With regard to macmac’s comment about use and understanding a general tool, I agree, my country’s syllabus is based around microsoft software, nothing else. If it ain’t done in M$ excel or access, it ain’t accepted. How do you fix that?

Just a few thoughts, I have many:-)

Your school does not teach grammar, therefore you must have a grammar check, or the teachers are so lazy they prefer the grammar check to be done for them, because they don’t know there grammar and if everyone produces grammar to MS standard its so much easier, even if the grammar is wrong?

I started with wordperfect 5.1 for DOS, from school I was a poor speller, however after just a few months of using WP5.1 I noticed it was not giving spelling errors, I even used to get the Oxford English dictionary out to make sure that WP5.1 had it right, from there my confidence grew.

I use open office full time now, it has a better British English dictionary.

Also remember that as a school you should promote the teaching of “word processing” not MS word, after all we don’t teach people how to use a SnapOn screwdriver, we teach how to use a screwdriver. The use and understanding of a general tool, not a single product.

I think your efforts are laudable and well meaning, but you have a fight on your hands, that few will take, calling your colleagues lazy is not an option.

Also remember MS has a low license price for schools, just to ensure there uptake in business!

I can only suggest that you promote the learning, the compare and contrast, make it interesting to the students, let the school buy office, then show the students how to do it with other products for less, Abiword, open office et all, after all the underlying goal of open software is choice, freedom and the right to think for yourself.

just place the OpenOFFICE icons in the desktop and “hide” the office 2007 menus lol.

AM NOT KIDDING

good luck and don’t get caught :)

Thankfully, I’ve planned for a very long roll-out. It’s hard to even start talking to IT people at school districts – many who are desperate for money. Many would rather do without than try something different. I just don’t understand the mindset.

I understand that Open Office would be a more cost effective proposal, but MS Office is the way of the world, and preparing the students should be top priority.

Some years ago the university where I worked would not accept Pegasus for internal e-mail, and got an expensive thing called Da Vinci, which didn’t work as well, but Pegasus was free, so it was not suitable.

Our IT department also insisted on WordPerfect, which could not do on the fly redlining, which we needed. But the needs of users were not important, so productivity went down because the IT department knew best.

Also, a previous commenter’s point about parents having ‘to shell out for Office 2007′ is also wide of the mark. Office 2007 can quite easily be set to use the old, binary DOC format by default (I did this myself for a couple of months when I wasn’t sure whether I was going to stick with it). That way, parents (who will all have some version of Office installed at home, like it or not) won’t have to buy Office 2007.

The simple fact of the matter is that Office 2007 is much, much better than OpenOffice. I’m not a Microsoft fanboy – I actually used OpenOffice for all my university work for the whole of the previous academic year. There really is no comparison.

Let’s set aside the fact that Office 2007 has features that OpenOffice doesn’t (like being able to create pages in landscape format, having a grammar check, having a spellcheck that works, opening DOC files without messing the formatting up). Office 2007 is much more user-friendly (never thought that term could be used to describe a Microsoft product, but it IS) and stable (10 seconds to load from cold on a dual-core machine? Over 100Mb of memory usage when you count Java?) than OpenOffice, and therefore its a no-brainer.

PS: No need to worry about the slight dodginess of Office 2003, the new version leaves it in the dust (as big a gap as between DOS and Win95. They both do the same thing but one is much betteR).

Parents are a big factor. If you’re in an area that doesn’t have a lot of money, parents are going to be looking for what is free or extremely low cost, yet still functional.

Really, Windows’ WordPad is sufficient for a lot of writing, but the amenities such as PDF export, spellcheck, grammar check, etc. are what drives users to more elaborate programs like OpenOffice Writer, MS Word, and Abiword.

If you’re in an area that money isn’t a problem, then you’re going to have to deal with the social stigma that Word is the /only/ acceptable word processor available. We in-the-know are wiser and know that this is not the case (hence this entire article). You might also have to deal with those parents who go for the import brew instead of the domestics; parents who want expensive software as a status symbol.

Really, the key is the parents: hit the issue of cost versus usability head-on. If the school gets Office 2007, parents are going to have to shell out to get Office 2007, as well. Let them know the cost of doing so.

Another question to ask: What features are present in Office 2007 that aren’t present in OpenOffice /that students will use/? It’s a school: grammar check is irrelevant. Word has a superior revision tracking feature, but how many students actually use it, or even know it’s there? Likewise with comments.

The last big point I can think of at the moment is this: choice. If the school uses a program that saves in OpenDocument (ODT, etc.), then the parents and students have a /choice/ of what program they want to use. I saw a news tidbit yesterday that someone had implemented OpenDocument in Word, but I can’t find the link.