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March 10, 2008

Comments

Loss vs. Gain
How about something such as the following?
"Use OpenOffice.org and you won't LOSE your documents. You will always be able to access them in the future."

Expensive vs. Inexpensive
Did they do a study on people's reaction to getting the more expensive pill at a discount versus getting the less expensive pill? I would imagine that if people were willing to choose the more expensive pill over the less expensive, then they would be even more willing to choose the more expensive pill when they can get a discount on it.

Possible solution: compare number of Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, maybe Access)
with number of OpenOffice.org programs (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, any others?).

Maybe even include other programs such as Firefox and Thunderbird/Lightning in the comparison?

Ooh, interesting -- the idea of a big discount on something that could be expensive. (People will pay $100 for something as long as it used to be $1000.) Maybe talk up Staroffice/OpenOffice's history more as a standard office suite from StarDivision.

Or get people "hooked" if possible on some aspect of OpenOffice like the PDF generator or Draw, so that then they could possibly lose that. Hmm.

Thanks!

Solveig

I don't know. My issue has been that editing which would take minutes in Word has taken hours in OpenOffice. There may be more flexibility with concepts like expressions, but all I really need to do is find and replace paragraph breaks and the like. I'm ending up having to hunt down macros and do things by hand that would be automatic in Word. I like the price of OpenOffice, but I'm frustrated at the amount of time I'm having to spend, fighting the autoformating, which I already know how to control easily in Word. That is where the change aversion comes from. I'm capable of learning new things, but darn it, I want to use my brain space for something else.

Hi Jenrose,

Here's how to search and replace for carriage returns, etc. in OpenOffice.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2005/12/finding_and_rep.html

Turn off everything from the second item on down in AutoFormat under Tools > AutoCorrect, Options tab. I've listed that and some other items in this article.
http://www.k12opentech.org/solveig-haugland/2008/02/24/five-principles-successful-openofficeorg-transition

Solveig

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