I've looked at Open Office, as well as Star Office (the proprietary version created by Sun.) For the cost of a single license with media (around $70 educational), you can get Sun Star Office distribution license for use within an educational environment, so they are both essentially free, and roughly the same product. The Law College isn't dropping either MS Office or WordPerfect any time soon, so I can't really address the issues related to end user training. I can tell you a few things about my own experiences with the software. I've used Open Office exclusively on a laptop I purchased back in February, and I can describe a few issues I've seen.

While the Open Office software allows you to save created documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in MS Office formats, there may be cases where that compatibility is limited. As always, you have the issue of fonts when building documents. If your document contains special fonts, and they aren't common windows fonts, conversion is a problem. Documents created with Open Office, saved in MS Word format, and moved to another machine where a font used in the document isn't installed can cause some formatting issues. This isn't so much a flaw in Open Office as it is in the way the Windows Operating system handles font installation and default fonts. I've created documents in Open Office and saved them as .rtf format, and had little to no problems opening and using them in MS Word. In general, I've gotten into the habit of creating shared documents in .rtf format, since I work with people who could use either Word or WordPerfect to read it.

The presentation software in Open Office provided a remarkable level of compatibility with MS Powerpoint. I was really quite impressed with how easily I could convert presentations between them. There was only one area where I ran into some problems: templates. If I used a canned template in Open Office to build a presentation, then saved it in Powerpoint format, some options had problems. The slides themselves transferred perfectly, all text and graphics intact. One thing that didn't transfer properly was transitions (ie, if the presentation was programmed to automatically move to the next slide after 30 seconds, that option was lost when it was converted to Powerpoint format.) As I said, the problem seemed to occur mostly when I used an Open Office template for my starting format. When I created an Open Office presentation from scratch, then saved it as Powerpoint format, options appeared to transfer cleanly. However, not being able to use a template means more work to create a large presentation from scratch.

The general consensus I've read on a few discussion forums is that the Open Office spreadsheet is "not yet ready for prime time". If you create complex Excel spreadsheets with pivot tables, formulas that calculate across sheets in a single file, or very complex formulas with multiple variables, you'll have some difficulty duplicating them in Open Office, and a hard time converting them back and forth between Open Office and Excel formats. My own use of spreadsheets is not complex. I don't use a lot of formulas, so I haven't tested this with my own personal experience. There were some improvements in Open Office 1.2 on the spreadsheet, but I honestly haven't tested them yet.

My general opinion is, if you have relatively simple needs for word processing, spreadsheet use, and presentations, Open Office might be a good fit. Students could consider it a viable alternative to shelling out $200-$300 for the latest copy of MS Office when they buy a computer. However, students also need to consider that, if they are turning in assignments to professors for grades as electronic files, those files should be compatible with the professor's software as well. As far as professional use is concerned, at this time I'd only consider the word processing and presentation parts of Open Office to be true, viable alternatives to Microsoft software.

These opinions are my own, and do not in any way represent the opinions of the College of Law. Your mileage may vary. In the immortal words of Dennis Miller "... but that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." (That should do it!)

Is anyone using an open-source office productivity suite instead of MS Office? If so, was switching (esp. user training, etc.)
difficult? Overall, do you think it was worth it?

Any comments would be welcome; we're just kicking the idea around.

Kim Geiger
Information Technologist
MSU Broadcasting Services
538 Communication Arts & Sciences Building
East Lansing, MI 48824 - 1212
517-432-9527 x 429