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2-Year OpenOffice High School Case Study

Posted by Zonk on from the effect-of-penguins-on-young-minds dept.

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.'"

3 of 472 comments (clear)

  1. So... by ColonelKernel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Open Office Study by mindaktiviti · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Although you may be right about the Linux slant, one of the reasons this may have worked is because it was in a learning environment. The learning curve for students is completely irrelevent, because that's the main goal of school. This is probably why it was feasible and why it worked. All you really need is to write essays and the odd report or presentation, and OO.o's software should be "good enough" for that. Note that they still upgraded and kept MS Office for some of the administration stuff, probably because they couldn't afford not openning certain documents. if a school can save money with using this type of software, then maybe that money could be used on books which are typically lacking in many schools.

  3. This bears repeating... by hacker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One of the best quotes I've ever seen on the whole OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office debate:

    "Microsoft properly asserts that OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with their product. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice.org formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice.org documents are publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own formats."