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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.'"
"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
Linux -IS- your Anti-Virus program.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
In particular you can get McCafee AV for Linux.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Spellbound is your friend. A forms spell checking extension for Mozzy/FF.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
No real issues with OpenOffice as an MS Office substitute here at our small office (5 employees, 4 computers, 2 running MS Office, 2 running OOo). The trickiest thing was the secretaries getting used to the fact that to complete some of the same tasks in OOo as Office, you've got to follow some different steps (printing labels, for example) Essentially, that's just a minor "get the user familiar with the new software" issue, and didn't take too much to overcome. We use MS Office and OOo interchangably, I set up the OOo boxes to save in MS Office native formats (.doc, and .xls). The only real issue I've seen is that OOo has a minor hiccup with Powerpoint presentations that use fancy transitions: instead of a single spacebar tap, sometimes it takes 2 or 3 to advance to the next slide. No biggy. Try it, you'll like it!
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
As a student who has switched to OO.org I have not had one problem with the word processing I do. Granted this isn't anything with insane layout requirements. I am able to export to word format to send email to friends who proof-read and open theirs when it's my turn. I don't use speadsheets to much but everything is simple enough for what I'm doing, I haven't tried to go back and forth from excel however.
The thing I love best is the built in PDF exporter, makes it so much easier to send out documents I don't want altered other then at the mester-copy.(Eg, they can't just fire up Word and type away) That's just me being picky though.
I haven't had a problem with it at all in practical use, but I'm hardly a power-user when it comes to office suites.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
Yeah, you've missed it -- they do that all* the time.
It usually looks something like "(Disclaimer: Slashdot and Newsforge are both owned by OSTG)"
*AFAIK
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Plan:
f ice_org_2_x.html
March 2005: OOo 2.0 Beta
May 2005 : OOo 2.0 changes will be done on separated branch, the trunk (HEAD) will then be used for the next OOo major (3.0 ?) release.
May 2005: OOo 2.0 rc
June 2005 : OOo 2.0
Q3 2005: OOo 2.0.1
taken from:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OpenOf
Use linux, no need for pirated software, so wheres the problem?
The GNU collection is designed to provide a large number of free small programs, which I use on the desktop and on numerous servers in the work place.
Its quite appareny when I use a Windows PC as I have thousands of stupid shareware programs complaining about this that and the other, when I load up an open source desktop life is much quieter.
And yes, this is propaganda, but you should try it out, and piracy is bad.
Why UNIX?
So while this statistically invalid survey suggests they don't do it "all the time", I have missed 'em, so thanx for the pointer mrchaotica which motivated me to do some quick research.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
M$ Office only appears to start that much faster. M$ preloads alot of the shared routines so that when you launch, say, Word it takes less time to get it up and running. As I under stand it the newest versions of OO.org come with a pre loader that essintialy does the same thing M$ has been doing. It really is just smoke and mirrors.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
No, really... they do it all the time.
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...
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.
Some OSes have builtin systemwide spell checkers. This is something I've dreamed of for years. For my webbrowser under OSX all I had to do is right click on this text dialog box, and enable spell checking as I type. Its cool, I put words anywhere (like the Google search bar) I feel like and right click on them to get the correct spelling all the time. Also other benefits of having a systemwide spell checker is that the words that you add the dictionary are universally available to all apps, and the spell checker is consistent between apps.
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
Damn skippy. LaTeX has the best output of anything I've ever used, and auto-formats bits in a non-annoying way.
Don Knuth is the man.
Clearly you missed the point of the Article... the question is not is OpenOffice.org better. The question is given the choice between spending $$$ on MS Office or using the open source alternative OpenOffice.org and saving the $$$ for other technology and non-technology (salary) needs which option would better serve the needs of our school? We at U of D Jesuit choose to use OpenOffice.org and save our $$$ for other purposes. Does every one of our users prefer OpenOffice.org to MS Office? Of course not, but neither does every member prefer MS Office. We are happy with our choice and recommend that others give OpenOffice.org consideration for the same reasons we did!
John
Well, not exactly suing, but..
http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html
ohhh you mean how all the scientific documents being written by all the biomedical/biochemistry/cell biology/etc/etc fields are written in latex? You mean how all grant templates for applications to the NIH are written in DOC format?
The truth is most of these professors and primary investigators (PIs, with MD's and Ph.D's) use MS Word in winxp or on MacOSX, then they sometimes wrap the documents using adobe distiller with adobe acrobat pro.
The only people I know who use LaTEX in academia are physicists and mathematicians (and some engineers).