OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas

Switching to OpenOffice.org

I wrote this article last year for my colleague Russell; here's the link.

Making a Specific Template Come Up When You Create Any New Document, in OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc, Impress, or Draw (repost)

This is a very useful feature, I think, so I'm reposting it.

Anytime you can help people do something without actually have them do anything is great for them and great for you.

Templates are a great way to save time. Set up templates with the styles, graphics, etc. that people need, and they don't need to re-create them. (Or create them in the first place.)

However, getting users to use the templates is another step. For them, choosing File > New > Templates and Documents might not be something some will want to do or remember to do every time.

What if one of the templates you've created is one that many or all users use all the time as the basis for new documents?   You can make it come up when users just choose File > New > [type of document] by setting it as the default template. I.e. the user uses the template but doesn't even need to select it.

First, create a new document and make it how you want it: create styles, apply styles, include canned text, whatever.

Choose File > Templates > Save. Select a category and name the template. Click OK.

Choose File > Templates > Organize.

Open the category your template is in, in the left side.

Right-click on the template and choose Set as Default Template.

Click Close. You're done! Choose File > New > [type of document] and you'll see the effect.

To switch back to the normal original boring blank document, repeat the steps but this time choose Reset Default Template > [type of document]

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When users want to switch back: "Build a Business Case."

Thanks to a colleague for this.

Here's the scenario. You've adopted an OpenOffice.org. You're saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or thousands. Or millions. It's a lot.

And OpenOffice.org is working. It's allowing your users to get their work done. You've done your pilot and testing and worked through the initial issues with getting everyone up and running, and you're satisfied that it works.

But you have someone, possibly hundreds of someones, telling you that they absolutely need Microsoft Office for various reasons.

Don't just say no. Consider this approach.

Tell them you'll be happy to consider it if they'll present you with the business case for switching. Give them all the costs, including costs for OS, admin, and hardware, of using MS Office. (For instance, if you're on Linux, switching to MS Office also involves getting Windows.)

Ask them to contrast the amount of time they would save, or whatever the benefit is of getting MS Office, against the amount of money saved per person per year, of using OpenOffice.org.

This is particularly effective with people who claim (sometimes accurately, often inaccurately) that MS Office is quicker. That five clicks are necessary in OOO but two clicks in OpenOffice.org.

click = 1 second
doing the task 10 times a day
1 x 3 x 10 times a day x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year = 125 minutes or 2.1 hours a year

2.1 hours a year of their time is used on OOo when it wouldn't be on MS Office. (Of course, they would spend this much time just doing the business case.)

This approach, if they actually follow through, points out to them and to anyone with authority over decisions and writing checks that there really isn't much impact. It might feel better, and sometimes at least at first be a little more convenient for some procedures for some users to use Word. But is preference enough? Not when you look at the big picture and the business case.

And of course by saying "sure, we'll listen to your request, just do a business case," you get to be the good guy and the ball is back in their court.

Now, if they do have a business case for getting, for themselves and maybe three other people in the company, a few copies of Excel or whatever, then sure, get it for them. It's all about having the right tools and spending your money on what makes sense.

Updated the 10th: An Impress PDF presentation on OpenOffice.org 3.0 features

I created this presentation  for a client, about the 3.0 features in OpenOffice.org. I'm going to do a more detailed article but I thought I would post this since I've done it. Here's the solver.ods spreadsheet you can use to fiddle with.

I got pretty excited about some of them, especially the 3-up layout with lines already in there, and the far easier Impress handout printing.

And for those who like a good cross-reference, you don't need to create them first; you can just point to a heading in a list and select it, to make the cross-reference.

Also very exciting is the PDF editing, which does some very Adobe Acrobat type things. It's in an extension you can get here.

In the words of Douglas Adams, share and enjoy!

Sorting mixed 5- and 9-digit zip codes in OpenOffice.org Calc or Microsoft Excel

Every advance leads to benefits and to problems.

The 9-digit zip code is great for delivery accuracy. But they aren't required. So you have mixed 5-digits and 9-digits.

Now just try sorting your address info by zip code when there's mixed 5s and 9s. Here's what you get when you sort a standard address list by zip code.  It's like cattle and sheep, they don't mix.

What do you do?

There are three things you can do:
1 - Enforce a 9-digit zip. Everyone without four digits gets -0000 whether they want it or not.
2 - Put a ' in front of every zip code. It doesn't print but it forces the zip code to think of itself as text. (This also helps with not losing leading zeroes.)
3 - Split the column into two, so you have the zip in one column and the four-digit extension in the other. This is kind of like the forcing-9-digit solution.

The explanations follow but if you want to root around in an example spreadsheet, here's a spreadsheet with options 2 and 3.

Solution 1
Solution 1 is self-explanatory.

Solution 2
Just type a '   a regular apostrophe on the keyboard, to the left of the first character of every zip code. It doesn't show but it forces text format.

See? The ' is there in the entry field but it doesn't show in the spreadsheet cell.

Typing ' into thousands of cells takes a while. So you can search and replace. There might be a better way to do this but this at least doesn't suck.

Click in the Zip Code heading in your spreadsheet, then  choose Edit > Find and Replace. Click More Options and fill out the window as shown, searching for ^0, caret zero, and replacing with '0, apostrophe zero.

You'll need to do this once for 0, then for 1, then for 2, and so on. (I've tried to figure out a faster way, plus submit any suggestions.) 

Either replace one at a time if you're cautious, or go nuts and replace all. You might want to select the whole column of zip codes, too, and select the Current Selection Only checkbox.

When you're done, and when you sort that data, the zip codes sort correctly.

Solution 3

You can split your data into two cells with the LEFT and RIGHT functions. I'm throwing in IF too because sometimes you'll want the right-hand four digits (the extension) and sometimes you'll want 0000. (Or just leave it blank, whatever you want to do.)

This is what I want to achieve.

And this is how I get it. The formula for the first column, where I extract the first five digits, is simple.

The right-hand side is a little more complicated since you're dealing with variable-length zip codes. But basically you're saying if the zip code is just five digits, then create a new 4-digit extension, "-0000" (or just "0000" depending on how you want to deal with the dash). And then if it isn't just five digits, then you want to see the right-hand five digits of the zip code (including the dash) or the right-hand four digits (if you want to leave out the dash and put it in manually somehow).

Then you just drag down those formulas to all the zip code cells.

If you want to turn those columns into normal text, just copy them, choose Edit > Paste Special, choose to NOT paste formulas, and click OK.

The pasted results are nothing but numbers.

Now when you sort, you just need to be sure to do it by two levels, first by the main zip code, then by the extension. BE SURE that you set the Ascending or Descending the same for both.

And you get your results, sorted correctly.

Here's a spreadsheet with options 2 and 3.

When in doubt, right-click.

When in doubt, right-click.

The right-click context menu gives a very nice list of many of the operations you can do with the selected item. Not everything, of course, but it's a good place to start. (Click to see a bigger version.)

Expanded List of Tips for Tweaking Word Documents or WP Documents That Don't Look Perfect in OpenOffice Writer

I realized that I don't really have all the tips for compatibility between OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word in one spot. Here we go. These aren't all of the things you could ever try but they're my classics.

• Before converting the document, see what you can do about creating it well in a way that will convert well. If you create documents well, they'll convert well.
• If people are having problems with your document, find out if they really need to edit the document at all. If they just need to print it or have it on hand, then use File > Send > Document as PDF and all formatting problems are moot. Ditto if the problem is on your end -- if you don't need to edit the document you've received, then ask for a PDF version.
• Don't overlook the idea, with legacy documents, of A) keeping a couple licenses of Word around so you don't have to bother converting 0r B) contracting out the conversion work.
• Check the page formatting. Choose Format > Page and adjust the page size, margins, and page orientation.  Make the page margins smaller  if you're having trouble fitting everything onto the right number of pages.
• If text formatting is decidedly odd, select and choose Format > Default to remove formatting and start over.
• Change the font and/or font size. Select the text and choose a different font and font size from the dropdown lists at the top left of the toolbar.
• If graphics are behaving oddly, right-click on each and choose Anchor > To Page. Then reposition the graphic. You might also want to slightly shrink the graphic so it will fit better, or increase the size.
• For lists, select the list and click the numbering or list icon to turn off all numbering or bullets. Then reapply the list or bullets by clicking the same icon again.

• Adjust the default tabs. Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Writer > General. Set the tabs slightly smaller or slightly larger and check the effect.
• Adjust the default fonts. Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Writer > Basic Fonts (Western). Specify the fonts and font sizes that fit best in your documents.

• Check the fonts that are used with your printer and operating system. You might want to set up font substitution. Choose Tools > Options > General > Fonts, and use the online help to apply the replacement table. Replace fonts you can’t use with fonts you can.
• Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Writer > Compatibility. If the printer metrics option at the top isn’t on, select it. Try changing the other settings in the window and see if those items help.

If you find that you have a set of formatting changes that works well going to Word and back again, make that your default template. Then every time you create a new Writer document, it will have those attributes.

• Create a document with the correct formatting attributes.
• Choose File > Templates > Save.
• Save the template in My Templates and call it Conversion.
• Click OK.
• Choose File > Templates > Organizer.
• In the left-hand pane, expand My Templates and select the Conversion template.
• Right-click on that template and choose  Default Template.

• If you want to go back to the normal default template later, open the Organizer again, right click, and choose Reset Default Template > Text Document.

Persuading people that OpenOffice.org is the right choice? Accentuate the negative.

I blogged about this item recently.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2008/03/loss-aversion-a.html

It's about how people are more inclined to fear loss than to be motivated by gain. (And also about how a cheap placebo is less effective than an expensive placebo.)

That was pretty depressing because it seemed like people are hard-coded to not be interested in Openoffice.org (free, and gaining money in the budget to do other things with), when they could clearly benefit from switching from MS Office.

(Caveat. Of course, not everyone should switch from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, but pretty much everyone should consider it.)

However. I'm listening to NPR again and here's the flip side.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93872977

People are motivated by fear, by loss. Not just to buy a certain brand of deoderant but it just works. Firefighters who during training are shown  or told about the wrong decisions by previous firefighters, ended up performing better than firefighters who were just shown the right decision-making process. Mothers who were told that formula was bad for their babies were more likely to breastfeed than mothers who were told that breastfeeding was good for their babies.

Microsoft certainly does this but without as much emphasis on truth/the whole truth/and nothing but the truth as one might hope.

And when you think about it, it makes sense. Why bother to get up off the chair that's on fire if all you're told is that it's cooler over there on the other side of the room? "You're going to die" is the key information.

So that's one major thing. Emphasize the danger, the disadvantages, of the current choice.

The next major thing I took away from this NPR show is that it's all about "what is everyone else doing." Which is not surprising, but it's very effective. You know the sign you see in hotels, saying please leave your towel on the rack if you want to reuse it. The sign says we should save hot water, save the environment, etc.  Hotels in a study increased their towel reuse by guests significantly simply by changing the sign so that it says that 43% (or so) of hotel guests reuse their towels. People look to their peers for approval and guidance of what to do.

Here's a by no means complete but useful list of many implementations of OpenOffice.org. And let's not forget that Sun, Novell, and IBM all have heavy involvement with OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/Symphony.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments   Plus my home town library in Kalispell, Montana; the library uses Userful kiosks. Not a major deployment ;>  but it's another stat.

Once you've done the first two things, then of course you need reasons for switching to OpenOffice, or whatever you're trying to explain. And we have those in spades for OOo.

90 things that are the same in Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org

I've put together three articles, showing tasks that are the same between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.

• Word/Writer
  
• Excel/Calc
• Powerpoint/Impress
  

Table and table-text flow control features for OpenOffice Writer

I've been doing some table-based layout recently, in my quick-reference cards. I got to know the table flow options real well. Here are some good solid table control features.

Text Flow tab

Get to know this one. Click in the table and choose Table > Table Properties. Click the Text Flow tab.

Break: If you want a cell to start at the top of a new page or column click in that cell, and then in this window select Break and Column or Page. Conversely, if you've got a table that starts at the top of a page or column and don't want it to, unmark the Break option.

