is Open Office Ready for University

[Alex Maynard]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 10:07:54PM -0400, John McGregor wrote:
> > I'm enrolled at Ryerson (Con-ed) and all major assignments have to be
> > submitted to www.turnitin.com which is an anti-plagiarism service. This
> > site requires Microsoft file formats, but it will not accept the Open
> > Office version of same ( I tried several times). One thing that might
> > take the bite out of buying MS Office, is that the student version can
> > be installed on three different machines in the same household (same IP
> > address at time of activation), so room-mates could split the cost. The
> > way that I got around the requirement was to log on to one of the
> > computer lab machines, do a 'Save as' of the O.O. document on my usb
> > drive, and then access Turn It  In.
>
> Sounds like the people running www.turnitin.com are incompetent then.
> Either they support the files MS office will read, or they don't.
> Wouldn't it have been much smarter to allow plain text or RTF as well?

I use turnitin.com in my classes. As far as I understand
they allow not only .doc (which open office saves in), but also pdf (which open office
makes easily) and I think also plain text and RTF so I don't see how
turnitin would cause a problem for open office.

Why not try open office to start with and if that causes your daughter
lots of problems, she can always buy MS office at the student discount?

> Heck some versions of ms word save as RTF when saving for older versions
> of word.  Perhaps they tried to reverse engineer ms word documents and
> only implemented things the way specific versions of word does things
> rather than actually just implement the file format properly.  Maybe
> they could learn something by looking at the openoffice import code. :)
> So by using this subpar service it seems ryerson has just told it's
> students that they must all use microsoft products.  I guess as long as
> they have machines in the lab that have that, it isn't too bad, although
> still inconvinient.
>
> My sister is doing courses at seneca, and part of the program involves
> learning various ms office applications, so in her case actually buying
> the student edition of ms office did make some sense, especially since I
> think it was about $100 at seneca.
>
> --
> Len Sorensen
> --
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