is open office ready for university?

[James McIntosh]

A Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc. employee said:

StarOffice does a better job at importing some MSFT documents than
OpenOffice since it has some bits of code OpenOffice doesn't have.  It also
has a better spellchecker, more clip art and a couple other less important
things.  I exchange MSFT documents everyday with clients and haven't used
MS Office in almost 5 years.  StarOffice is just the commercial version of
OpenOffice and it works pretty well.  Both tools are quite good.
StarOffice is the official productivity quite of UofT Scarborough Campus
according to their website, if that helps out.

Staroffice is worth the $60 or whatever it is since it can do things
better.  On the other hand - how often do most users need this better
functionality?  Some people need it regularly becuase of
the role at a company, but most people never need it.

Typical Student discount for MS Office still puts it around $150+ CAD
for "Student and Teacher Edition".  As for 'needing to know MS Office'
there is a catch with that; by the time the students in school now get out,
the user interface will be radically different in MS Office.  If you
haven't seen the U.I. in MS Office 2007, you are in for a surprise.  I am
in no way passing judgement that it is better or it is worse.  Only telling
you it is a LOT different.  Moving from MS office to StarOffice or
OpenOffice is a snap, but moving from MS Office (current version) to MS
office 2007 will not be so easy.  Regardless, the UI is changing a lot on
the MS Office side so learning MS Office now buys you very little in the
future. Unfortunately.

About Comments and Notes:

Depends on how these things are used.  If you have a draft of a document
one would typically use the Record/Show changes feature (which
interoperates just fine with the MS office Track Changes feature).  If
you want to insert a comment then the Notes feature works well (for me)
in NeoOffice (on Mac) or StarOffice.  I assume that it would work the
same way on OpenOffice.

If you need someone's complex macros and whatnot written in VB Script,
then StarOffice should accomodate that.  Staroffice also allows you to
create new macros in VB Script, Javascript or Java as well.


Jim McIntosh   416-292-8126   <jemcinto-cpI+UMyWUv+w5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org>


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