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2-Year OpenOffice High School Case Study

Posted by Zonk on Fri May 27, 2005 01:34 PM
from the effect-of-penguins-on-young-minds dept.
Software Education Linux
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.'"
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  • Open Office Study (Score:5, Funny)

    by geomon (78680) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:35PM (#12657681) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Really! They need to Get The Facts! [microsoft.com]
      • I like it how down the left of the screen we have an article which states that the costs over $100,000 cheaper than going with microsoft and down the right we have a microsoft ad saying "META Group found in a study that Linux costs are not lower than Windows" (refresh the page a few times if that ad is not there!). .

        hahaha

    • Re:Open Office Study (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mindaktiviti (630001) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:45PM (#12657814)
      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.

      • Re:Open Office Study (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Karzz1 (306015) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:52PM (#12657905) Homepage
        I think the point you are missing is that in order for any program to function as expected (hoped) in an educational facility, you will need the backing of the instructors. I am sure that most of these teachers had not ever heard of OOo prior to this experiment but had probably been users of MS Office for some time (the article states that most had powerpoint presentations). The fact that there is no mention of any complaints from the faculty speaks volumes. In fact, the only negative I saw throughout the article was that some *.ppt files would not open properly and rather than have teachers waste time rebuilding ppt presentations on OOo, they could use the *free* powerpoint reader.
        • I think the point you are missing is that in order for any program to function as expected (hoped) in an educational facility, you will need the backing of the instructors.

          I know you meant this is the sense that a major group of users supported it, but it also works in the sense that they were actually able to give instruction for its use.

          One of the reasons F/OSS has such an uphill battle is because existing software has such huge support in terms of classes on it's use, informal help on its use, and the

      • Re:Open Office Study (Score:5, Funny)

        by Kludge (13653) on Friday May 27 2005, @02:17PM (#12658180)
        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.

        That's true. For real documents people use LaTeX. Fortunately that comes preloaded on most Linux distributions too.

        • Re:Open Office Study (Score:4, Informative)

          by nurd68 (235535) on Friday May 27 2005, @03:21PM (#12658963) Homepage
          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.
        • 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 an
      • one of the reasons this may have worked is because it was in a learning environment.

        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.

    • Like:
      • 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!).

  • Open source does win out in the end (Score:3, Insightful)

    by suso (153703) * on Friday May 27 2005, @01:36PM (#12657690) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 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.

      Well, this and all other TCO "studies" are BS. They "saved" $100,000 over a completely different solution, not a better one. By this, they kept around their old PCs and threw Li

  • This one is priceless... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TripMaster Monkey (862126) * on Friday May 27 2005, @01:38PM (#12657726)

    From TFS:
    ...several surprising developments, including OpenOffice's ability to open old Word documents that even the new Word versions were having troubles with...


    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.
    • Yes. As they said, powerpoint has some issues of some kind.
      Macros typically will not work, so openoffice for corporate use is probably not such a great option.
      I've had a horrible time getting openoffice to print the right way in certain spreadsheet documents.
      etc, etc. The point is, you have to decide if openoffice does what you need, and if it does not, if you can cut out or redo the things it lacks.

    • Re:This one is priceless... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zeebs (577100) <rsdrew.gmail@com> on Friday May 27 2005, @01:49PM (#12657869)
      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.
    • 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 b

        • Re:Font Issues (Score:5, Interesting)

          by MynockGuano (164259) <{hyperactiveChip ... {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday May 27 2005, @02:19PM (#12658202)
          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

  • Linux is Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by jetkust (596906) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:39PM (#12657735)
    Yea, but none of my Anti-Virus programs run on Linux.

  • So... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ColonelKernel (566554) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:39PM (#12657741)
    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.

    • Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by caseih (160668) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:57PM (#12657955)
      Precisely. In just a couple of years the school will yet again need to buy new hardware and probably upgrade some servers. At this time, MS can come in with a great, almost-free deal to lock them back into Windows that they can't afford to refuse. And they would be fools to turn it down. While this may seem immoral to you and I on slashdot, in the eyes of MS this is no more immoral than the OSS camp "dumping" their software for next to nothing.
  • 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?
    • Spellbound [sourceforge.net] is your friend. A forms spell checking extension for Mozzy/FF.
    • 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 spe

  • Grammar School (Score:3, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:42PM (#12657769) Homepage Journal
    "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" [getitwriteonline.com]). Choosing "that" or "which" properly can require some fast thinking, but using "who" for a school is a real failure.

  • classes on it's use (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2005, @01:43PM (#12657784)
    The school "has classes on it's use."

    Presumably they also have classes on the use of the apostrophe. (Sigh.)
  • 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.

  • OO is all very well... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spungo (729241) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:46PM (#12657838)
    ... 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.

  • wimps (Score:4, Funny)

    by happyclam (564118) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:47PM (#12657846)
    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!

  • Detroit did this? (Score:3, Funny)

    by thgreatoz (623808) on Friday May 27 2005, @01:52PM (#12657903)
    Damn...who'da thought Detroit would ever be at the forefront of ANYTHING ever again?

  • This bears repeating... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hacker (14635) <setuid@gmail.com> on Friday May 27 2005, @02:33PM (#12658367)

    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."

  • Tried downloading Open Office just now ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by SamSeaborn (724276) on Friday May 27 2005, @03:06PM (#12658798)
    I never downloaded Open Office before, so I just tried it.

    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

  • Just switch already (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HangingChad (677530) on Friday May 27 2005, @04:02PM (#12659361) Homepage
    I've been using OO for a couple years and have never had problems sending documents to customers or opening theirs. Sometimes the formatting isn't exactly right, but as long as I can read it.

    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.

    • 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.

    • Re:Did the school donate any money to OO? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by malraid (592373) on Friday May 27 2005, @02:09PM (#12658101)
      Do you use OO.o ?? Have you donated?? Free software is free to use. Like it or not. I would say that the school is doing more than its share by giving classes and getting the product know to young prospective users. Fair?? fair is using the product even if for free. Unfair would be taking the source code, rebranding and selling a propietary product. Unfair will be redistributing without the corresponging credit to the authors. Donating is beyond fair. Congrats to the school.

    • Re:Excellent to see... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kebes (861706) on Friday May 27 2005, @02:10PM (#12658115) Journal
      If you show a cost savings they stop giving you funding because you've shown you can operate on a leaner budget.

      Yes, that's true. However, if someone in charge decides they can save 100,000$ in software, and put that money into books or teacher salaries (or an additional hire) instead, then this is a net benefit to the school without their funding being reduced.

      They need to start using XP and Office, and run up their support bills.

      It bothers me that you're advocating a publicly-funding institute wasting money. And we wonder why our governments mis-manage funds? It's in large part due to that kind of thinking. No, I would rather that the school not waste money, and that the savings go into other school programs, or even into other schools, or even into other sectors of the government that need funding (of which there are many).

      If I was the schools administrator I'd avoid anything with the word "free" in it like the plague.

      I truly hope most school administrators are not like you. Avoiding things that are "free" because that might reduce your budget for next year? What's the point of having a big budget if you're forced to waste it? I would much prefer that those in charge of spending my tax dollars do the right thing and spend my money intelligently.
    • 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.

    • 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

      Wow how is that precognition going? This thread is already several hundred posts long and I haven't seen anyone (aside from you) voice that assertion. This is a typical straw man argument, ...weak.

    • 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

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