cocoa has spell checking pretty much for free in every App you make with it, which is like 90% of the OS X apps out there. Obviously Linux also has a spell checking libraries available, although it's not as standard given the loose structure of linux, so that leaves MS Windows as the only OS without a standard spell-checking library in their API... unless people just never use it, which would be equally ridiculous.
I haven't had to face them with 2.0, but in 1.1, checkboxes on forms were a nightmare. I generally had to use XXX instead.
hawk
I figure that this is the same reason they don't teach the slide ruler in schools much anymore. It's not because the technology isn't valid and useful, it's because the pros in the field no longer use it. Why teach something that just isn't going to be used in real life?
i.e. you are a troll.
I would be great if this kind of data was utilized through a "Get the Facts" campaign to counter Microsoft claims about their superior TCO. I wonder if OpenOffice people are going to make use of it in order to promote awareness and gain even more support. If OpenOffice was a commercial product, their salespeople would already be knocking on the doors of all major education establishments with nifty handouts documenting this case study, begging the officials to give OpenOffice a try.
I am glad to see an educational institution make this move. Personally, I tried to do the same when I was the PC Geek at my hometown library, but the intransigence of the administrative staff and their deep-seated fear of change (unless it involved adding another librarian or increasing librarian salaries) was the major hurdle I could never clear.
After I left, their new tech guy trumpeted the new technology plan, which discarded "cost-based" moves (i.e.: open source) in favor of "patron-centered" moves (i.e.: upgrade everything to XP and buy an expensive new server for lot$a dollar$.
Some people should NEVER be allowed access to the public purse.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
Think REALLY expensive. I'm all about OS X, but it would cost a chunk of change to replace all computers at the school with new mac minis (though very cool).
Very few people actually know or need to know the advanced parts of MS Office. As such very few people need any retraining whatsoever. It's easy enough for anyone to figure out on their own where things like bold, italic, font size, margin controls, etc. is in OpenOffice.
And for those who actually know and use the advanced features of MS Office, they often can't even think of switching over until industry standards do first. The only ones at the school I worked at who couldn't switch without some effort were the secretaries/office managers. Retraining is a non-issue in most places, especially education.
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
You can change things to suit your preferences if you're smart about it, can demonstrate the value of the alternatives to Windows. So this attitude that we must stick by Windows because it's a Windows-dominated world is sort of circular.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
The problems that have arisen from OpenOffice use where I work (we only get MS Office licenses if special needs require it - otherwise it's all OO now) are these:
-OO is heavy. It takes a modern puter to run it, and start up times on Windows machines are ridiculous. Dunno why.. but on my old 1GHz Linux box OO + document opens in under a second while on a 3GHz win PC it takes about 30s. Talking of 2.0 beta, 1.1 loads faster on windoze.
-Some ppl accidentally send OpenOffice format files to contacts outside (forget to export as PDF)
-Some Powerpoint presentations have fonts, layout, effects or all of them fuxxored
-Macro problems in spreadsheets
That's about it.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Most of the time I'm sending them PDF's by posting them on the web server, which is as easy as saving them to a network folder, which I do right from OO. And I really like being able to use the same application on Windows or Linux.
I've also known some small offices that have switched over, very few problems. All those FUD talking points MSFT uses are absolute crap. There is no massive learning curve or training costs and anyone who can open a PDF can read what you create.
A $100,000 to a school district is a lot of money. That could pay for an after school program for a whole year, equipment for a sports program, an extra teacher. Even if OO was a vastly inferior product, which it's not IMHO, it would seem like the things you could do with the money in a school far outweigh having the latest and greatest software.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"NewsForge (a Slashdot sister site) is carrying a 2-year OpenOffice case-study on a Detroit high school who switched from Windows NT and MS Office 97 to Linux and OpenOffice."
How is going from Office 97 to a knock-off of Office 97 an upgrade?
