The Real Cost of Retraining for OpenOffice.org

[BWF89]

One of the most frequently voiced objections when discussing a migration to OpenOffice.org is the cost of retraining the users. The argument is raised as a cost barrier, and essentially amounts to claiming that it would be cheaper to upgrade to the next version of Microsoft Office than to retrain users on OpenOffice.org. It's an attempt at the old "libre software isn't gratis" argument. Let's examine this argument closely to find out why it doesn't hold water.
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/46775/index.html

[Zotova]

That is a weak argument though.

It may be cheaper to upgrade to Office 2006 or Office Vista or whatever they are going to call it than training users for open office. But what happens when we are on Office 2007? Those who have switched to open office won't have to pay anything for open office 3 and open office 4 - but those who stuck with MS Office will be coughing up more money for Office 2007 and 2008.

Maybe it might be cheaper in the short term but not in the long term.

[poofyhairguy]

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/46775/index.html


What I can't wait for is the next version of Office. Office 12 or whatever. Jdong posted a pic here in the forum and its WAY different from previous versions of Office. So much that OO.org is WAY closer.

So the argument will go out the window (pun intended). It will cost less at that point to train people to use OO.org than train people to use this new freakish Office AND buy copies of it.

When will MS learn? You can't change things MS, everytime you do you break the mental connections millions of people have made to great through your software (rather than learn it)!

[matthew]

I think if you switch between MSOffice releases this holds true.

If you wait until you are required by MS to upgrade to their latest version or lose support (because you are using an older version) then you can switch to OpenOffice without any greater amount of retraining than switching from an older version of MSOffice to a newer one. (and probably no more complaining than the times you have upgraded form one MSOffice version to another)

[aysiu]

As someone who uses Microsoft Office on a nigh-daily basis, I can say that it's actually about the same annoyance/retraining for Office-to-Office than for Office-to-OpenOffice. We recently had our computers "upgraded" (for me, that basically meant they made me redo all my settings and get used to a new version of Office) at work.

I think we had 2000 before, and now we have 2003. It's annoying. I was very used to Office 2000, and I found that 2003 had a lot more wizards that I couldn't easily turn off (for example, in mail merge, there appears to be no way I can just do a normal mail merge without answering stupid questions). I also found some of the formatting/settings just didn't work. I created a label template for our special labels, and when I tried to recreate that label in the new version of Office, it didn't work (it insisted on printing six-to-a-sheet instead of four-to-a-sheet). Luckily, I was able to dig up a version of that label template I'd saved from the old version of Office.

We also have a database program that interacts with Word, and it has macros and insists on using an old version of Word to save documents in (95/6.0) for cross-compatibility. The new version of Office keeps giving me extra warnings and dialogues (What kind of encoding do I want? Am I sure I want to save in this format?), and I cannot find a way to turn these settings and warnings off in the Tools > Options menus. My toolbars also don't appear to be easily configurable to look the same.

The point is that even with Microsoft Office, if it's a different version, it's annoying to a user, and a lot of retraining (actually, I didn't get any retraining... I just had to figure things out myself) and loss of productivity happens.

That said, there are some things I can do in Word that aren't easily apparent that I can do in OpenOffice. For example, I often use the "change case" feature in Word, and the only options in OpenOffice for "change case" are UPPERCASE and lowercase. There's no TitleCase. So when I had to do some emergency data manipulation with Excel and Word over the weekend recently (at home), I used Word and Excel to do it.

Only after the emergency was over did I realize I could have done everything in KWord and KSpread. OpenOffice wouldn't have cut it, though (again, no TitleCase change case option).

Final word: my job requires me to be what technology likes to call a "power user." The vast majority of my co-workers do not use change case or any of the even intermediate features of Microsoft Office (let alone writing macros and such). All they want is a program that can bold, italicize, futz with the margins, and change font size. Maybe some bullet points every now and then. And any word processing program can handle that--even Wordpad. But certainly KWord, AbiWord, and OpenOffice Writer more than suffice for the average office worker.

