Fred A. Miller wrote:
[snip]
I am really starting to dislike the latest incarnation of Outlook.
"Starting to?" I quit helping people use it. Now, when someone calls, I
simply tell them to download and install Thunderbird, which I'll gladly
help them with. These are the few who don't have a clue yet and haven't
dumped MickySoft for Linux yet. ;)
There is an unfortunate aspect to this that I suffer under. Big$
Bu$ine$$ has not moved to *nix at this time for end users. This
includes a whole lot of smaller businesses as well. For example,
the company I'm currently consulting with uses Outlook for
calendaring meetings. I don't have LookOut, eh, Outlook and have
not yet figured out a way to solve this problem.
Second, because I consult in a Windoze centric world I have to
keep it running on my main laptop in dual boot, which is actually
a bit of a pain in that if I create something under *nix I have
to put it on a USB key, reboot, import, and then fix the
inconsistencies to be able to send it to the rest of the team.
Quel fromage!
However, I figured out a way to undermine some of the Windoze
centric thinking and I thank my parents and the list for making
me think of it. This came came about this way.
My 87 year old mother has been using Word Perfect since pre 5.1
days in DOS, has stuck with it since I moved her and my recently
deceased father to Windoze so they could do e-mail about 6 years
ago. As they advanced in skill and the e-mail lists and
organizations started sending Word docs, they had no easy way to
open them and they, in turn couldn't send documents to others. I
taught them about RTF, which helped with sending. But it did not
help with the incoming as the version of WP they were using was
not capable of working in Word format. So I installed an early
version of OO and did the associations so that they could at
least open the documents, even if in an ugly format.
The next step happened about six months ago. A fellow worker
asked me how to do something in Power Point that I did not know
how to do and I had no manual or such for it. I looked it up in
the Impress docs and figured it out and told my colleague how to
solve the problem.
The next time I was asked about a similar issue (I tend to be the
goto person for such questions because of my ability to solve
problems in weird ways) I simply pointed them to the Impress
docs: http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/ and said have
at it. You would not believe the caustic remarks and funny looks
I got.
I lead one person through the process and they were able to learn
something and migrate their knowledge to M$. Ah ha!
Now if any question comes up about a M$ problem that there is
parallel info in the *nix world I send them to the *nix
documentation and let them see that it is better, on the whole,
than the M$ docs. As a result a few people have started to look
at *nix with new respect, subverting their dependence on M$. A
very few have actually added portable OO to their machines - they
can't install as they don't have admin rights - and use it to
create things. The favorite use so far is the Draw tools in Write
to create Visio-like diagrams because they don't have Visio on
their machines but need it from time to time. I figure over time
they will move to using more of the tools as there are things you
can do in OO that you can not do in M$ Word, etc.
I suggest you try the same tactic.
Best
Allen
Best,
Allen
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