I single-handedly moved my elementary school to OpenOffice two years ago. I did it because we were previously using MS Word 4.5a as our standard (on the student systems), and we were having problems with kids who had MS Office at home. At first I added OO to the existing software mix, and steered kids who needed MS Word compatibility to use OO; two school years ago, in September, I simply stopped using Works and made its icon harder to find, starting kids with OO from the beginning of the year. We've had some minor compatibility issues w. kids working on presentations on Powerpoint at home and on OO at school- mainly due to differences in special effects. Other than that, compatibility has been good.
While we were using MS Works, we purchased copies of MS Word (97 or 2000) or Word Perfect for teachers who wanted them on their systems... I didn't replace those. Clerical staff continue to use Word Perfect.
Education pricing for MS Office is about CDN$85; pricing for MS Word by itself is about CDN$45... not too expensive-- but we have about 100 systems altogether; $8500 is far more than we can afford to easily pay.
My school district may be looking at District-wide software recommendations next Fall-- I'm going to try to be on the committee making the recommendations.
By the way-- if you're demoing OO to your staff, you may want to show off the version 1.9 beta; it has a more professional look and feel and some modules (such as the presentation package Impress) are quite different from the 1.1 version. Hopefully 2.0 will be out soon, but I find the 1.9 beta quite stable and usable.
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I single-handedly moved my elementary school to OpenOffice two years ago. I did it because we were previously using MS Word 4.5a as our standard (on the student systems), and we were having problems with kids who had MS Office at home. At first I added OO to the existing software mix, and steered kids who needed MS Word compatibility to use OO; two school years ago, in September, I simply stopped using Works and made its icon harder to find, starting kids with OO from the beginning of the year. We've had some minor compatibility issues w. kids working on presentations on Powerpoint at home and on OO at school- mainly due to differences in special effects. Other than that, compatibility has been good. While we were using MS Works, we purchased copies of MS Word (97 or 2000) or Word Perfect for teachers who wanted them on their systems... I didn't replace those. Clerical staff continue to use Word Perfect. Education pricing for MS Office is about CDN$85; pricing for MS Word by itself is about CDN$45... not too expensive-- but we have about 100 systems altogether; $8500 is far more than we can afford to easily pay. My school district may be looking at District-wide software recommendations next Fall-- I'm going to try to be on the committee making the recommendations. By the way-- if you're demoing OO to your staff, you may want to show off the version 1.9 beta; it has a more professional look and feel and some modules (such as the presentation package Impress) are quite different from the 1.1 version. Hopefully 2.0 will be out soon, but I find the 1.9 beta quite stable and usable.