I moved our school to Open Office in 2004. Boy, it is a lot easier now than
it used to be. That being said, Office 2007 still causes some problems. I
do recommend using the .doc, not .docx formats. Most people using MS Office
do not install the odf plugins and won't be able to open files saved in the
native Open Office formats. Inside school you'd be fine but you still need
to communicate with the MS world. Even though OO opens MS Office, failure
by MS Office will be percieved as a limitation of OO and undermine your
efforts.
Also, your merge documents will no longer work. The field mappings between
Word-Excel is different than OO Writer- OO Calc. The fields would need to
be re-mapped. Make sure power users understand that going in.
Lastly, all MS Office users have learned that the Help menu is not helpful.
Thus, they don't use it. OO help is actually very helpful! Make a serious
effort to re-train people to use the help menu.
Good luck with the switch!
Take care,
Alex
--------------------------------------------
Alex Inman
Director of Technology
Whitfield School
St. Louis, MO
314-434-5141 phone
314-434-6193 fax
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Tim Rice <tim.rice@kcd.org> wrote:
> As an exclusive OpenOffice user for the past 6 years I am seriously
> considering moving the entire organization to this format. Has anyone
> moved completely to OpenOffice (students and faculty)? If so, did you make
> the default save a .doc or did you stick with the native OO format? What
> problems to you encounter? What benefits (cost is our primary concern-
> roughly a $15-$20k savings from Microsoft Office)?
>
> Thanks in advance for any information you can provide.
>
> Timothy Rice
> Director of Technology
> Kentucky Country Day School
> 4100 Springdale Rd.
> Louisville, KY 40241
> (502)814-4366(dir)
> (502)423-0445(fax)
>
> 5-6 Grade Football information:
> http://mail.kcd.org/~tim.rice/5-6_Football<http://mail.kcd.org/%7Etim.rice/5-6_Football>
> http://www.kcd.org/sports/football_ms.htm
>
>
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