At 19:09 27/02/2008 -0500, Fred A. Miller wrote:
2008/2/27, Julia Ross:
I am doing school online so it has to be Office Word, Excel, and Power point.
... that there have been MANY [students] - some undergrad, grad, and
quite a few doing all of their studies online. NONE have any
problems at all, and it's VERY, VERY rare that any on-line professor
will mandate that you send him a file completed with MickySoft's Office!
NB: This is not a criticism of the above, but merely a continuation
of the thread.
If a student needs to submit coursework in some fashion that the
school can deal with, then the close compatibility of OpenOffice and
Microsoft Office - in terms of final file formats - is no doubt
sufficient, as you say. But it is perhaps worth mentioning that
there is one exception to this compatibility issue, and this may
apply to this particular questioner.
Sometimes students will be taking a course in the use of Word, say,
and will be given precise instructions such as "Now open the
so-and-so menu and select the blah item" or "Now press Ctrl+Shift+F9
to do whatever". For this purpose, Writer will not substitute for
Word - just as Word would not substitute for Writer if a user were
following a course in OpenOffice. Some students may have been told -
or may just expect or perhaps merely hope - that OpenOffice will
transpire to be a sufficiently close clone of Microsoft Office for
this sort of thing to be feasible. (We may know that this is not the
purpose of OpenOffice, but they may not.) The (perhaps extravagant)
claims for "100% compatibility" (with no reference to the context
being file formats and document exchange) made not by OpenOffice
itself but by some sellers of OpenOffice will no doubt encourage this
misapprehension.
I suppose the fact that some users use terms like "Word" to mean
"generic word processor", "Excel" for "spreadsheet application", and
so on may also encourage this confusion. In any case, potential
users cannot be blamed for trying out OpenOffice for this purpose, or
for asking if it would be appropriate. In this limited circumstance,
though, anything other than the application that is the subject of
the course simply won't do. Even a different version of Microsoft
Office or a heavily customised copy of the same version probably wouldn't.
Brian Barker
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