Re: [PLUG] A lesson for us all?

[Art Clemons <artclemons@aol.com>]

>Our sucesses with OpenOffice is about 30%. We've found that if we throw
>it users who know MS Office and expect them to be just as proficient -
>it fails miserably every time. What has been successful is easing them
>into it with a few hours of training and a support number to call when
>they need additional help. The problem is that by the time the training
>costs are factored in, OpenOffice is nearly as expensive as MS Office.
>So the decision makers have to clearly understand the long-term cost
>advantage. If they look at the short-term only - then we don't even
>push OpenOffice. If they want to blow a few grand on MS Office - I let
>em.

Having seen the same claims made when WordPerfect was the package of the 
word processing set with WordStar in 2nd place, I'm not sure this is a 
good argument.  To this day, there are and were things that Word can't 
do that WordPerfect 5.0 did in DOS.  WordPerfect Macroes also didn't 
normally overwrite data or embed trojans either, although I suppose it 
was possible to create one that would overwrite data if someone was 
silly enough to execute someone else's macro without knowing what it did.

Most folks don't do enough with Word to more than scratch the surface 
and for those users, OpenOffice or StarOffice is a good idea, especially 
if their defaults are set to save documents in WordXP, Excel or 
Presentations format depending upon the program being used.  I also have 
to sadly note that OO is better at opening documents produced in 
Word2003 than WordXP is.
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