ShareThisRecently school districts across Western New York State have been seriously considering whether or not they really need Microsoft Office for all users. Even though school districts can acquire Microsoft Office for as little as $55 per license, that's still costly in a time of declining budgets. School districts that have a thousand or more student, staff and faculty desktops could save $55,000 or more by switching to Open Office. Add to the cost savings for the school districts is the issue of interoperability with the home user and also Macintosh users. Open Office and its Macintosh port NeoOffice can share documents without compatibility issues. As major PC manufacturers seek to trim the bottom line more often than not home computers come with Wordperfect, Microsoft Works or some other program not compatible with Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007. Students bringing work from home reach their school district and leave its IT department scratching their head about how to make the student's work readable on the school's software. This morning I came upon a well written and timely critique of Open Office at the Free Software Magazine.

I would say that most of our users’ word processing needs will be perfectly met by Writer. The interface has a familiar feel and you can get up and typing within seconds. Opening documents sent by other organisations will probably not be any bigger an issue than it is now. We often get sent MS Works documents (ugh) which Word cannot open—and for which there is no plugin—or an OpenXML/Word 2007 file. In those cases it’s fairly trivial to ask the sender to send it Word 2002 format or—if they can—in ODT.

Read more here.