is open office ready for university?

[Peter King]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 09:21:14PM -0400, 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.

Depending on what your daughter studies...

The OpenOffice suite covers all the functions, and then some, that most
users need most of the time. There may be an odd mathematical function
not in the spreadsheet, or multicolour revisions in the editors, and so
on, but for an undergraduate student OpenOffice is more than sufficient 
in itself.

However, that's only half the battle. The other half is having the
ability to interchange / interoperate with MS Office applications, which
the majority of people use, and which they (often unthinkingly) assume
the rest of us do or ought to use as well. On this score, OpenOffice is
okay, but no more. Its different modules have different import/export
capabilities. They all do basic translation reasonably well, so it your
daughter never has to import an MS Excel spreadsheet with complicated
internal macros, or a word-processor document with history revisions,
and the like, she'll be okay, although she can expect to have the
occasional inexplicable difficulty. She *will* have to put up with some
inconvenience. You can make her a deal to motivate her: pay her the
amount of any MS Office install / upgrade if she uses OpenOffice
instead.

Both MS Office and OpenOffice are hard on hardware, demanding pretty
hefty processors before they run decently. After that, the benefits all
tilt toward OpenOffice. It's better-maintained, has an extremely active
support group, and the price is right. Nor will it become impossible to
run on current hardware in the next year or two, as will MS Office after
the release of Vista...

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
215 Huron Street
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5S 1A2
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

=========================================================================
GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC  36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42)
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20061016/2c1aae63/attachment.sig>