Vote for Pedro
I don't have sympathy for the parent poster, I have pity. I cannot imagine relying on a computer spellchecker for posting comments on a website. If you don't know how to spell a word, you probably don't know what it really means. A computer spellchecker is no substitute for learning to type and obtaining a vocabulary. The main use is to flag potential issues after typing a long document. Even then, it won't catch every typo.
Chances are (statically speaking), I'm far more intelligent, well spoken then you will ever be. Chances are that I have a larger vocabulary then you do. I'm far more likely to know what a specific word means then you.
I was a horrible speller throughout grade school, and although it improved greatly during collage when I started posting on the internet constantly. That said, there are still a lot of words out there I don't type frequently, and therefore can't spell. I notice when I use one of these words, and spell-check it. Most of the time, I don't.
(Interestingly, I really only know how to type words, if you ask me how to spell a word, I'd often need to 'type' it with my fingers to know what letters make it up).
If you can find a single mis-used word in any comment I've ever posted to Slashdot (several thousand) I'll paypal you $100.
In conclusion, you're an idiot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sheesh, when I was a kid we were all just piles of organic chemicals lying in sludge pits dreaming about that one lucky bolt of lightning that could make us into living organisms!
But, in TFA it does say that this was from U of D Jesuit. A very good school, but not a city school.
It just suddenly dawned on me that it is more surprising to see this from the Catholics than Detroit.
June 5, 2008
DETROIT (AP-DRUDGE) - Students trained in high school on Open Office had an unemployment rate three times the national average, according to a new followup study released today. The original study, describing a two-year pilot project in the Detroit school system to use Open Office instead of Microsoft Office, saved the school district $100,000...
David Jones (not his real name), a student in the original study, was quoted in the followup as saying he encountered difficulty applying for jobs without Office experience. "Most of my interviews got as far as them asking if I could use Word," Jones said. "They wouldn't listen to my argument that Open Office was "just as good" and "could open older Word files that even Word can no longer open. I guess they just weren't interested."
Jones spoke from the vacuum cleaner station at the Mighty Hose Car Wash, where he has advanced in his career to Senior Vacuum Specialist after being with the firm since graduation.
i find this article to be the most fake thing i've ever read, even though i havn't read it yet
anyone that is still in school knows that you can NOT take away microsoft from teachers, as they are the most un-tech-savvy people around, i once had to instruct a teacher how to read images from a CD, another time a teacher asked me if the monitor had anything to do with the CPU.
but hey, at least the schools 486s play DooM fine
In my work, compatibility with MS file formats is a prime requirement. From that perspective, OOO is a mixed success. I have received timesheet documents with pretty complex formatting that works just fine. However, the formulas in them are completely broken. Also, I have sometimes been completely unable to open spreadsheets that had write protected some cells. As for presentations: Forget it. Whether reading files generated by PowerPoint or creating new ones for PowerPoint to open, the chances of success are very small, in my experience. If you have no need for MS users to open your presentations, it works fine. The word processing files are by far the most compatible, but even so I often see bulleted lists marching off the left side of the page, each line being farther to the left ...
I had forgotten how much cooler teenagers look when they are smoking. Oh, wait
If an OO document is prepared for use in an OO environment, problems are really, really unlikely by definition. This is as true for a school district as for a corporation. If your company prepares press releases intended for reading by a general population of journalists, the final editing really needs to be done on boxes running MS Office. The school district administration machines using XP/MS Office are probably preparing documents for state / Federal agencies using MS Office, very possibly for the forms, Office macros. The basic rule to save money and get functionality... inward focused boxes, i.e. boxes from which the great majority of docs prepared will stay in-house on OO (well, I prefer Textmaker) and outward focused boxes on MS Office. So everybody wins except MS, which is selling a handful of workstation seats where they were selling thousands.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Everybody here is bashing MS because Ms Office is so "expensive". I would like to point out that MS has been developing Office for many years now. Someone has to fund the salaries and offices and all the other normal things employees get.
MS also has been developing the technology of Office Suites where OO comes along and "copies" the technology, puts it on Linux and call it open source. As someone said recently. All the open source people do is reverse engineer existing programs. Please go and create something better than Microsoft and then supply it to us as open source with out any bugs, then we will speak again.
