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Last week I asked if OpenOffice was good enough. The general consensus? OO.org is good enough to start a flame war, but we’re not really sure if it’s good enough to be a serious competitor to MS Office.
Now that OO.org 3.0 is out, I’m having a much tougher time seeing both sides of the issue here (I actually like Office 2007/2008, by the way; I think they’re slick, well-polished, canadian cialis and highly functional). I had never liked the OpenOffice equation editor; this version brings a very nice graphical and text-based hybrid editor to us math teachers. Mail merge was clunky in OO.org; this version brings a mail merge wizard and improved label templates. Outline numbering tended to be a bit kludgy for notetaking in OO; this version improves the stability and interface of outlining.
Annotations are now incredibly easy to add (Insert, Note) and Office 2007/2008 formats are supported across the board. While Microsoft has dumped VBA support in Office 2008, OO.org users can run Visual Basic scripting, as well as Python and Javascript.
I’m not actually bashing MS Office here. It’s a great suite and they still have something that OpenOffice lacks: Publisher. However, Publisher was lacking on the Mac platform anyway and *nix users haven’t had access to MS Office (including Publisher) without some serious Wine work. Speaking of Access, OpenOffice continues to bring a solid database offering to all platforms. Is it as powerful as Access? I don’t think so (let’s face it – Access 2007 rocks). However, Mac, *nix, and Windows users can all interchange databases and use OO.org Base as a front end to a variety of data sources (including MySQL).
OpenOffice.org is not a clone of Office 2007 (good call, Sun). It’s a full-featured suite that gives us everything we need from MS Office and the world of productivity software while keeping the bottom line quite a bit more reasonable (you don’t get any more reasonable than free).
Yes, OO.org has been good enough for a long time; the latest release should leave little doubt for any users who had been on the fence.
OK, obviously there’s more to this story than my tongue-in-cheek answer. This came up after one of our supercool, power user secretaries (who is an Office 2003/2007 wiz) ran a training session for the other secretaries in the district. The other secretaries are largely using OpenOffice (NeoOffice, actually, since OO.org for OS X still isn’t where it needs to be). It’s also worth noting that these secretaries have quite a spectrum of abilities from quite proficient to looking for the “any key.”
The training session actually centered on our student information system, but touched on OpenOffice as a tool for manipulating data extracted from the SIS. Whether it was for a mail merge or simply easy sorting and reporting of various fields, Excel (and OpenOffice Calc) is a necessary tool in most secretaries’ can you buy cialis without a prescription bag of tricks.
My uber-secretary leading the training had only recently begun using OpenOffice and really prefers the slick, polished interface of Office 2007 (and the utter simplicity of mail merges and labels that OpenOffice just can’t match). She raised the question of whether OpenOffice could fully meet the needs of a secretary or if it lacked the automation tools that they need to maximize productivity.
The other secretaries largely consider OO “fine.” They don’t love it, they don’t hate it, but they appreciate that I was able to buy an extra computer for what I saved in licensing costs among the secretarial and nursing staff. Of course, they simply aren’t as proficient as the secretary I had doing the training.
So there it is: Is OpenOffice good enough?
I still stick with my original answer: yes, it is. For the vast majority of users (students, teachers, and administrators, especially), OpenOffice is more than good enough. The price is certainly right, too.
Even for the most savvy power users, OpenOffice will suffice. However, secretaries, as we all know, run our schools. Anything we can do to keep them happy and make them as productive as possible should probably be a high priority for us. For some of them, Microsoft Office (especially its latest iteration which actually is a very nice piece of software) just might be worth the licensing if it meets their needs better.
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