Allow Table to Split Across Pages and Columns: You're going to have some weird layout with your longer tables if you don't let the table at least split across columns.

Allow Row to Split Across Pages and Columns: However, I think it looks a little weird, at least in some circumstances, to let the row split. So I don't mark that.

Repeat Heading: Here's how you get the first, or first and second, and so on, rows of a table to repeat on each additional page. Helps readers to know what each column of information is about.

Putting a Carriage Return Above a Table at the Top of a Page

If you've got a table at the top of a page and you want a blank line above it, just click in the upper left cell of that table and press Return.

Getting Rid of a Carriage Return Above a Table at the Top of a Page or Between Tables

Click on the line where the carriage return is and press Delete. 

Bam, the two are consecutive. Not the same table, but consecutive.

Split/Merge Options on the Table menu

Let's say you've got a long table, and you want to split it into two. Just click in the line where you want the 2nd table to being, and choose Table > Split Table.

If you've got two tables and you want them to be one, then click in the top line of the second table and choose Table > Merge Table.

If there's just one to choose from, the merging will just happen with the  table above it. If there's a table above and below, you'll get this window. Make the choice you want and click OK.

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Any way you want it: OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet keyboard shortcuts

I get a lot of requests from people switching office suites who want to know how a feature is done in Microsoft Office, compared to how it works in OpenOffice.org.

It usually ends up that the person wants a list of shortcuts. And I say "but you can have any shortcut you want in OpenOffice.org, it's incredibly configurable." I don't really like to give out lists like that because it gives the impression that it's fixed. If someone wants Ctrl 2 to make text double-spaced and they see it's assigned to the Heading2 paragraph style, they might think there's nothing they can do about it.

All this is kind of a meandering introduction to the following general topics:

You can have virtually any shortcuts you want in OpenOffice.org.

There are a zillion  features you don't know about that you can apply shortcuts to.

It's really easy to do. And once you've got it set to your preferences, you can easily give the file to your friends.

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You can have virtually any shortcuts you want in OpenOffice.org.
Choose Tools > Customize, and click the Keyboard tab. Those are the current shortcuts. But to change one, just select something in the Category list, something in the Function list, the Keyboard Shortcut of your choice, and click Modify. Bam, you have your new shortcut.  The world is your oyster.

There are a zillion  features you don't know about that you can apply shortcuts to.
Sooooo many features that aren't on the menus or toolbars, and possibly not on the right-click menus, are in the Keyboard tab.

As mentioned, choose Tools > Customize, Keyboard tab.

Select the first Category, and scroll through the Functions. Look at all that. You can set up any of those to use a keyboard shortcut you want, or you might see something you like that has a keyboard shortcut with it already.

The keyboard shortcuts are different for OpenOffice.org in general, and for Writer, for Calc, for Impress, and for Draw.

Here are just a few functions for Calc. The first screen shot shows that it's Ctrl Page Down to go to the next sheet, and Ctrl Page Up to go to the previous sheet. You can use this as is or change it.

Here are just a few functions for Writer

Here are just a few functions for Draw

It's really easy to do. And once you've got it set to your preferences, you can easily give the file to your friends.

All right. You've chosen Tools > Customize. You've clicked the Keyboard tab. You've scrolled through and found the feature for making line spacing doubled. And in the Shortcut Keys list you find Ctrl 2, the shortcut you want to use. It's already occupied by being assigned to Heading 2. That's fine. Just click Modify and it'll switch.



Here's what it looks like now, with Ctrl 2 assigned to double-spacing.



Now let's say you want to share this and any other shortcut configurations you've made with your friends, or all the folks you support in your job as an IT professional.

* Click Save.
* Name the file and click Save.

Then give the file to someone else and tell them to:

* Choose Tools > Customize, Keyboard tab.
* Click Load
* Find the file and click Open

Want to give this post a plug on FSDaily?

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Switching to OpenOffice.org: specific step-by-step tips to customize and make OpenOffice.org your own

I wrote this article for my friend Russell over at FanaticAttack.  Lots of comments (I clearly need to do better at publicizing my own blog! ;>  ).  Check it out; it's definitely one of my more explicit, step-by-step guides.

Excerpt....

Here are some setup tips to help you get OpenOffice.org humming.

Automatic Settings

Some of the default settings aren’t quite what I would recommend, but it’s very easy to make the changes.

First, choose Tools > AutoCorrect.

In the Word Completion tab, turn off word completion if it bugs you by unmarking the Enable Word Completion option. If you like it but want to change what key you use to accept the suggestion, you can do that too.

General Settings

A window you want to get to know: choose Tools > Options. I strongly recommend that you go through every option in that window since many are very useful. To get the options for text documents you need to have a Writer document open first; to get the options for spreadsheets you need a Calc document open first, and so on.

• I like to choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > View. Select Large as the icon size.
• You might also want to turn on backups. Choose Tools > Options > Load/Save > General and select Always Create Backup Copy. The backups are created at the location specified for backups under Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Paths.
• If you find the color selection in OpenOffice.org lacking, you can create your own under Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Colors.

Printing

Writer printing: Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Writer, Print: you might want to turn off the option for printing automatically inserted blank pages unless you’re heavy into the first page of a new section starting on the right-hand page.

Calc printing: Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Calc, Print: it’s best to turn off both options here. If you want to select two or more sheets to print when you’re ready to print, just select one sheet tab, then hold down Ctrl and click on each additional sheet you want to print.

Read more....

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Loss aversion, the placebo effect, and OpenOffice.org

When you switch a group of people to OpenOffice.org, the biggest problems you encounter are rarely about the software. It's all about change management.

I've been trying to untangle this problem for years, and I have a few techniques. Show people the fun, cool aspects of the program. Emphasize the money being saved (which usually doesn't help at all). Try to demo the program without divulging that it is not MS Office.

And then NPR comes along with two back-to-back stories that are directly relevant.

I'm sitting here with my tea listening to a story about loss aversion, how we will work harder to avoid losing something we want than to gain the same thing. (Kind of like how we feel the pain of losing money on the stock market more than we feel the pleasure of gaining.) I thought, wow, this is so applicable to the psychology of switching to OOo. So I started creating a new blog entry and bam, the next story is about how people get more benefit from a placebo when they are told it costs more. And that, obviously, is dead-on applicable to switching to OOo as well. I could hardly type fast enough.

Here's the first story. There's a site, www.stickk.com, where you can place a bet on whether you will lose a certain amount of weight by a certain date. (Let's leave aside the question of verification.) According to the NPR story, some people respond very well to a contract. ""There are a significant portion of people who have an explicit preference for commitment," says Karlan. The commitment, or the stakes, help people act in their own self-interest. The contract helps them stay the course."

Furthermore, they will work harder to avoid losing money than to achieve the benefits associated with becoming thinner (gaining something they want). "The results exemplify what behavioral economists call "prospect theory," or loss aversion. "What we know about incentives is that people work a lot harder to avoid losing $10 than they will work to gain $10," explains Ayres. "So something that's framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior.""

 

So this explains why the obvious benefit of Openoffice.org, freeing up money you're spending on Microsoft Office, isn't that enticing to many people. Whereas losing their comfortable Microsoft Office or WordPerfect is very painful.

How to frame switching to OpenOffice.org in those terms? It has to be associated with losing something people love. For instance, if people were going to have to choose between paying Microsoft Office and something they want more, like health benefits or their free periods (these might not be realistic examples), they might be happier to use OpenOffice.org because by doing that they avoid losing their health benefits or free periods.

This sounds like heavy-handed mafia-type techniques, I realize, and I'm not trying to do that. I just think it's interesting that the pain is more intense from losing something we have than the pleasure of gaining something we could have. So I'm trying to think of ways to help people see more clearly that not only can they do what they need to in OpenOffice.org but that the money that's freed up can help them keep what they really would hate to lose.

Based on this, I think that when you present the campaign to switch, it would therefore be effective to try as hard as you can to present the entire budget with all the expenses, and the entire amount of money you have, and ask the decisionmakers what they want you to cut. Don't just make it about switching office suite software. Make it about having 3x things you are currently providing and 2x money, and ask what to cut. That helps make it clearer what's really important.

• Are the fabulous high school music program and those two great music teachers more important than using Microsoft Office?
• Is that new ambulance and Chris the EMT more important than using Microsoft Office?
• Is  finishing that new product that could help you demolish your competitors more important than using Microsoft Office?

This not only helps people focus on what's really important, but helps frame the idea of switching to OpenOffice.org in terms of avoiding losing something users want, which is more effective than gaining something.

Now here's the other story. People were given two placebos, supposedly for pain relief. Placebos, no effect in the chemical whatsoever. There was a back story for each placebo, and they even made fancy pens for one of them with the fake name of the placebo on the pen. One placebo, let's call it fendorexor, was a lot more expensive than the other placebo, which we'll call endorantec. When people were given the more expensive fendorexor, machines hooked up to the people indicated they experienced less pain than when they were given the less expensive endorantec.

This is very interesting. It's not just reported pain, it's actual observed-by-machines pain. People's brains not only fool them into thinking that a sugar pill can reduce pain, but that the reportedly more expensive sugar pill can reduce pain more than the less expensive sugar pill.

So the key benefit of OpenOffice.org can be the thing that makes people think it's not as good. Ironic, eh?

I'm not quite sure what to do about this. It's hard to sell the work involved in a transition without mentioning the price. But I think it's a good idea to emphasize other aspects of OpenOffice.org, like the open document format, the availability on multiple operating systems, no licensing issues, easy availability to students at home, etc.  And when you demo OpenOffice.org, do it first without mentioning the price. Or try to disguise what it is, show screen shots without the title bar. Downplay the price to users, emphasize the price with decisionmakers.

Anyone have any ideas on how to use this information to help facilitate switching to OpenOffice.org? Comments, please.

[Note: OpenOffice.org is not always the right tool, especially if you do business or other activities with organizations that are tightly and rigidly tied to Microsoft Office specific macros and processes. This blog is presented to help people manage the change management part of a transition that has been well considered and well planned, where the software issues have been ironed out and solved.]

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Read/listen more.....

Losing weight and loss aversion:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87931325

People like more expensive placebos:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87938032

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Free Presentations to Organizations Considering Switching to OpenOffice.org or StarOffice This Year

I can feel it. This year is already different. In the first month of the year, I have received a far higher number of requests for training and for consulting. Also, notably, I've received several requests for input on how to, and whether to, make the transition to OpenOffice.org or StarOffice.

I'm particularly pleased with the last item, since planning is essential to a successful, smooth transition to OOo or SO for  your organization.

If you're part of an organization that's looking at making the transition and you'd like some input from me, I'm happy--actually, eager--to give it. For February and March, I will give as many free one-hour sessions on tips for a successful transition to OOo and SO as I can fit into my schedule. I might extend this option longer, depending on response and other projects.

• If you're in the Denver metro area, I'm happy to come by in person.
• If you're outside the metro area, I can work with you on the phone, or present using the ReadyTalk multi-platform screensharing tool or your own screensharing tool.
• If you'd like to set up a paid in-person consulting visit of one or more days, please contact me.

Here's a thought about why transitioning to OOo or SO . Most people have only used one office suite in their lives, maybe two.  Switching to another office suite is going to be, for them, analogous to living in a small town all their lives and then making their first visit outside the country as an adult without knowing anything about what the trip will be like. It's not that the foreign country is so inherently hard to figure out, but that they've never done it before, and aren't used to all the unexpected differences. If they're  mentally prepared for a change, open to the idea of learning; and have some essential tools like a guide, some good shoes, and a couple weeks of basic French; the experience will be much better.

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Summary of new features in OpenOffice.org 2.3

Here’s a summary of the features from the 2.3 new features list that I considered the most useful or important to write about. This page  http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/New_Features_2.3 about the new features is an excellent guide, as well.

General

• This is convenient for anyone who prints to multiple printers, all over the world. You can load or ignore the printer settings for your documents. This means you don’t end up accidentally printing to the printer in building 4 which is on the opposite side of the country, just because you were on a business trip there last week and that’s where you last printed your document.
  

• If your document isn’t wider than the OpenOffice.org window, then it will be centered in the window, not left-aligned.
  