And yes even Linux is buggy people. Stop bashing and start giving constructive critisicm. I am sick and tierd of this Linux V Windows. Its apples and pears people. Windows is good for some things Linux better for other. LIVE WITH IT.
Yes, won't someone please think of the children?!
I never said that my posts couldn't be nitpicked. I said I had misused a word, That meant using a word in a way that shows I don't know what that means, not using a word in a way that some random idiot on the internet asserts is grammatically incorrect, and certainly not relating to hyphens, commas, etc. You do understand the difference between "words" and "punctuation" right. Or do you just not know how to read? As far as my grammar is concerned, simply stating that it's incorrect isn't sufficent to show that it's incorrect. I did use the word "statically" correctly by the way. And I misspelled "than". A misspelling isn't a misuse.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
er, I meant "statistically"
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actualy, I meant statisticaly. You're still an idiot though. A bone-dry idiot. And your mother washes her hair in pig urine.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I vastly prefer OpenOffice over MS Office, but to be fair, there are a few things that I find slightly irritating. I haven't researched them properly, so it's possible they've been fixed since 1.1.3, which is what I've been using:
Sometimes when I save a Writer document on one system and open it on another, the page layouts are slightly different. (eg. What's exactly 4 pages on one system may be slightly over 4 pages on another.) I haven't figured out why, unless it's because the paper size settings are different between systems, and it's not being properly preserved in OpenOffice's saved document format.
For a reason that I can't identify, opening a Word document in OpenOffice causes all of the imported text to be dark blue. I presume there's something in an internal template that I haven't yet been able to locate.
There are a few minor niggles that I've had with things like table layout cell-spacing, when I can't get paragraphs in neighbouring cells to line up even though various settings seem to imply that they should. Having said so, I've had some much bigger nightmares fighting with table layouts in MS Word.
In my view it's not flawless, but I do vastly prefer it over Word.
Were you simply changing language property of the font inline within the text, or were you changing the language property of the font for the 'default' style, which all other text styles are (I think) based on? (Visit Format/Styles/Catalog, then Modify the style called Default and adjust its language.)
If the former, you may find that because there are still remnants of other fonts in different (or maybe hidden-in-some-way) parts of your document, not to mention all of the other heading and paragraph styles that get used and injected through all sorts of automated operations, it could come back again quite easily.
I agree that the Font section seems like an unintuitive place for this, but I still think it'd fit perfectly well in the Paragraph section. Language is a property of particular bits of text much more than the entire document. There are a lot of cases where it's useful to be able to assign more than one language per document.
Dear Bill,
I have your fabulous Office Software on one of my computers at home. Considering licensing issues I could not, in good conscience, install it on my second computer and has forced me to find a perfectly (for my needs) viable and *free* solution.
Your Pal,
AC
For the majority of users, OpenOffice is more than adequate. The article does not say that MS Office is an inferior product. Total cost of ownership is the bottom line here. Face the facts! The cost of using OpenOffice is far less than MS Office. This is VERY important when speaking of students whose parents/school are not upper-middleclass or rich. Opensource solutions make a lot of sense for working-class Americans and the schools their children attend! I would like to see more working-class schools and colleges do the same. Savings can be diverted to things like books and gym equipment!
"When you put on your coon skin hat, you should expect ambushes!" Ramowl
It's the Windows power users who are going to have the confidence to give OO a try or are going to be asked to put it on their friends' machines, and they are no more likely to lack a copy of WinZip on the desktop than they are likely to be running without AV and a firewall.
So what you're telling us is that OO's usable from at least an installation and out-of-the-box standpoint for Windows, but could use some minor tweaks in packaging and menu item placement.
About what I've expected, I've never had occasion to try OO in Windows, my first exposure was the default install in FC2.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You realy mean you use LaTeX for important documents?
You let someone else write your formatting macros for you?
You don't even write your own TeX output routine?
You don't use \shipout to have real control on how your document's pages realy look?
