OpenOffice (was Re: The future of Ubuntu Linux.... Will it make Micro$oft go bankrupt?)

[Graham Todd]

On Tue, 12 May 2009 11:26:55 -0700
sdavmor <sdavmor at systemstheory.net> wrote:

> Sorry to hear this. My two sons do all their homework assignments on
> Open Office, except for the computer-lab stuff that they are required
> to do at school on Windows. They save their files as Word, Excel and
> Powerpoint compatible and have never had anything "blow up" when
> presenting in class or emailing to their teachers. They do always test
> them on my wife's Windows desktop first, but everything done and saved
> in OO has always worked straight out of the box.
[snipped]

At University, I am required to show Presentations and I must make up
my essays in "Microsoft - compatible format" so they can check it with
their own software for plagiarism.  The essays need to be presented as
printed documents with certain kinds of formatting (footnotes,
bibliographies, indentation, etc) and I usually find it easier to use
AbiWord for this purpose and save the text in Encoded Text format, or
Rich Text Format, both of which seem to be parsed correctly by the
"anti-plagiarism" software.

However, when using OO for Presentations, I always keep the software
required in one folder and burn each presentation to disk with OO.  For
safety, I burn it twice to hold a backup in case the first disk is
scratched, etc.  I sometimes use criawips to produce presentations,
which I find easier to use as its got a smaller footprint, but it has
not the number of options that goes with it, which is often a blessing
in disguise.  However, whatever I use, the disk has to be used with my
laptop running Ubuntu.

If you've got to use a Windows machine with OO, the disk still works
and can be kept as a record, providing the elements (the graphics,etc,
are in a Windows-compatible format.

The Free Software Society at my University is always pressing for free
software and open document formats to be accepted alongside proprietary
formats.  It is of the greatest of importance that documents written
now will still be accessible to scholars in the future when copyright
has run out; as most documents are kept in digital formats these days
we have to be sure that the knowledge in them is still accessible in
the future. The best way of ensuring that is to have a universally
recognised, legally acceptable open format that is available for all
operating systems that can't be killed off by one company.

-- 

Graham Todd