• Lots of locale information was added, for locations such as Tagalog, Frisian, and Hausa.
  

Writer and Web

• The HTML editor now has a preview feature. Choose File > Preview in Web Browser and the document opens in the default browser.

• I love this feature. You know how when you get a hyperlink but then want to retype it or reformat it, but clicking on it takes you to the target of the link? No more. You can select hyperlinked text all you want; you now have to Ctrl Click to open a link. This is very nice.
  

• The notes say that there is a new compatibility option on Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Writer > Compatibility: Do Not Justify Alignment in Lines Ending With Manual Line Break. However, I’m mentioning this because I couldn’t see it. The illustration shows the compatibility options that are there.
  

• When you open the Styles and Formatting window (Format > Styles and Formatting), you can set what kinds of styles you wanted to see: Applied, Custom, Automatic, etc. Previously, you had to reset this every time you opened a new document or re-opened OpenOffice.org. Now, thankfully, that category will stick. The setting is saved per application. However, the choice you make for Paragraph, Character, Frame, List, or Page doesn’t stick.
  
  

• When you right-click on text, you used to see Default as one of the options. Now you see Default Formatting, which is clearer. (Default Formatting is a great way to just clear out any extraneous formatting and apply the default style to the selected item.) This is a very nice feature regardless of the text; for one thing, it’s the best way to remove the hotlink from a URL.
  

• A new export filter lets you export to MediaWiki format. Choose File > Export and select MediaWiki in the file format list.

Calc

• This is a very, very smart change. By default, the print options for Calc are now set to Print Only Selected Sheets and Suppress Output of Empty Pages. If the Print Only Selected Sheets option is enabled, the Calc page preview shows only the displayed sheet and the message “There is nothing to print.” To change these options, choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Calc > Print, or choose File > Print and click the Options button.
  

• Here’s another very smart change that will screw up all my documentation. :) The SUM icon on the main Calc toolbar has changed. Now you can select the range of numbers to add, click the SUM icon, and get the total in the first cell below the selected range. Phew. But if you liked it the old way, it still works that way, too.
  

• Graphics can be linked to macros. This should help with Excel compatibility.
  

• The Excel export filter now handles the cotangent functions COT, ACOT, COTH, and ACOTH.

• Calc now supports inline matrix/array constants in formulas. An inline array is surrounded by curly braces '{' and '}'. Elements can be each a number (including negatives), a logical constant (TRUE, FALSE) or a literal string. See this link for more detail. http://sc.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=features&msgNo=230

• You can now use dynamic ranges, rather than absolute ranges defined with $, in lists in Data Validity. Choose Data > Validity, and under the Criteria tab select Cell Range from the list.
  
  

• The GETPIVOTDATA function returns a result value from a DataPilot table, so it can be used in a cell formula.
  

Mail Merge, Databases, and Forms

• The infamous checkbox on the print message when you print a mail merge document, Do Not Show Warning Again, is gone. Phew! See this blog http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/10/how_to_get_the_.html for why that caused problems.
  
  

• This is nice. When you choose File > Print with a mail merge document, in the Mail Merge window, you can choose to save the document as separate documents or as one document.
  
  

• Unfortunately, in Base there is still no File > Export or File > Import feature. File > Export does appear, but it’s dimmed.

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Why Open Source Matters: A Larger View

When I teach, one of the most common questions about OpenOffice.org is "How can it be free?"

I answer with a hodgepodge of topics from "Sun wanted to piss off Bill Gates" to "you know how your printer is really cheap but the cartridges are more expensive?" to "well, when geeks go home and want to relax, they don't play volleyball, they code." And I vow to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar when I get home.

I'm traveling soon so I'll be able to fulfill that vow before my next training class. Before I delve into the official or popular views of open source software, however, I'm going to open up the chest of my own opinions. Here's one thought. Software development is an odd combination of useful for mass numbers of people, and fun for others to develop. Usually, things that are fun enough to do voluntarily are not that useful to other people.  There might not be as much of a benefit to millions of people from group collaboration in, say, acting or singing or lounging around in the back yard -- other more traditionally enjoyable activities. But there are enough people who enjoy, or are significantly rewarded by in nonmonetary forms, software development, to create a lot of usable software. And it's far more useful for the rest of us to have a free office suite, than for a bunch of people around the world to have united to read some great novels while sipping gin and tonics. ;>

So this is one way it's possible for open source software to be, metaphorically, delicious and calorie-free because, well, it's different. The context and assumptions of the nature of software development are different than other products and services.

Then there's others' opinions that I want to share and expand on. I came across this article/blog which I thought was another interesting angle on open source from a larger standpoint.

It's not really hot news; it's about the keyword that characterizes Web 2.0 and all the associated buzzwords: participation. But I haven't talked about that theme much on this blog, having generally focused on specifics like exactly what to choose to make an inter-subdocument cross reference show up. Thus I'd like to emphasize the link between OpenOffice.org and the big ideas.

The article mentions the attempts to create an online encyclopedia.

"Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales were running into problems on the other side of the Atlantic. Together they were working on Nupedia, an encyclopedia they planned to make available to the public, free of charge, via the Internet. They considered it the ultimate democratization of knowledge. Sanger and Wales found renowned academics who were prepared to write entries for the site as well as to edit others’ contributions. Great plan. But it had one drawback: It was impossible to get anything done. Two years in, Nupedia included only 24 articles. “The pace was horrible,” Wales says now."

And then they discovered wikis. They opened up the process and now of course wikipedia is the first place many of us look for information if we just want a definition, some background and examples....in fact, an online encyclopedia entry.

Open source information goes much farther back than that. The Professor and the Madman chronicles the development of the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, begun in the late 1890s. Where did many of the entries, many excellent entries come from? An inmate of Broadmoor who was imprisoned for murder. On the up side, he was still a very intelligent man, and of course had plenty of time to write definitions. I don't want to imply anything about today's software developers ;> with this analogy, but simply to point out that a venerable, dignified, and very old mainstay of our culture was developed with participation from many outside sources rather than an officially appointed and restricted group.

Let's keep in mind that  the odds of any software project successfully producing the desired outcome, on schedule, are roughly on par with going on a diet before your high school reunion and getting to your ideal weight in time. The structure of a standard project doesn't seem to be that much of a benefit. "It's impossible to put a precise number on the failure rate," says Karl Fogel, author of Producing Open Source Software, "but anecdotal evidence from over a decade in open source, some casting around on SourceForge.net, and a little Googling, all point to the same conclusion: the rate is extremely high, probably on the order of 90 to 95 percent."

Obviously, open source software can fail too. But my point is that developing outside the cube farm is not the risk.

Free software  seems odd to a lot of people, I think, because it's just new. We get free entertainment through TV; free information all over the place on the Internet; and overpriced $5 1000-calorie macchiatos while we're enjoying the free stuff.

The simplicity and rigidity of money = value , in an environment of better communication and participation, can't be applied as uniformly anymore. Barter, whether actual or less obvious, has a role too: you're bartering your willingness to dig a little on the Internet for information instead of being handed a thick manual. (And for those who have read through thick software manuals, sometimes they're worth the price of the software....sometimes they're not.)

I've been sitting here, staring across the coffee shop (past my $2 iced tea) trying to come up with a splendid, eloquent final sentence that ties everything together. So far, no luck. I will go with something like "Open source is more normal than you think, and was providing many valuable, reliable, free products long before Linux came along."

A very important post for decision-makers considering OpenOffice

The most important thing to make sure you understand about a transition to OpenOffice.org is to run a good hard pilot program first.

But this is a very very close second.

The more tech-savvy you are, the more serious mistakes you can make in an OpenOffice.org transition.

It's very likely that you can't trust your own judgment. Not when it comes to evaluating how users will be able to make the transition.
Because the following, more or less, describes most IT directors or people in related positions who will evaluate and choose OpenOffice.org. And these attributes color how you consider other people's skillsets.

1. You are an experienced computer and find it inconceivable that people don't have at least basic computer skills.
2. You've used a dozen text editors and while you love vi and emacs, you don't really care which one you use. You have no emotional attachment to the current office suite.
3. You understand how office suites work. You have text, you format it; you have cells, you refer to them; they're all pretty much the same. When you learn a new office suite, you just transfer your existing knowledge to a new set of navigation.

If you run a 10-person geek-heavy startup company, all of these assumptions are fine.

If you run any non-software business, a city or county government, a volunteer organization, or anything else that is not a small techy company completely populated with intense techy people, then you probably don't really know your users' skill sets. If you don't take some time to triple-check your assumptions and realistically evaluate their skill sets, then formulate plans to address related issues, you're going to have some serious bumps when you transition to OpenOffice.org.

Note: This is not in any way meant to be condescending. People have all different skillsets, from computers to people skills to decouppage to athletics, and the person who is disinterested in, or struggles with, document margins is sometimes the one who knocks you out on the dance floor or gives the speech at the annual conference that has the salespeople on their feet, cheering. This blog is to help the people in charge of transitioning users to new software ensure that those users have the skills, confidence, training, etc. necessary to do their jobs.

How do I know this?
The usual ways. Observation. Reading posts and comments online.

And through my own experience when I started to do training. I had been a techwriter/course developer in high tech for 12 years when I started doing OpenOffice.org training. I used styles, I coded raw HTML, I'd used four operating systems, etc. I didn't think of myself as techy because I was usually surrounded by people who, for instance, had written the Java certification exam. But I was way more experienced in how to use office suites, especially word processing programs, than the folks I was training. So the class on how to use styles and master documents wasn't a great success. ;>  So I quickly backpedaled and refocused and rewrote the training materials to suit the audience, their experience, and what they needed.

Back to the main topic. First, let me emphasize this:

You can have a very successful transition to OpenOffice.org even if you have users with limited software skillsets.

You just need to work with your users as they are. And since you're very different from them, your unconscious assumptions are likely going to lead you astray.

Let's go back to the numbered list.

Issues Corresponding to the Three Assumptions, and How to Deal With Those Issues

1. You are a techy and you just don't understand how someone can not understand how things work. It's like being able to read, maybe, and not know how someone can look at a word and not sound it out.

Even if you field really basic questions from your users every day, they don't ask  you all the questions. And they just skip some of the questions they should be asking. Get a sense of what their skills really are. In a nonthreatening way, either send out a little questionnaire, have a short session where you put people through their paces on some basic skills, or just send out some of your non-threatening IT folks to observe people doing their jobs. You'll find that a lot of essentials, like being able to navigate a file system, are missing. A lot of people never learned to choose File > Open and go up or down a level to find a file.  Likewise, a lot of people never learned to right-click, they don't know how to do it and they don't know what a great way it is to figure out where a feature they need is.

You can offer people training (and of course having the authority to make it required means they'll come to it).  Possibly start with fundamentals of computers and go from there. You can do daylong sessions, CBT, little tips and tricks every Wednesday at lunch, give prizes to the department that does the most entries on the Internal Tips and Tricks FAQ, whatever. It's all doable. You just need to know what you're working with, and help people get the skills they lack and that can make them happier and more productive.

2. You have no idea how they really feel about transitioning. You think, what's the big deal? It's just another software program.

This is kind of related to #3, which I'll get to in a second. But hearing that they will be switching to an office suite they've never heard of (or even if they have heard of it) fills people with panic. Fear. Hostility, sometimes. It's fear of the unknown, fear of learning things they don't feel comfortable with, fear of losing skills and ability to do their job that they feel are tied to the software they use. All very normal and human and addressable but they are NOT the feelings you would have. 

How do you address fear and panic? Well, one very practical way that's kind of offtopic is to reassure them that any massive document conversion will be taken care of. Conversion is a big issue people panic about. Also, since it's partly fear of the unknown, show them the software. Have brief 15-minute presentations or CBTs where you run through the software and show just a couple features. Bold Italic Underline, and colored text one week. Send as PDF another week. Show a cool feature like the prefab graphics as a fun feature; people like graphics. Put a bunch of clip art in the Gallery and show that another week -- ditto.

Reassure them that you're not just going to slap it on their desks and make them use it without books or training.

Reassure them that there will be a transition period where they can work with it and learn it.