By using preinstalled macros collections such as LaTeX instead of TeX primitives you are giving up some of your freedom!
I downloaded and installed OpenOffice.org on a WIN98 machine in an effort to gradually switch to open source software. But I have never been able to view even one MSWord document correctly in Ooo. (It was not the last version, and all documents I tried were mixtures of right to left text with math formulas. But that's what I need for everyday use. MSOffice has been doing this for years.) I hope sometime in the future it becomes more useful to me.
This is not so much different from the old Netscape vs. IE issue: IE supported bidirectionality years before Netscape, resulting in almost all Israelli websites created specifically for IE (there was no point writing code for nonexistent platfoems. It's quite similar with Ooo now. It doesn't work smoothly, and most people who try it and see it doesn't work for them go back to MS Office, and don't recommend Open Office to anyone.
> ... the school is doing more than its share by giving classes
> and getting the product know to young prospective users.
True. But the real benefit that schools can give to FOSS is by contributing code. This is not something that can be expected from a single school or schhol district. However, this is something the FOSS proponents should encourage. There is a "coolness factor" in FOSS: you can build on it. You can add something and than say "I made part of it". High schools have lots of young talented people that can contribute. The problem is how to teach them that they can participate. How to make participation "cool".
To be "cool", participation in the development of FOSS should not be limited to geeks (sorry...) Right now it is very hard for a non-techie type to get started contributing to a open source project, or even to understand how to get started. There are many ways to contribute for "non-coders": graphics can be contributed. Documentation can be contributed. Interface design is something that needs lots of "non-geek" participation.
If FOSS can make it into a substantial number of high schhols, and if things are appropriately handled, FOSS can benefit from very high return in the form of students' participation in development. For this to work a critical mass has to be reached, and the "coolness factor" has to be leveraged. What you would want to see is students prefering FOSS because they can see how their ideas can be rapidly incorporated into the software, i.e., the software learns how to work with them, instead of them learning how to work with MS software.
I realize what I wrote here is very vague. Others might be able to say it in better English than mine. The important thing is that there are millions of kids with all sorts of talents and loads of creativity that can be leveraged to make better software. The average teenager has much more creative potential than the average 25 year old programmer. And what school kids can contribute that FOSS somewhat lacks is usability: not by recreating what MS has, but by doing it in new ways, that adults would never think of. There are fresh minds out there, but to recruit them you have to make an environment that compensates them in the way teenagers expect to be compensated: by making them feel "cool"!
Of course there are other important reasons why schools should bith use FOSS and encourage students to participate in its development, such as teaching the value of contribution to society: you use what others have contributed to you, and you pay back by helping others. You learn by doing things. Students can even get credit for donating time to open source projects...
Someone needs to get the European Computer Driving Licence Foundation (ECDL-F) to embrace Open Office! Then you shall see the difference. ECDL are the standard exams that one needs to be cometent on in order to show computing skills. Currently the market is asking for ECDL but there are still businesses that don't knwo about it. But all these are changing cause European
Citrix doesn't work, at least no where I've seen it installed. You end up with all the problems of Windows, plus extra downtime. It's been a wast of time and money where I've seen it. However, the concept is quite interesting.
Did anybody else comment that this article is comparing Windows NT and Office 97 to a Linux Distro and OpenOffice? There is at least a 5 year difference in technology between the two, and in the computer world, this would be equivlent of a rock-and-chisel to a typewriter. Of course there are astronomical differences; old and busted vs. new hotness.
I think this is a great story, and I'd like to take this as a good indication that Open Source is being accepted more, HOWEVER....
I think it might actually be a disservice to students who may lose out on being trained on an operating system that, let's face it, is used by what, 95%+ of the desktops in business.
Learning, and I mean REALLY learning Excel is nearly invaluable. I had no idea what it could actually do until the business types started sending these excel sheets out during projects. At work my machine is Linux, at home it's dual boot. I spend most of my time in Linux but there are just too many instances where I have to boot into XP to really get shit done.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
Don't you mean "Let's" ?