Re: [Staffslug] OpenOffice in schools

On 10/09/2007, Kris Douglas <webbox.uk(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Today I completed an assignment for IT in Linux. Excellent, my girls do exactly the same, write it in oOo open it at school in MS Office. (We dont have any windoze machines in the house). So I saved it in a format > supposedly compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, but...of course, > microsoft's (lack of) support for open document format has redered the > rather hefty assignment useless to the school. Whoa hang on Kris lets be honest here, MS Office was around long before oOo while I agree it would be nice for Mr Gates to include support for oOo in his product I doubt he will seeing as that would lose him money. IMV its for oOo to improve their compatibility with MS Office and not the other way round. Don't get me wrong I'm not defending MS or anything but I prefer fact to fiction and the fact is its oOo that's at fault here not MS. oOo is notorious for being cumbersome, bloated and not too hot with compatibility. Lets not cover up OSS failures by using the fog of MS insults to cloud whats really going on. I think this is a pile of animal's fecal matter, the school should cater for > the people that are actually using some software that is compatible with > open formats available on the *nix platforms. I agree and this has been discussed over and over again, actually Sneyd school, Bloxwich is starting to change, at the end of last term the IT teacher was handing out oOo on cd's, Firefox has been installed on one or two machine along with one or two other OSS apps such as Dia. I intend to complain at my school today to see if I can get some form of > open solution for the software made available to us. But I am interested to > hear your oppinions on this issue, and if its actually worth promoting. Yes it is, just remember you are promoting an alternative that will have incompatibilities and missing features compared to the product they have used for at least the last 10+ years. A rather peed off, dick_turpin hands Kris a large bar of chocy :-) -- Regards Dick Turpin Arch Linux is an independent i686-optimized community distribution for intermediate and advanced Linux users. Utilising a Rolling Release System packages are regularly updated and an ISO release is just a snapshot to the stable packages at that time. So there's no need for a fresh install the command 'pacman –Syu' upgrades the whole system.