And for the people who are more angry and resistant than fearful -- well, that's a management issue, not a software issue. It's time for some tough love from the person's supervisor, with the appropriate proportions of carrot and stick for that person. (You need to have support for OOo from the top to make sure you can make this happen.)

This needs to be absolutely clear to everyone in your organization. If using a particular tool to do certain tasks in the person's job description, then that person has an obligation, both ethical and legal, to learn to use that tool to the best of their abilities. This applies to computers and whatever software is installed; hammers; backhoes; or whatever the tool is.

See the addendum at the end of this post for a suggested rough draft of the email from the CEO about the transition.

3. You see how similar OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office are. Going from choosing File > Page Setup to choosing  Format > Page Setup poses no problems for you.

But these are problems for users. Many people just concentrate on what menus and buttons to click to do their job; they don't generalize those skills so that they can easily reapply them in a new piece of software. They feel like they're starting over when they switch to a new word processor, even though the fundamental principles are the same.

This is why they panic at the idea of change. They think their ability to do their job is tied to their current office suite. They think if you take away MS Office or Word Perfect, they'll be no better than an intern off the street. Maybe they fear losing their job, or at least losing their self esteem at performing their job well.

So how do you deal with this? It's nothing terribly original, but when you realize that they aren't going to be able to generalize their skillsets to OpenOffice.org on their own, you can give them the resources they need to learn OOo.

DON'T JUST INSTALL OPENOFFICE.ORG ON THEIR COMPUTERS, THROW THEM A FEW CLUESHEETS, AND FIGURE YOU'RE DONE. This is a really good way to increase support calls by an order of magnitude, make people resent you and OpenOffice.org, and risk having the transition fail.

Essentially, switching some people from MS Office to OOo is like taking a macro and changing the name of the variables. Only the names have changed, but the macro is going to break.

• You have to make sure people know how to use the program before they have to start doing their jobs using the software. This might not involve a lot of training. If people do the same five tasks all day long, then find out what those tasks are, train them on those tasks, leave them documentation for how to do those tasks, and that could be all you need to do.
  
• If there are some tasks that are more difficult in OpenOffice.org than the other office suite, then try templates, styles, menu and toolbar modification, or consider just reassigning a few tasks to another person or group.
• Increase their confidence along with their skill sets. Show them something new and cool, like making a shortcut under Tools > AutoCorrect, Replace tab; or using the drawing tools under View > Toolbars > Drawing. When you make them feel good about their skills and the program, everyone wins.

As Weird as It Feels, You Have to Believe Things That Just Don't Seem to Make Sense (to you)

The key thing is, don't make assumptions about skills users have, even when they seem natural and easy -- to you. 

If you can use OpenOffice.org easily and if your 10-year-old son picked up Openoffice.org in about 15 minutes, that has no bearing on whether or not your users will be able to pick it up on their own in the same way.

It's tempting to believe that your users will be fine, since it's cheaper and easier to do a transition with techy users. It reminds me of the joke about the economist, the engineer, and the chemist who are stuck in a room with no doors or windows. The engineer and economist have various solutions, and the economist just says, "Let's assume that there's a door."  ;>

And I'm sure in some situations, some rare situations, I'm wrong. But in my experience, this is the case. Just be sure you know the real situation, the real users you're transitioning, and address them as they are.

And you, and they, will be fine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ADDENDUM: TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT EVERYONE IN THE ORGANIZATION WILL LEARN OPENOFFICE.ORG AND THAT MAKING A FUSS WILL NOT BRING BACK THE OLD OFFICE SUITE.

It's a good idea for someone with authority to send an email like this to all employees. A friendly but direct email from the CEO or whoever is appropriate stating something like this. Make it clear that there will be few or no  exceptions, there is no turning back, and that kicking up a fuss will not bring back the old office suite.

(This is all assuming that you did a good, thorough job of researching, testing, and piloting OpenOffice.org, ensuring that it is the right tool for the job.)

ACME  team members,

One of the essential attributes of a successful company is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and take advantage of new opportunities and tools. Based on the changing marketplace and emergence of new types of software, I and other members of the ACME team, decided to evaluate OpenOffice.org, a powerful and free open source office suite compatible with Microsoft Office.  OpenOffice.org has a text processing module like Word, a spreadsheet like Excel, a presentation tool like Powerpoint, as well as database capabilities and a drawing program. The programs look quite similar to Microsoft Office. To learn more, go to www.openoffice.org.

I have decided that ACME will switch to OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is a good choice for ACME for many reasons, including its excellent feature set and the enormous amount of money we will save by not paying for Microsoft Office licenses.

The transition to OpenOffice.org will be phased, not immediate. We have begun the transition with a pilot program and will begin the official rollout on ________. The rollout will take approximately __________ and by __________, the company will be using OpenOffice.org as its official office suite.

I understand that making this change might seem alarming. Rest assured that the change will not be immediate. All employees will have the opportunity to use and learn OpenOffice.org for a minimum of ________ before being required to use it for work.  All employees will provided with information about the program to help you learn it, and the help desk will support it. You can also download and install OpenOffice.org at home if you would like to use it as your home office suite. I use it myself at home and am delighted with it.

The switch to OpenOffice.org applies to all employees.  (if there are exceptions add the following) The only exceptions are as follows:
- __________
- __________
- __________

To learn more about OpenOffice.org at ACME please go to:
- [create an internal faq site]
- [an internal site where you describe it a little more, including screen captures and videos of how OOo looks]

I am confident that all ACME employees have the ability to learn the new program and do their jobs with the same high quality of excellence that has made us so successful. Thank you for your participation in this transition.

Regards,


[name]

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The Slow Death of Microsoft (or at least some wasting away)

Pretty much everything in the business world evolves and changes. The Detroit auto industry, for instance, has gone through some changes. A lot of phonograph companies are no longer in business.

And so even though it seems impossible to think that Microsoft would ever be less than its current massive size and influence, it will happen. Not only because of history but because of the reasons in this blog by Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

I'm sure Microsoft will evolve, diversify, maybe go more into games, etc. But they're not permanent the way they are now. Nothing is.

From the blog. This of course is not an issue specific to Microsoft, but an issue with standard big corporate software development in the current model.

The third, and most telling, nail in Microsoft’s coffin was highlighted for me in a talk given by a former Microsoft employee who had recently moved to Yahoo. I can’t remember his name, for which my apologies. But I remember very clearly what he said.

He had developed a new feature for Outlook/Exchange in 2004. It was a cool feature and was due to be incorporated in the next release, in 2007. But then it was deemed to be a little too aggressive to include it so quickly, so it was postponed until the following release, which will presumably be in 2009/10.  Six years after he finished it! When he moved to Yahoo, he would implement a new feature and it was not unusual for someone to ask, “Could this go live this afternoon?”

 

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Publisher Users: Making Postcards, Brochures, and Other Cool Stuff With OpenOffice Writer and Draw, and Existing Microsoft Templates (Repost)

Reposted April 2007 because this post doesn't show up in Technorati searches.

Update: See The Linux Box for more ready-made OpenOffice Impress templates.

One of the biggest losses people experience when switching to open source is the loss of all those cool templates. They are, as the song says, a hard habit to break.

The good news is, you usually don't have to break the habit. (Unless you've been using Publisher, unfortunately, and you can't open Publisher files in anything—not even Word.) Here's how to keep on using the same templates you know and love; find new ones, or create your own in Draw and Writer.

You Can Still Use Your Own Word Templates and Any Others You Can Find

Here's where you might really start to enjoy the value of OpenOffice.org's compatibility with Microsoft Office.
You can still use all those Microsoft Office templates you got with the software. (Assuming the license doesn't forbid it--just putting that in just in case. ;> ) In OpenOffice.org, just choose File > Open, go to Program Files\Microsoft Office\templates (or wherever) and find the one you want. 

You can also set up OpenOffice.org to just find those templates. See this blog on templates. Go to the end.

And you can google around for more. I googled for “postcard templates” and came to this nice site from HP. The templates are available not just in Publisher but in Word. Click the image to see it larger if you like.

http://www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/office/direct_marketing.html

Follow a few links, and you get here. Click the image to see it larger if you like.

http://www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/office/stocklayout/stocklayout_overview.html

 

I decided to download the postcard template and the brochure template. I clicked on each; here's what it looked like to choose the brochure template.

Once the files were downloaded, I just went to OpenOffice.org, chose File > Open,  and opened them in OpenOffice Writer. Here's what the postcard template looks like.

 

I modified it according to my own information; it was relatively easy. Here's what that looks like. Here's the file itself. Right-click on the link and choose to save link as.

So that's really all there is to it. Use your own  or find new ones. There are a zillion free templates out there, and you can use the Word format templates (or Powerpoint, or Excel) in OpenOffice.org. Just google for the free ones, or ask friends where they are.

Making Your Own Postcards, Brochures, etc. in Draw and Writer

Now, that's not all the fun. If you want to create a postcard yourself, let's say in Draw, you can go ahead and do that, too. Or a brochure, or anything with specific measurements.

(You can do this in Writer to; I'm just showing it in Draw since the previous section was all about Writer.)

You need to know three  things.
- Choose Format > Page and click the Page tab to set the overall page size and orientation.

- Use the drawing tools like the text box and shapes to create the borders of the items in the document. Choose View > Toolbars > Drawing to bring up that toolbar.

- Select any item, right-click, and choose Position and Size. In the window that appears, click the Position and Size tab. will let you specify that the border of the postcard box, for instance, is 4x6. Remember to mark or unmark the Keep Ratio checkbox depending on whether you want to change one measurement of the object or both.

 

So let's do an example.

 

I'm going to create another postcard template. So I choose File > New > Drawing to create a new Draw document. I choose Format > Page, click the Page tab, and set the page size and margins.  I'll need a document that's like the first one or the second one, depending on what I'm printing on.

Option 1: A document with no margins, 6 across by 8 high (for two 4x6 postcards), and portrait orientation

Option 2: A document with half-inch margins, 7 across by 9 high (for two 4x6 postcards with two half-inch margins around the outside),  and portrait orientation

Next, I create a box to show me where the content should go. I just click on the rectangle tool in the Drawing toolbar and draw the box. I don't want a fill in it so I make the fill Invisible.

I right-click on the border of the rectangle, choose Position and Size, and click on the Position and Size tab. I choose 6 wide by 4 high, and unmark the Keep Ratio checkbox.

I put the edge of the box against the edge of where the postcard paper will end.

At this point, I make a template of it, so I can get at it again. See this blog on templates. If you want my document to download and make into a template,  here it is. Right-click on the link and choose to save link as.

 

Now I just make one version of the postcard, the way I want it. I put the content in the box, keeping in mind I need a bit of space between the text and the edge of the paper.

 

I copy the postcard and paste it, and drag the pasted version down to the bottom end of the document.

 

And now I just delete the boxes.

 

That's all there is to it. A little bit of work to set up, but the template takes care of that; you only need to do it once.

 

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Creating Keyboard Shortcuts in OpenOffice, including Assigning Keyboard Shortcuts to Styles, a GREAT Feature

One of the complaints people have when switching from any software package to another is that the keyboard shortcuts that they're used to don't work anymore.

However, in OpenOffice.org you can set your keyboard shortcuts pretty much any way you want. You can even assign shortcut keys to styles. This means that:

• You can blow through formatting quickly without using the Styles and Formatting window
• You can set up styles, put them in the default template that your users use, then just give them all quick reference guides that might look like this:

         

        Text with hanging left indent   In WordPerfect was [whatever]  In OpenOffice Ctrl F4
        Heading indented from left and right   In WordPerfect was [whatever]  In OpenOffice Ctrl F6
        Back to normal text   In WordPerfect was [whatever]  In OpenOffice Ctrl Q

Assigning a Keyboard Shortcut to a Task

1. Create or open a document in the program where you want to apply the shortcut. You'll be able to choose that program, such as Writer, or all of OpenOffice.org, as the context in which the shortcut will work.

2. Choose Tools > Customize, Keyboard tab.

3. Select the program, such as Writer, or OpenOffice.org, at the top.

4. Use the Category and Function lists at the bottom to select the feature you want to assign a shortcut to. You have to be willing to spend some time looking but you'll eventually get a sense of where things are.

