is open office ready for university?

[Jamon Camisso]

PW Armstrong wrote:
> 
> 
> sooooo, my daughter is off to university
> 
> yes, I've bought her a laptop
> 
> yes, I've caved, it runs xp
> 
> but I balked at buying a copy of ms office
> 
> her laptop actually came with a free copy of WP office X3, but she says 
> she needs ms office
> 
> do I have to spring for this?  if WP office X3, isn't good enough, is 
> open office good enough?
> 
> any and all comments appreciated.

U of T at Scarborough sold (maybe still does?) StarOffice for around $20. As 
someone who just completed my HBA at U of T I can say definitively that ms 
office is totally unnecessary -- OO saves in .doc, exports to pdf, works with 
ppt, xls etc. Likely everything she'll need to do in a Humanities context is 
easily done with OpenOffice or StarOffice. My partner made it through 4 years 
using StarOffice herself and we exchanged and proofread each other's work 
through .sxw and .odt the whole time.

Don't do it! Go with OpenOffice, or StarOffice if you really need to buy 
something (though they are pretty much identical in most respects).

Jamon
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists