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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.'"
What makes this any different from any other company who funds research in order to have scientific or real world proof that their product x is better than someone else's product y. Or in the case of OpenOffice, not so much better, as much as just as good for a far superior price.
I use OpenOffice myself, and I find it satisfactorially meets all of my needs as a college student, with less annoying graphic overhead and for the perfect price. (ie, free.)
Also, I am aware that this was sarcastic, however, a lot of people actually think that way.
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.
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.
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.
The Detroit school board is broke. I live in Grosse Pointe Shores, and my wife teaches school in Detroit. They are firing something like 1000 teachers, including her, due to the lack of funds. 100,000 dollars is desperately needed, and it's good to see that they can save that much money. Running up support bills will make the problem worse.
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."
I have done some powerpoint presentations in Office 2003, then loaded em up on OO running on my linux laptop. The only issue I have seen is the templates can get a little goofy. I have had the background pictures and lines get moved a little, even sometimes off the side of the page, but its pretty simple, to move them back. I am impressed that they still look the same, just the object placement seems to be off. When I put the objects back where I want them in OO, then that same file looks the same in both OO and office 2003. I have also noticed a few things with bullets, ie, square bullets become triangles, but that is not a big deal to me.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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?
Two sides to that coin, however. Where I work, I was put in the position of doing the technical background work of a briefing for a visit by a certain high-ranking General. I get called on to do this from time to time, and it basically consists of me sitting at the briefing room computer, reading a book, and advancing PowerPoint slides at the appropriate times.
On this occasion, however, when the PowerPoint presentation was given to me (about 30 minutes beforehand), I was quite disconcerted to see that the act of merely opening the file quite rudely caused PowerPoint to crash compeletely on every single computer I tried it on (nonsensical as it sounds, it seems as if the problem was an issue with there being some speech recognition program on the computer it was originally created on that it wasn't able to find on our computers, or something; the error message wasn't very helpful).
Anyways, 5 minutes before the General arrives, I dash across the building to my workspace and, in a final, fleeting effort, stuff the thumbdrive into my Linux box. I mount it, fire up openoffice.org, open the file, and behold! Nary a glitch--and certainly not a crash! Click "Save", run back, and ta-da! General waltzes in and gives his briefing, oblivious to any trouble, and I sit back and smugly read my book.
Yes! The language setting is terrible. Things that need improvement:
1) Put the setting somewhere else. There is no logical connection to the font dialog it's controlled in right now. Put it in the context menu, at the very least - although the context menu already is fairly crowded because pretty much everything is controllable from it.
2) Have a means to reduce the number of possible languages. As it is, you have to wade through every imaginable language when typically you only use a few languages in your life, and often only one or two in a single document. I can't stress enough how annoying that is.
3) Preferably, have a way to auto-detect the language I use. I think MS Word does that. If 8 out of 10 words in a paragraph are misspelt in the current language, and there exists a dictionary associated with another language where only 1 out of 10 os misspelt, switch that paragraph to the other language. Alternatively, ask me whether to switch, or make it extremely convenient to switch. Have a preference panel to control this behaviour.
4) Keep the setting when I create a new paragraph or slide.
In a related vein, OOo doesn't "ship" with a thesaurus for British English, I think. It does ship with one for AE. Obviously, nearly everything that applies to the AE thesaurus also would apply to the BE thesaurus. The same is true within most other dialect groups - a thesaurus for German would also be applicable to a text written in German (Switzerland). There is no functionality to that degree as it is - if you write a text set to be English (Great Britain), there is no thesaurus function available. The whole design of treating dialects as seperate entities with no relationship to each other is just way off and has a lot of unwanted consequences. It'd make more sense to have a language/dialect tree.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
We should be wanting a system-wide grammar checker too.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...