5. Find the keyboard shortcut, in the Shortcut Keys list in the top half of the window, that you want to assign. If it's already assigned to something, that's fine. Select the keyboard shortcut you want.

6. Click Modify. The shortcut will be assigned to the item.

7. If you want to remove a shortcut key from an item, select it in the Keys list and click Delete.

8. Click OK.

Assigning a Keyboard Shortcut to a Style

You might find it easier to just use a keyboard shortcut for styles, than to double-click them in the Styles and Formatting window. (Format > Styles and Formatting.)

To use a keyboard shortcut for a style, you do pretty much the same thing.

1. Create or open a document in the program where you want to apply the shortcut. You'll be able to choose that program, such as Writer, or all of OpenOffice.org, as the context in which the shortcut will work.

2. Choose Tools > Customize, Keyboard tab.

3. Select the program, such as Writer, or OpenOffice.org, at the top.

4. In the Category list, scroll to the bottom and select Styles. Expand the + next to it and select the category of style: Paragraph, Page, etc. Then in the Function list select the specific style. Select the shortcut you want from the Shortcut Keys list and click Modify.

5. Click OK.

Remember, the style has to be in the document where you use the shortcut key, otherwise of course it won't work.

Giving the Configurations You've Made to All Users

Shortcut keys are stored here in XP:

openofficedirectory\soffice.cfg\modules\swriter (or another module) \accelerator\en-us\default.xml

If you want everyone to have the same shortcuts, you can modify that file, then copy it to other machines or user directories. This is the directory on XP; different for Vista. (Grrr.....my impression of Vista is, OK, it's pretty because it looks like Mac, but I am sure sick of the blue screen of death.)

In Vista, it's

\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice.org2\user\config\soffice.cfg\
modules\swriter (or other module)\accelerator\en-US\current.xml

If you're having trouble finding the location, just make a change, then search your system for files that were recently modified, or contains a word in the change you made.

Here's what it looks like.

xlink:href=".uno:StyleApply?Style:string=HangingIndent&
FamilyName:string=ParagraphStyles" accel:shift="true" accel:mod1="true"/>

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Transitioning an Organization to OpenOffice.org: My Own Tips and Yours

This post is for IT managers or people in similar jobs, in charge of determining whether to switch to OpenOffice.org, and then planning and implementing the conversion.

Many problems with switching to OpenOffice.org aren't, at heart, caused by actual problems with the software.

There are hiccups, there are things you need to rethink, but bugs or lack of features in the software itself really aren't the issue most of the time. It's people, processes, perception, planning, and so on.
Many problems can be preempted or solved with strategic use of setup options in the software.

I'm going to keep this blog topic going, as I think of and have time to add more items. Please add your tips through comments.

• See also this post for more of a sequential planning-through-implementation checklist.
• See also this post for important information about how really can't trust your own judgment when determining what users need for the transition. The same post also contains a draft email of how the CEO should tell users in a direct but respectful manner that the transition is happening and no amount of complaining will do any good.

Technical Issues
Test, test, test. Before you even officially decide to switch, get a really solid representative sample of the current documents and processes that people complete with your current office suite software and database software (if you're going to be using Base) and make sure that everything essential works with OOo.

Users will tell you things that aren't true. In the test phase and during implementation, don't rely on users telling you that things don't work. Research it and make sure that it doesn't work; usually the item does work or is possible, just not in the way the user is used to.   For instance, to import content into a database, you just right-click in the table area of a database window and choose Paste. Not something that you would guess. With OpenOffice.org, most things are possible; many things are not obvious.

Mail merge is very different. You'll need to concentrate some effort on educating users on how to do this. It's not inherently difficult; it's just not very wizardy. Don't go live with OpenOffice.org before making sure that at least one person in every department knows how to do mail merges, including with envelopes and labels, cold.

Here are all blogs that I've filed in the mail merge category.

On a related note, consider using labels instead of envelopes. Unless your company pins its reputation on its ability to print addresses on envelopes, I'm pretty sure there isn't a business reason for using envelopes instead of labels. People will resist changing but, well, see the other sections of this blog for what to do about that.

Both envelopes and labels are certainly possible but envelopes have a few more tricky bits, especially because of how Word users are used to using them.

Here's the envelopes category of my blog.
Here's the labels category of my blog.

Publisher files aren't compatible with anything else.  This is Microsoft's fault, not OpenOffice.org. Your Publisher users will need to create new documents in Draw or Writer, depending on the type of document. You might want to keep one or two Publisher licenses around if this is a big issue. Consider creating a few commonly used templates for brochures, postcards, etc. to make the transition easier. You can make tri-fold brochures in Writer using frames.

There are a lot of very nice Writer and Word templates out there; just open the Word ones in Writer and you can generally use them as is.

You might introduce the more advanced users to Scribus.  Some former Publisher users absolutely love it.

See this blog, which talks about using OpenOffice.org instead of Publisher.

Suppressing the page number on the first page is far more complicated than it needs to be. You can train everyone, and/or you can create a template that has the first page number suppressed already.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/09/starting_page_n.html
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/12/merry_christmas.html

Change Management/Attitude
Understand what level of skills your users really have. It's often tough for an IT director to realize that many users have really core skills and aren't able to easily navigate up and down in an Open window; don't know to select first then format; don't know that there's a keyboard shortcut available instead of copying and pasting; etc.  Knowing your users' skill level will help you plan training.

This post covers this in more detail.

You MUST have the top brass on your side. This is essential, since you will get tremendous pushback from people who don't want to change. You will need a clear, definite message from the top telling people that this is happening and making a fuss won't bring their old office suite back. (This presumes that you did a good job in the initial evaluation and you turned up 90% of the issues, and know how to address them.)

See  this post  at the end for a draft email of how the CEO should tell users in a direct but respectful manner that the transition is happening and no amount of complaining will do any good.

Find the vocal people who don't like the software, and convert them. Show them the cool things they can do with the software. Tell them you value their experience with the previous software and would really appreciate their insight into how best to do tasks in the new software. Alternately, if they're a tough case, then it's time for their manager to get tough and tell them that using OpenOffice.org, and learning it, is now part of their job description.

Many people will tell you that things are so much easier in Word. This is not necessarily true. If you can, then politely ask the person telling you this to demonstrate the supposedly easier process in Word, preferably in front of a decision-maker or other higher-up. Also see above regarding users telling you that things don't work.

You might need to keep a few Excel licenses around if your financial people are addicted to macros or wield extraordinary power. This is OK.

There will be a period of unpleasantness. When you switch to OpenOffice.org, many of your users will be unhappy at first. Change is never popular, especially if you have WordPerfect users who have not had to change word processors since the 90s. You will need to tell a lot of people that yes, it is more complicated in OpenOffice.org to do X or Y, and that they'll just have to deal with it. Having support from higher-ups will help this go over, if not better, then at least with more effect. Remind people that their job descriptions do not include the right to use only Microsoft Office or WordPerfect, or at least that their job descriptions include the phrase "Other duties as assigned."

Make sure everyone knows that free doesn't mean bad. It's not easy to explain, but talk to users about how OpenOffice.org is not about making money; it's about people working together to get the features they need, and sharing them with others. Also, many people will think that your organization is just being cheap by refusing to spend money on software. You of course are trying to save money, at least that's a common goal, but reinforce that you now can spend money on things that are more important like benefits, smaller class sizes, or whatever is more important in your organization.

Specific Software Features to Use to Your Advantage
Don't teach them to fish if it's easier to give them reusable fish. Spend some time getting to know what you can do with templates and styles. Much of the formatting you can do is possible, but challenging for users who only have core skills. For instance, a common formatting feature is a left-hanging indent. Users might not be able to do this easily. Another item is text that is indented from both the left and right an inch or so. You could create styles with this formatting, call them OurOrg_HangingIndent and OurOrg_LeftRightIndent, for instance, and add them to a template that everyone can access. Here's a template with those two styles.

In particular, consider setting the default template for each user. Incorporate all styles that they might need, such as the ones I mentioned in the above paragraph, plus a page style that has no page number on the first page, and automatically uses a page number on the second page.

Customize menus and toolbars  Consider customizing the menus and toolbar. If you get a lot of calls from users looking for page setup under File > Page Setup, it might be easier for you to just add that option under the File menu rather than telling everyone several times that it's under the Format menu. Or create a new menu called Month-End Procedures that will open various windows users need to use for month-end procedures.

Along the same topic, consider removing some icons that might be confusing or lead users to try things you don't want them using. My 89-year-old father, not computer savvy, uses Calc to track financial information for taxes. I made it easier for him by taking off most of the icons.

Here's some info on how to customize toolbars and menus.

Create keyboard shortcuts for tasks and for styles  Set up keyboard shortcuts for people, or show them how to do it themselves. This will help especially with WordPerfect users who have memorized the keyboard shortcuts and find it difficult or slow to switch to a new program. If it takes three mouse clicks to get to the feature on the mouse, someone who's been getting there with Ctrl  G is going to be annoyed even though it really isn't that much work to do the menu selection. (Again, as I said at the beginning, it's not about the software causing problems.) So show them how to use Tools > Customize, Keyboard to set keyboard shortcuts. My blog on that topic is here.

Set up menu items to bring up templates or other documents. For instance, you might make a new menu called Personnel Department Templates and add items like Job Description Template, Org Chart Template, and so on. A blog on how to do this is forthcoming; I've got the macro but haven't fiddled with how to do it.

Add fun and convenience with the picture Gallery. Some users find it difficult to navigate a file system to find clip art or pictures to include in their documents. In addition, pictures are just fun and can help change attitudes surprisingly quickly. I highly recommend configuring the Gallery so that there are vast numbers of graphics available. Users can simply choose Tools > Gallery, select a category, then drag a picture into their document. My blog on adding graphics to the Gallery is here.

Show everyone PDF and the File > Send features. It's a very slick easy feature, people like it, and it's great for reducing issues you encounter when working with people who use Microsoft Office or other office suites.

Show advanced users the automatic TOC feature.  So many people still manually type their tables of contents. Agh! Just be sure that you've used the paragraph styles Heading1 through Heading 10 (or as detailed as you need, maybe Heading3) on the appropriate headings. Then Insert > Indexes and Tables > Indexes and Tables, and click OK. Bam, instant TOC .  You can also make a linked one and the links remain when you export to PDF. Any links that you create in any way in the OpenOffice.org document will remain when you export to PDF. Just be sure to choose File > Export as PDF, and in the first tab of the PDF options window, be sure that Tagged PDF is selected.

Here's the PDF/Publishing blog, including how to make the linked TOC. Advanced users or web people will love this.

Conversion Process
Test, pilot, rinse and repeat. You absolutely must do a long research process. Test documents. You might discover that several departments are using Quattro Pro and have documents created in the 80s. Be sure OpenOffice.org can open these and if it can't, then have a plan for outsourcing re-creating them. (Before you do that, be sure that these documents even need to be conveted in the first place.)  If your company uses an app that produces a spreadsheet or CSV file, be sure that OpenOffice.org can open it. Talk to every department and give them an exhaustive list of questions. Make sure they know that it is crucial they give you complete and accurate information.

Trust, but verify. With emphasis on the verify part.

Do one thing at a time. If you're switching to Linux, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird, switch to one application at a time. Once everyone's solid, then switch your OS. (Thanks to Dave Richards of the City of Largo for this one.)

Create a plan, publish the plan, and stick to it. Give people a transition time when they can learn and start using OpenOffice.org, and a cutoff time when you take MS Office or WordPerfect off their machines. For you and your IT group, of course, you have a public cutoff date and an internal cutoff date maybe 1-4 months later, to give yourselves some flexibility.

 

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50 Open Source success stories in Business, Education, and Government

Success stories! If you're considering switching to any open source program, read on.

http://www.crmchump.org/2006/10/in_a_world_wher.html

Here's one story.

Golden also mentioned the implementation of SugarCRM Oregon Department of Human Services. The service provider needed a CRM put into place quickly, due to new HIPAA regulations in electronic billing. Believe it or not, Oregon DHS was sold on the idea when an IT engineer surfed the internet, found open-source SugarCRM, downloaded it onto a laptop and showed it around the department the next day. After “a couple of days” configuring, Oregon DHS went live with the system via the same laptop.

