is open office ready for university?

[Simon]

Indeed, but if you care enough about technical reports and the
accompanying math, you'll be glad you took the time to learn to use
LaTeX (for the brilliant output it produces).  I do agree that MSO is
in some ways superior to OOo (not in all things, however), but the
question is whether it's worth the money.  To be clear, I am an OOo
and TeX user.  I think the money spent on Office would be better spent
on other things, computer hardware or otherwise, unless you're dealing
with someone else's macros and thus need Office, something unlikely
for a student of almost any subject, as those are usually only spotted
in industry, or maybe in some kind of applied course, but I've never
heard of that.

Also, Zbigniew: In the first year of Ontario high school they teach
the obvious stuff you mention ( Word, Excel, I even encountered Access
for a couple of weeks in Grade 10 CS), unfortunately I would say that
both that and any sex ed in the curriculum need improvement, hehe..

Simon
2nd year Basket Weaving undergrad

On 10/18/06, Paul King <sciguy-Ja3L+HSX0kI at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> To answer the original question, I am a user of OOo 2.0, and I do not feel it
> is ready for anything math or science-based at the university level, owing to
> their broken equation editor. Algebraic expressions as common as "2x" get
> handled incorrectly (x is not itialicized unless there is a space, as in "2 x",
> which just looks dumb when printed. I have reported this bug to the OOO team,
> and they told me they are not really placing a high priority on it.
>
> MS Word and WordPerfect handle this properly. I am not satisfied that OOO is
> ready for the big time in science/math education. Maybe in the arts, where no-
> one cares about equations, it might be.
>
> But even there, there is another problem. Suppose I am Dr. Academic, Ph. D.
> (doesn't matter what faculty) of the Faculty of Basket Weaving, and I am on the
> editing team for a textbook on weaving baskets on behalf of a publisher. The
> standard way to put editor's remarks in a document is to place comments in it.
> The comment editor in OOO has a poor 1-line-that-goes-on-forever editor, which
> many people who write comments will find utterly annoying. Under OOO, they are
> not called comments; they are called "Notes". Again, in this important area, MS
> Word and WordPerfect come out on top.
>
> Paul King
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