[poofyhairguy]

That said, there are some things I can do in Word that aren't easily apparent that I can do in OpenOffice. For example, I often use the "change case" feature in Word, and the only options in OpenOffice for "change case" are UPPERCASE and lowercase. There's no TitleCase. So when I had to do some emergency data manipulation with Excel and Word over the weekend recently (at home), I used Word and Excel to do it.


This is an important point for me so I want aysiu and everyone to be able to read it. I almost bought a copy of Office 2k AND a copy of Crossover Office because the kind of work I have to do requires me to copy things off a website where they are lower case and turn them into title case. I NEED this feature and OpenOffice.org2 was forcing me to do it by hand.

But then I was saved when Breezy came. Did OO writer add the feature? No. Abiword did. This feature combined with grammer checking makes Abiword comparible to anyone who needs more advanced features of Word.

In summary: If you are writing a lot of documents, try Abiword. If it could handle crashes better (stupid addiction to xcompmgr!) and could convert doc files better I would delete OO.org2 from my machine. As it is I use OO.org2 bascially as a compatiblity layer!

[aysiu]

But then I was saved when Breezy came. Did OO writer add the feature? No. Abiword did. This feature combined with grammer checking makes Abiword comparible to anyone who needs more advanced features of Word. That's good to know. AbiWord in Breezy does it, too, eh? I'm beginning to think KOffice and GnomeOffice are much better than OpenOffice (apart from the fact they don't need some funky quickstarted application to get them to start up in a reasonable amount of time).

[MakubeX]

But then I was saved when Breezy came. Did OO writer add the feature? No. Abiword did. This feature combined with grammer checking makes Abiword comparible to anyone who needs more advanced features of Word.


Tried verifying this on the openoffice.org forum?

[aysiu]

Tried verifying this on the openoffice.org forum? I haven't, but this Google search (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=site%3Aopenoffice.org+%22title+case%22+change+ca se&btnG=Search) didn't turn up much for OpenOffice. This search (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=site%3Akde.org+%22title+case%22+change+case&btnG=Search), however, turned up something for KWord immediately.

[poofyhairguy]

Tried verifying this on the openoffice.org forum?

The answer I found on there blew my mind.

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=19615&view=next

I like Abiword more for other reasons too, so its no big deal.

[aysiu]

The answer I found on there blew my mind.

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=19615&view=next
I clicked on the thread you linked to. I have no idea what that means.



I like Abiword more for other reasons too, so its no big deal. Same here with KWord--the ability to import, edit, and export PDFs, for one. And, as I mentioned before, AbiWord and KWord start up a lot more quickly (without having to install a quickstarter program).

[mcmillan]

I clicked on the thread you linked to. I have no idea what that means.

My impression of the link was that it was some kind of code to include to make open office do this automatically, though I should probably look at it more carefully when I'm not drunk after spending the last 4 hours at a bar. If it's confusing aysiu, who I've seen posting a lot here and at linuxquestions, I'd imagine this isn't a trivial task.

I've generally been impressed by my lack of problems with open office since I've tried ditching windows for linux, the only serious problem has been this week when I discovered regression analysis seems a lot more difficult in calc than in xcel. I've only been able to find how to do linear regressions, and that took some effort since a lot of what I came across seemed to be people suggesting ways to do the equations by hand, which I can do by digging out my stats textbook but would prefer not to have to do. To me it seems Xcel is able to do most regressions pretty intuitively from the graph without any background in stats. I haven't come across AbiWord before. Is there any spreadsheet equivalent worth checking out? I'm mostly interested in this for data analysis aspect. The only part I was able to find in synaptic was AbiWord.

[aysiu]

I haven't come across AbiWord before. Is there any spreadsheet equivalent worth checking out? I'm mostly interested in this for data analysis aspect. The only part I was able to find in synaptic was AbiWord. The spreadsheet equivalent is Gnumeric, and it's part of the GnomeOffice Suite (along with AbiWord itself). You may want to look into KSpread and KWord, too (both part of the KOffice Suite).