And get this, especially the end.

CRMBlog recently reported the story of the implementation over at Learning.com, a developer of online technology integration and assessment tools for public schools. Within six months of installing NetSuite, Learning.com had achieved results in acceleration of its business processes by a crazy 1500 percent and ultimately doubled business in 2005. And best of all, Learning.com reportedly required no extra personnel or personnel costs in making the switch.

Click here to read more.

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Importing Fonts Into OpenOffice.org 2.1

OpenOffice.org will just pick up whatever fonts you've got on your system. As someone who's worked with a lot of desktop publishing projects and who's mostly on Windows, I have a lot of fonts.

But let's say you don't have a lot of fonts, and you want more fonts for OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is there for you. In 2.1 there's a link from the Wizards to an installation site.

Choose File > Wizards > Install Fonts From Web.

Just follow the wizard through. Here are the windows.

Click on English and here's the text you see.

===========================

FontOOo

Version 1.6.1

FontOOo is a wizard allowing free fonts installation.

 

FontOOo is a wizard to simplify the downloading and installation of selected, high-quality fonts available on the internet.  License restrictions prevent these fonts from being directly shipped as part of OpenOffice.org but do allow end-user installation and use for no cost.   Please carefully read and follow the license for each of the fonts you install.

 

Click the button to start the wizard

Notes:

You will have to restart OpenOffice.org and the quickstarter to see your new fonts.

FontOOo only works at OpenOffice.org level and no font is installed at operating system level

 

This wizard is licensed under the terms of the LGPL, available here:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.php

Author: Laurent Godard – © 2004–2006 – [email protected]

===========================

Select available fonts. If they're dimmed, click Next and select any that are available.

I selected all these and installed them.

Selectwhat you want installed and click Next. The process will run. Restart OpenOffice.org and the quickstarter when you're done.

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Top 10 Reasons to Fall in Love With OpenOffice.org

In honor of the day, here's a slightly tongue-in-check, but very true, list of reasons to consider OpenOffice.org.

You might be looking for a new relationship this year. An office suite that doesn't cost you more than you get from it. An office suite that supports you in accomplishing your goals rather than spending all your time supporting it. OpenOffice.org is here for you. Here are some great reasons to fall in love with it.

10. OpenOffice.org will change to please you. It will, if you so desire, meet you at the door each evening with a menu of your favorite choices. (Which is to say, you can configure the menus and toolbars to say and portray whatever you want.)

9.  Does Microsoft Office give you $450 of love for everyone who uses it? It's a user, not a giver. Spend your money on something important. Education. Cancer research. A truly great pepperoni pizza. OpenOffice.org doesn't take you  away from what you want to do.

8.    OpenOffice.org makes great PDFs, with a zillion graphics, display, and security settings you usually only see in Adobe products.

7.  Want cool templates? All your  Microsoft Office templates work in OpenOffice.org.

6. OpenOffice.org won't leave the relationship and take  all your stuff with it. Microsoft Office makes files in its own proprietary format. OpenOffice.org uses OpenDocument format that anyone can make a program to open. It's your data -- don't pay someone to let you access it.

5.  As Lyle Lovett says in his song, "I married her just because she looks like you." OpenOffice.org looks more like your current version of Microsoft Office than Microsoft Office 2007 does.

4.  OpenOffice.org gets along with all your friends. It runs on Vista. On Linux. On Mac.

3.   Want support? Sun Microsystems provides it.

2.  Microsoft Office is high maintenance -- if you don't keep track of all your licenses, Bill's jack-booted thugs come around and throw a hissy fit. OpenOffice.org is low maintanance. Upgrade or don't, and either way, pay nothing.

1. Cost of buying OpenOffice.org licenses for everyone in your organization: $0.  Never having to pay Bill another cent: Priceless.

http://www.openoffice.org   Download it today. Start loving it tonight.

(Start migrating tomorrow morning.)

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ODT Plugin for Microsoft Word

Here's an ODT plugin for Microsoft Office so that you can use Word and create OpenDocument format files. I haven't tried it yet but it's on my list.

The story on Groklaw.

Download the file from Sourceforge.

TechTarget Article: Compatibility Tips for Word and OpenOffice Writer

I've written an article for TechTarget.com about how to create documents to convert as well as possible between Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer.

http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid39_gci1186330,00.html

It's essentially about how, when Word documents don't open all that well in OpenOffice Writer, it's often because...well, the original document wasn't in great shape. The article talks about how to use tools appropriately to make documents that are well constructed no matter what application you're using, and how well constructed documents convert better between office suites, operating systems, and other environments.

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I've got Microsoft Vista

For various reasons, I suddenly bought a new HP Pavilion laptop last week ($800 down to $650!). One key reason was that I couldn't keep my old laptop going on AC, even with valiant attempts to duct-tape the cord to the computer hard enough or at the right angle to keep the juice going.

So I'm the proud yet somewhat abashed owner of a slick new Vista-running laptop, with wireless internet (yay!) and various other features that weren't on my laptop that I bought in 2002.

Vista -- well, it certainly seems attractive. Kind of a Macintosh look to the graphics. And lots of helpful things pop up so I'm sure that the OS is easier for some people. Frankly, I was expecting more of a dramatic difference given all the emotional pants-wetting that was going on.

Anyway, the main point is that the first thing I did once everything was set up for the OS was to download OOo 2.1. It installed slick and runs fine.

Now have SUSE, UBUNTU, XP, and Vista in the house. (What does it mean if I have more operating systems than cats? Not by much, granted. I guess I'd rather have that ratio remain on the side of the operating systems.)

Of course, the big issue is, what's MS Office 2007 like? I haven't activated my free trial yet but I will be SURE  to let you know what I think of it when I do. ;>

Educators: Do schools really care about Vista? (Or Microsoft Office 2007?)

Wesley Fryer has a nice take on Vista and schools.

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2007/01/30/vista-is-out-but-do-educators-care/

He says, among other things:

Well, Windows Vista is now on the market, but my question is: Do any educators care? I don’t know of any midwest U.S. school districts planning to make the transition to Vista anytime soon.

I'm skeptical too.  (But you knew that. ;> )  Really, though. What's the attraction? I'm not sure what genuine benefit, matching the amount of money that would have to be spent and the effort to upgrade, that schools get.

What happens when your current licenses run out, though, or when MS comes aknockin' and says, upgrade or else? (I'm not exactly sure how all the licensing systems work but I believe in general, you have to upgrade sooner or later.)

Open source, perhaps?

I'm not saying OpenOffice.org and Linux are for everyone, but I think they deserve serious evaluation by any educators with limited budgets.  (I assume that's pretty much all school districts.) When the software doesn't cost anything, that frees up an awful lot of money. Which means students and teachers can get a better education, better facilities and supplies, and better salaries.

But it's a pain to switch. Yes. Any change is a pain. Switching from WordPerfect to Word was a big pain for most people, who left WP kicking and screaming. It's part of using computers.

Just take a real look at each side. For staying with Microsoft and for going with open source, evaluate all the money and  training and lost time and converting the documents and installing the software and networking and everything else. Then when you have all the facts, do a comparison of what it really would be like on Vista and MS Office 2007, versus what it really would be like on Linux and OpenOffice.org (and Firefox and Moodle and the other cool education-related pieces of open source software out there).

One public organization with 3000 employees is saving 2.8 million dollars over the next six years, just by switching to OpenOffice.org. That's a lot of money.

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Top 10 Reasons to Use OpenOffice.org Instead of Microsoft Office 2007

Hi all,

I'm working on a tshirt for those who are already fully assimilated, to wear to help convince the Microsoft Office users. I'm looking for ideas that are better than what I came up with. 

Any thoughts on other Top 10 Reasons? I'm looking for factual or silly or just funny. ;>

Thanks,
Solveig

Click the image to see a bigger version.

More Brilliant People Saying that Office 2007 Is A Whole Different Program, So Why Not Just Use OpenOffice.org?

Baslow expresses what I've been talking about for a while.

The current Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org work in a roughly similar way. But the new Microsoft Office 2007 is essentially a whole new program, according to many reviewers including David Pogue. So when you're thinking about switching to Microsoft Office 2007, don't just think about the price -- think about the retraining effort.

So why upgrade to MS Office 2007? Pay nothing, and switch to OpenOffice.org, instead. You retrain for both, but the cost of OpenOffice.org is hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of dollars less than Microsoft Office, depending on how big your organization is. Saving a lot of money is, well, really good. It lets you spend that money on something that's actually important: education, cure for cancer, better pizza, or whatever your business or organization is about.

Here's my extended-dance-version blog post on this.

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Vista Launch Will Boost Desktop Linux

I'm glad lots of other people are spreading the word that, you know, Vista....is not necessarily worth the money.

"The launch of Windows Vista has created a huge opportunity for Linux vendors to take a larger share of the corporate desktop market, according to the president of Linux Australia."

http://scott2096.blogspot.com/2007/01/vista-launch-will-boost-desktop-linux.html

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Vista_launch_will_boost_desktop_Linux/0,130061733,339273059,00.htm

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Creating Customized Toolbars and Menus, and Copying Them to Other Computers (Repost)

I couldn't find this article when I searched my blog, so I'm resposting this "classic" blog ;>.  It's actually a techtarget article I wrote on how to customize toolbars and menus.

http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid39_gci1190230,00.html

Not only is reconfiguring the interface easy, and not only does it help people use OpenOffice.org and get used to the new program, but it is huge fun to change things around this much.

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UK Schools Advised Not to Upgrade to Vista and MS Office 2007

"The British Education Communications and Technology Association (BECTA) released a report last week advising UK schools that there was no reason to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007 at present.

 

BECTA argued that a "persuasive business case for the level of investment needed to deploy the products" was needed before they would change their recommendation.

 

The reasoning behind the recommendation is as follows:

 

Office has no "must-have" features for education and is geared towards businesses and there are concerns over file compatibility with the new version (despite being able to set Office apps to save in current 2003 formats by default). Also, schools should not deploy Office 2007 until it will interoperate with products that use the ODF file format such as OpenOffice."

Wonderful to hear so much common sense.

Read more here.

And in Computerworld.

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Indian State Moving to Open Source

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu is making a move to adopt open source software, due to concerns over security and the high cost of Windows systems.

Makes sense to me.

Read more.

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EU Report on OpenOffice.org/StarOffice

Check it out! Erwin sums up an EU report on OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.

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Education and Technology Trends for 2007

I got very excited while reading this article from Wesley Fryer about education and technology in 2007.

Within five years, [Plano Independent School District Technology Director Jim] Hirsch predicts, not a single desktop in this 52,000-student school system in metropolitan Dallas will carry the image of a proprietary school software program. Gone will be the familiar Microsoft applications and desktop icons that over the years have become synonymous with document creation. In their place will be a suite of lesser-known, but equally capable alternatives--or, what Hirsch likes to call "open technologies."

He also talks about the great work done by the Strategic Open Source Initiative and Steve Hargadon.

This all ties into another project I have for early this year, which is to develop a promotional system of low-priced educationally priced site licenses for my workbooks. I want to make it as easy as possible for schools to adopt OpenOffice.org. I'll blog here when I have the details worked out.

Let's make 2007 a year of open source in education! If you haven't looked at tools like OpenOffice.org or Moodle yet, give'em a try or talk to someone who knows about them. If you've tried them and like them, talk to your administration about doing a pilot project. And if you get resistance, read this post. ;>

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Looking for Linux/OpenOffice.org Transition Stories

I've been writing articles on OpenOffice.org for TechTarget.com, and now I'm going to go in a new direction: writing articles about actual transitions from Windows to Linux, Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, etc.

That means I need to talk to people who have done this! I'd like to document how you accomplished it, lessons learned, and of course to tell your story so that others can benefit and make a successful transition, as well. If you're in the middle of a transition, also, I'd like to talk to you.

Contact me at [email protected], or just post a comment here, if you'd like your organization to be featured in a transition story. You can be anonymous in the article, as long as you can provide enough information about your transition.

