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.'"

Open Office Study

[geomon]

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.

Classes

[Anonymous Coward]

the school ... has classes on it's use

But clearly not on proper English grammar.

Linux is Great

[jetkust]

Yea, but none of my Anti-Virus programs run on Linux.

classes on it's use

[Anonymous Coward]

The school "has classes on it's use."

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

Re:Open Office Study

[MikeMacK]

Really! They need to Get The Facts! [microsoft.com]

Seems like an apropriate Ad

[Anonymous Coward]

Directly below the article:

Ads By Google
Free Microsoft Word 2003
Get Word 2003 in MS Office Pro Free Guaranteed 100% Free - Act Now!

wimps

[happyclam]

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!

Re:Open Office Study

[geomon]

Amazingly, this time you were.

Statistics are great, aren't they?

Detroit did this?

[thgreatoz]

Damn...who'da thought Detroit would ever be at the forefront of ANYTHING ever again?

classes on open office?

[farble1670]

...has classes on it's use

thereby readying their students to compete for those coveted administrative assistant positions.

They missed the hidden costs

[darkonc]

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!).

Re:Open Office Study

[Kludge]

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:This one is priceless...

[squidfood]

I've heard the same thing, but I have no idea of what constitutes a "power user".

Then for you, OpenOffice should be fine.

Re:Open Office Study

[alc6379]

Hah! If you can get +5 Insightful by not using your brain power to its fullest, I wonder what you can do when fully aware!

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of this guy!

Re:Needs a better spellchecker.

[toddestan]

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.

[mac user]
What's this "right-click" you speak of?
[/mac user]

For realy real documents use only plainTeX

[hadaso]

You realy mean you use LaTeX for important documents?
You let someone else write your formatting macros for you?
You don't even write your own TeX output routine?
You don't use \shipout to have real control on how your document's pages realy look?
By using preinstalled macros collections such as LaTeX instead of TeX primitives you are giving up some of your freedom!