Thanks!

Solveig

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Migrating to OpenOffice.org ODF Format

I like to talk periodically about how you actually do the work of migrating your systems, and your users, to OpenOffice.org. Even better, I like to find other people's advice on how to do this. Bob Sutor has an excellent list of questions to ask. Once you have the answers, you can start in on the plan.   His list, 10 possible elements of your ODF migration strategy, has a lot in common with my own recommendations, including identifying gurus to start working on the migration.

Based on my own experience, I want to strongly recommend among other things that if you have complex or badly formatted  documents that are causing problems when you convert, just pay to get them converted. Your users will be far happier.

My own blogs on the topic are here  and here.

 

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Good Introductory Overview of Linux and Open Source

The "Of Zen and Computing" blog has a nice article on Linux and open source and just what the deal is.

 

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Word Filter for Writer

A new filter is being worked on for opening Word files in Writer. I don't necessarily follow the technical description here, from Henning Brinkmann but it's good to know that things might get even better.

 

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The French National Assembly Is Going Open Source

The French National Assembly is to adopt open source software for its deputies’ use, from the next legislative session.

Each deputy’s desktop computer will be equipped with the Linux operating system, the Open Office productivity suite, the Firefox internet browser and an open source e-mail application.

Read more.

 

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Are Vista and Office 2007 for You?

ComputerWorld has an article about the pros and cons of continue the upgrade trail with Vista and Office 2007.

I've been talking about this for a while. Upgrading to Vista or Microsoft Office 2007 or both is not to be undertaken lightly.

Here's the deal in a nutshell.

• Vista isn't going to just run easily on the same hardware you've got.
• Office 2007 means lots of money and  retraining.
• Skipping the Microsoft upgrades, and going to Linux and OpenOffice means little or no money for the software and hardware, and retraining.

So....what works for you and your organization?

Note: If you're a school or otherwise on a limited budget, are you sure that's the best way to spend the money, especially on the hardware you have now? Here's a blog from a Vista beta tester, The Tech-Savvy Teacher.

 

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Nancy Drew Rides Again: Adding Two New and Wonderful Email Options to the OpenOffice Menu

First they take the simple but elegant mail merge option off the Tools menu, and now this.

There are two wonderful, extremely useful, much-requested features in OpenOffice 2.0.3.

• Email as Microsoft Word
• Email as OpenDocument Text

These are in addition to the existing ones:

• Send Document as PDF Attachment
• Send Document as Email

If you're working in some text document, the Email as Microsoft Word  option will take your current doc, make a MS Word version of it, start your default email program, and attach the MS Word copy to a new email document. 

The Email as OpenDocument Text option does the same thing, but the attachment is in OpenOffice text format regardless of the format of the current document.

Send Document as Email -- This one does pretty much the same thing, but it just uses the format of the document you're working in. If you're working in MS Doc format, the attachment is .doc and if you're working in OpenOffice,  the attachment is  OpenOffice.

Send Document as PDF Attachment -- This one does the same thing but creates a PDF copy of your document .

Can you see how incredibly useful these are? They're great for working with MS Office users within or outside your organization. Combine them with File > Send > Document as PDF Attachment and you're golden. (See this blog on setting up openoffice for easier use for inexperienced users for more info on that.)

But how do you get them on the menu? They're there -- you just can't see them.

Here's how. I'll show you how to add them to File > Send, and I'll also show you how to create a whole separate menu to add them to. If you're working with inexperienced users in your organization, the latter might be more helpful for them.

Adding the Two New Items to the File > Send Menu to Join the Other Similar Options
Choose Tools > Customize.

Click the Menus tab.

Select the File | Send menu.

Click Add.

In the window that appears, find Document on the left and the indicated menu item on the right. Click Add.

Select the other option, Email as OpenDocument Text, and click Add.

Close the window.

In the original window you'll see the two newly added items.

Click OK.

Choose File > Send and you'll see all the items.

 

Adding the Two New Items to the File > Send Menu to Join the Other Similar Options

Here's how to make a special menu to put these items on. It might be simpler for your users if there were a specific menu for these items.

Choose Tools > Customize.

Click the Menus tab.

Click New.

Type the name for the menu like Sending Out Documents.

Click OK. You'll see the new menu with no items.

Click Add.

In the window that appears, select Document on the left, and the four indicated items on the right. Select each of the four items in turn and Click Add.

Close the window. You'll see the items you added.

You might want to rename some of the items to make them clearer or comply with internal processes. Select the item, click and hold down on Modify, and choose Rename.

In the window, type a name you prefer, then click OK.

 

Rename any additional items.

Click OK to save changes and close the window.

Click on the menu you added. You'll see the items.

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Question: Why Aren't More Schools Switching to Linux and OpenOffice.org?

Note: Steve Hargadon has an interesting post on this same topic.

I was teaching on Bainbridge Island, Washington a couple weeks ago. Their school district, one of the best in the state or possibly the best in the state, is in the process of  switching to Linux thin clients and OpenOffice.org. You should see the performance of OpenOffice on their setup -- it takes a couple seconds to start the program. Yes, to start it.

The school district is saving several hundred thousand dollars just by switching to OpenOffice.org. I'm not sure how much additional money is being saved by switching to Linux.

The teachers who I trained had the usual reaction -- "Hey, this is really similar to Microsoft Office. What was the big deal about switching?"

Which leads me to ask any and all of you who are reading this blog.

Why haven't more schools switched to OpenOffice.org?

It's the perfect fit. Free. Lets you spend money on something really important, education. Schools are perpetually short of money and teachers are underpaid.  It's hard to find something in the real world that would do more good for a school than to switch to OpenOffice.org. (Or another open source software product that would save as much money.)

There's the Microsoft campaign of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), of course. There's inertia.

But is there something else?

Are there teachers reading who'd like to know more, or share frustrations with open source?

Let's talk about this. It frustrates me that such a good thing isn't being done. There could be schools across the country, across the world, with smaller class sizes, better teacher salaries, and better facilities and supplies, by saving money on software. Let's make it happen!

 

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Bacone College: Another OpenOffice success story

Read another story about spending money on something more important than office suite software. This was posted in April but somehow I missed it.

http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03/30/2033252&from=rss

First paragraph:

"Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, is an outreach of the American Baptist Association (ABA) to Native Americans, and is Oklahoma's oldest center for higher education, established in 1880. The small, four-year liberal arts school doesn't receive any form of government funding, so finding economical ways to provide the best education possible is a priority for the staff. Recently, Bacone's technologist Robert Duncan III, transferred a Linux hobby into huge savings for the school's IT department. "

And the last paragraph:

"Duncan remains pleased with the results of his creativity. "This puts us in control of our tech resources, instead of relying on some third party. It's kind of a scary to say there's some company out there telling me I'm going to buy a new computer every two years. We've doubled the number of computers we have available to us with the cost-savings of OpenOffice.org versus Microsoft Office. We've made available open access to labs and cyber cafés using hardware that others would have just thrown away. "

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Making OpenOffice.org Work the Way You Want It (Repost)

 

(Originally posted in October 2005.)

Note: Here's a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com.

What's better, software that does what it thinks you want, or software that does what you tell it to?

If it's rocket-launching software, and I don't know much about rocket-launching, I guess I would let the software do what it wants. However, I know what I darn well want my office suite software to do. I know how I want it to behave. I know what features I want and I know, for instance, that I do not want it suggesting to me what word I am typing and offering to help me finish the arduous task of typing it.

OpenOffice.org has its default behavior and default settings just like any other software but is very cooperative in letting you customize those behavior and settings the way you want them. Which is refreshing. You just have to tell it how to behave.

So I've put together a list of the top  customizations I think are the most helpful and/or powerful. I make sure that everyone in my classes learns these by lunchtime, and review them afterwards. When the software behaves the way you want, that makes everything better.

(By the way, this is a little bit off topic, but I wanted to mention that the scroll graphic at the top of this blog is a drawing shape in OOo 2.0.  I'm a bit of a giggly schoolgirl when it comes to the OOo drawing tools, especially the new 2.0 features.)

1. Turn off the word completion.

I hate word completion, and it’s really easy to turn off. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Word Completion tab. Make sure the Enable Word Completion option is unmarked, and click OK.

2. Turn off any automatic formatting that you don’t want.

Would you let people live in your house who you didn’t know? Then you don’t want automatic formatting going on that you don’t understand. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Options tab. Unmark everything except the top option, Use Replacement Table. Then go back through and see if you really want anything.

(You can unmark the Use Replacement Table option too....but that table is handy, as you'll see in the next item.)

3. Use the automatic formatting to create handy shortcuts.

The same tab where you turned off word completion has a really great feature for creating shortcuts. Let’s say you type the word supercalfragilisticexpealidocious a zillion times a day, or your name and title, or anything kinda long. You can set up a shortcut for it. It's a much more reliable approach than word completion.

To do this: Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click on the Replace tab.

A. In the left-hand field type your shortcut like sig and in the right-hand field, type the word you’re tired of typing all the time.

B. Click New, then click OK.

C. Click the Options tab and be sure that both checkboxes for the top item, Use Replacement Table, are marked. That just means "use the stuff in the Replace tab."

D.  In your document, type the shortcut, followed by a space, and your word will appear.

Note: You can also delete anything in the Replace tab that you don't want.

4. Display the icons that you want.

There are a zillion icons in OOo as with any software and you probably don’t use all of them. There’s also that dandy little result of having to click on the black arrow to get to the icons you want, while the ones you do want sit there taking up space and, quite frankly, smiling a bit smugly. So take off the ones you don’t want, leave room for the ones you do want, and add some other ones.

First step is to take off the ones you don’t want. Click on the dropdown arrow and choose Visible Buttons. Find the icons you don’t want, like double spacing, and select them. That’ll remove the checkbox by them, and that removes them from the toolbar.

Now add the icons you want. The first thing to try is to click the dropdown arrow again and choose Visible Buttons. If the icon you want is there, select it and it’ll appear.

If the icon you want isn’t there, click on the dropdown arrow again and instead of Visible Buttons, select Customize Toolbar. Find the toolbar you want to add icons to. Click Add, and in the window that appears just keep looking through the categories on the left til you find the feature you want in the list on the right. Select it and click Add.

 

Back in the customization window, you can leave the icon as is and just click OK, or change the icon by clicking and holding down on the Modify button and choosing Icon.

5. Get to know the choices under Tools > Options.

Choose Tools > Options, and you’ll see the big fat configuration window. Just as the items under Tools > Autocorrect were about default behavior, Tools > Options is about default settings, default values. Anything about the program, from icon size to language settings to where the program looks when you choose File > Open, is set here.

I suggest that you open the OpenOffice.org (or StarOffice as in this illutration) item at the top, then select Paths, and change the values for any paths you use a lot. Change the My Documents item, for instance, to change the default for where OOo tries to save documents. You’ll save a lot of time scrolling around in your Save windows.

To change the path, select it in the window, click Edit, and just point to the new location.

You might also want to expand the StarOffice Write item, select Default Fonts, and choose the ones you prefer.

When you’re done, just click OK.

You can turn off the Save for Autorecovery feature if you want--or increase the save interval
I find this feature entirely un-annoying, but you can turn it off easily if you want. Autorecovery means if OpenOffice.org crashes or you have to coldboot your machine, at least you'll have something recent to return to. If you're hypervigilant, increase the interval to every minute or 5; if you don't care about it, set it to every hour or just turn it off.

Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Load/Save > General. You're looking for the Save AutoRecovery Information Every  option. Unmark it, or change the interval.

Click the thumbnail below to see a bigger image of the window.

Now OOo is more like a well-behaved pet and less likely to jump up at you, licking and biting inappropriately.

Those are not all the configuration steps you can do, by a long shot. But I like them, and students seem to like them. And they're an important set of steps in the general process of showing that OpenOffice.org does what you tell it to do.

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Top Ten Reasons to Start a Healthy New Relationship With OpenOffice.org (Repost)

(Originally posted in October 2005.)

I'm not a raving crazy open source OpenOffice fanatic. Not quite, anyway.

I do like it quite a bit, though.  I've used it for six years, about the same amount of time I've used Word and Framemaker. I've trained people on it for the last three years and have written about it for five years.

So I know about the limitations, the cool stuff, the weird stuff, and the normal stuff.

And I think it's a far better choice then Microsoft Word.

(It's not always a better choice than Framemaker, but it was never meant to be. It's far more similar to Word. See my blog on whether OpenOffice.org is a good tool for techwriters and other book publishing professionals.)

I want anyone who's frustrated with Microsoft Office, who doesn't have the money for Microsoft Office, or who just wants the features of OpenOffice.org, to understand everything the program has to offer. With Sun in charge of marketing the program, the great aspects of the program are far less well known than they should be, and so many people are out there cursing the random bulleting in Word when they could be writing documents with a program that does exactly what they ask it to. (Always refreshing.)

So here are ten reasons for anyone out there to use OpenOffice.org. They're not presented in any particular order.

Price, Price, Price

You can read all the reports from Microsoft that you want but that doesn't change the fact that OpenOffice.org is absolutely free. All updates are free. Always will be. If you personally on your own computer decide to download OpenOffice.org for free instead of buying each new version of Microsoft Office, you're spending absolutely no money. If your department switches to OpenOffice.org at work, you're spending absolutely no money.

Add Linux to the mix and you're spending maybe $100, depending on your distro.

Microsoft Office costs more. Windows costs more.

If you purchase books and training, you're spending a flat one-time amount, and it's not going to be $500 a person unless you're buying some serious one-on-one tutoring. I trained 300 people for a client in Houston over three weeks, with each person attending two day-long classes, for a total cost to my client of $15,000. That's $50 a person. That's a good price.

Document conversion can take time and money too, but that's a one-time fee, too. And with the enhancements in OpenOffice.org to the compatibility with Microsoft Office ( http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/2.0/index.html), converting your Microsoft Office documents to OpenOffice.org is even easier.

And frankly, there's a bunch of learning that users need to do with each new version of Microsoft Office. That takes training money, or else users never get the training and might not learn the new version very well.

There Are More Important Things to Spend Money on the Office Suite Software

Think about the most important things in life.

Health. Love. Family. A roof over your head. Education. World peace.

The right or privileg of using office suite software you're familiar with, or even just having everyone using the same software, is not on the list. I challenge anyone out there to rank using Microsoft Office as one of the most important things in life.

Which leads one naturally to think about schools. Police stations. Libraries. City government. State government. Federal government. What do they spend money on? Some fairly important stuff. Much of the stuff from our earlier list. They pay teachers' salaries, police salaries, allocate money for healthcare, and a zillion other things. And of course, most of them use Microsoft Office. Not for free. Take all the money they spend on Microsoft Office, replace it with OpenOffice.org, and that frees up a lot of money for important things. I'm not sure how much but I don't think I'm out of line in saying hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac, OS/2 and Other Operating Systems

You're not stuck with Windows when you use OpenOffice.org. If you're happy with Windows, then you can stay with Windows. If you're all about Linux, or Mac, or OS/2, or Solaris, then OpenOffice.org works the same way on those operating systems, too. Which makes sense, since your operating system shouldn't have so much control over what software you use.

Learning a New Program Isn't as Difficult as You Might Think

Think about writing a text document.

What do you do?

You type. You make things bold. You print.

There are only so many things you can do in a text document, and there aren't that many different ways to do them. The same applies to numbers in spreadsheets. You add, you subtract, you calculate the internal rate of return.

The point is, the differences between office suites aren't all that huge. Take a look at the main text toolbar for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org.

Something else I've observed in training is that a lot of people never received training on Microsoft Office in the first place. They aren't working as efficiently or powerfully as they could with the office suite they currently use. So when you switch people to a new office suite like OpenOffice.org and give them a day or two of training, they're going to be working more efficiently with the new office suite than the old one.

OpenOffice.org Is Free, Runs on All Operating Systems, So Everyone Can Use It. No More Digital Divide

With many functions of jobhunting, schools, government, and other essential functions done using the computer, it's very important that everyone be able to complete these functions. When a government agency sends out information or requires submission of information using a Word document, that's unfair and an undue burden on someone who just needs a job or needs to pay taxes. Imagine that FEMA required that all applications for assistance had to be done in Word.

Anything that we are required to do or need to do must be doable without paying $500 for the tool. Especially when something as useful and powerful as OpenOffice.org is freely available now.

OpenOffice.org means equal opportunity. You can read Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files, and create them, as well.

Small File Sizes

This seems kind of trivial, after talking about universal access to required functions. But it's something to think about. OpenOffice.org file sizes are roughly 1/10th the size of their Microsoft Office counterparts. This isn't so much an issue for your own personal computer, but think about network servers, and about email files around. Having smaller file sizes is a tremendous advantage.

Great Drawing Tools

Anyone using Illustrator, or perhaps Photoshop should take a look at OpenOffice.org Draw (File > New > Draw), especially the new 2.0 version. The prefab shapes are amazing, there are precise controls for curve points, you can export to EPS, JPG and more, you can convert any item to a curve, polygon, bitmap, or 3D, there's curved text formatting like in Photoshop...the list goes on and on. I can spend an entire weekend just fiddling happily with Draw.

Take a look at this OpenOffice.org 1.x file; it's all done from scratch within the program. Here's a thumbnail of what's in it.(And by the way, speaking of small file sizes in the previous item, the file size is 14k.)

Download bowloffruit.sxd

Solid Styles for Formatting Text and Page Layout

Styles are how you make your document do what you want it to. Styles are things like the paragraph style Heading1 which is 18 points big, Helvetica, with 12 points of space below it. Or the bulleted list style DiamondBullet that has a black diamond for the bullet character, and has three tenths of an inch from the bullet to the text. Or a page style with a footer centered at the bottom of the document half an inch from the edge, a header at the right side of the top of the document, and a left margin of an inch and a half.

Create or modify the styles you need, apply them to the text as you need, and life will be good.

OpenOffice.org doesn't randomly create new bullet or other styles and apply them to your text, it doesn't take every style you've ever created and infiltrate them into your other documents, and it doesn't get all twitchy with the formatting the way Microsoft Word does. Microsoft Word drives me up the wall. I think it's a sign of the apocalypse that something this uncontrollable is used so widely.

If you've always used Microsoft Word, take a look at OpenOffice.org. Use the styles. (Format > Styles and Formatting.) See how free of cursing and hair-pulling-out life can be.

In OpenOffice.org 2.0, a Nice Presentation Tool

The 1.x version, I must admit, was serviceable but not sexy. The 2.0 version looks a lot like Microsoft Powerpoint, has a zillion effects, and makes everything a lot easier. Check it out if you've used 1.x and been disappointed.

OpenOffice.org Doesn't Randomly Decide to Do Stuff to Your Document

You can see my blog on how to easily configure OpenOffice.org to do what you want it to do, not the default stuff by default.You control it through Tools > Autocorrect.

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The Microsoft Office 2007 Upgrade Is Going to Have a Big Learning Curve--and a Big Price. Now's the Time to Consider OpenOffice.org Instead.

(Originally published February 2006)

Office 2007 Is Just Another Upgrade...Right?
In a word. No.

This is going to be huge. Painful. Expensive. And that's before you get to the retraining costs.

Here's why.

Microsoft Office 2007 Is a Radical Redesign of the User Interface, and Will Require Plenty of Retraining

Here's the current Microsoft Word toolbar.

Courtesy of LInux Watch  and linked articles, here's a screen shot of MS Word 2003. Click to see a larger version.

MS Office 12 looks entirely different, and changes constantly as you move in the document. Click this image to see a larger version.

And again courtesy of Linux Watch, here's a screen shot of MS Office 2007. Click to see a larger version.

You can't just install this on all 500 computers at your organization and tell people there's a new version.

The Buzz on Microsoft Office 2007 Is the Retraining

Experts around the planet are leary of the radically changed new interface.

Here's an excerpt from an article on eWeek.

Heading the list of challenges facing Microsoft is the fact that Office 2007 has a new user interface, which could require extensive staff retraining at a significant cost, as well as a new file format, which has the potential to create compatibility issues, analysts such as Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research, told eWEEK.

"When you introduce something new, it disrupts, and this increases things like help desk costs and employee downtime," Wilcox said. "So, to get to the benefits that come with this, they have to get past whatever retraining will be needed around the new user interface and any hardships around the new file format, which are always disruptive. These are two big hurdles Microsoft has to get around."

Enterprise customers such as Robert Rosen, CIO for the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and an eWEEK Corporate Partner, agree. The new user interface and file formats pose "major concerns and will slow up adoption significantly," Rosen said. "Since we don't know enough about the benefits of Office 2007, we have not yet developed any plans to move forward."

And another quote:

Jupiter Research's Wilcox told eWEEK that if there were ever an opportunity for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, "this might be it, going head-to-head against Office 2007, because we have a new file format and a new user interface, which means a lot of extra cost," and which could torpedo many enterprises from upgrading.

In addition, a lot of Software Assurance contracts are expiring between now and the end of July, and Microsoft will be aggressively beating the sales drum. Those businesses might well be looking at their alternatives and options before signing a new contract, he said.

Here's Paul Thurott:

For the first time ever, Microsoft has dramatically changed the Office interface, replacing the standard menu-and-toolbar interface we've known since the earliest Windows applications with a new UI paradigm based on context-sensitive ribbons and tabs."

Here are quotes from Paul's article on the new office software, from Jacobe Jaffe, Group Product Manager on the Office team.

As a personal anecdote, I have a variety of PCs, and on one of those machines for a variety of reasons, I still have Office 2003 installed. I use Office 12 essentially full time, and for me to go back into 2003 is not so good. It's pretty painful, actually."

And Paul's follow-up comment--keeping in mind that he's an expert user.

But because this requires a different skill set to accomplish, I had to relearn how to do this. Long story short, most things are easier, but some power user features will require some more work....I'm nitpicking here, of course. The truth is, the Office 12 interface is so much dramatically better than previous versions, it's hard to find fault with it. On the other hand, I am a power user who uses Office all day long, and I slightly resent having to relearn certain skills. I'll get over it.

Mark Shuttleworth (founder of the Ubuntu project, second space tourist and freedom toaster guy), makes this point, posted by Justin here.

This might not be a direct quote but it's Justin's restatement of Mark's point.

"Office 12 has had substantial UI changes, since Microsoft is trying to distance themselves from the Open Office project. End result, users will require re-training. So which is easier? Re-train users in new Office 12? Or simply, start using Open Office which quite frankly looks just like MS Office today."

Here's another blog along the same lines, Ted's Radio Blog, with a similar conclusion at the end.

"Seven different versions. Dozens of applications, with various features disabled. Nightmarish new licenses. New servers. What a mess! All this to print documents, calculate spreadsheets and do other routine office work? I think Microsoft is overreaching here. They may sell to their captive audience, but new computer users whose machines come with Corel Office or OpenOffice are going to be hard-pressed to find a reason to switch. If you haven't tried OpenOffice.org, there's no better time than the present!"

Think about all those users out there.  Switching, if they all do, is not going to be easy. Take a look at just one part of it. Think about how the people who call you, the IT support folks, are going to react. Think about Laura in accounting or Bob down in contracts.

It All Comes Back to Economics 101

You're happy now with Microsoft Office.

But things change, and the cost can grow to outweigh the benefit.

What if this:


changed to this?

Think About the Cost and Benefit of the Upgrade to Microsoft 2007. Really Think About It.
If you feel that the new UI in this version could change your world and your users' worlds,  there might be a wonderful promised land of fabulous easy of use waiting on the other side of the River of Retraining. There might be. But ya gotta cross the River of Retraining first, and some of your users are going to rock the boat.

I'm not saying you shouldn't use Microsoft Office just because they're changing the interface. I'm saying, you're going to have to retrain people. As long as you have to retrain people, why not consider all your options?

Switching from your current Microsoft software to Office 2007 will require:

• A lot of money for the software
• Training and documentation
• Time and effort to install and convert documents

Switching from your current Microsoft software to OpenOffice.org will require:

• A lot of money for the software
• Training and documentation
• Time and effort to install and convert documents

 

<>

The Microsoft Office 2007 Upgrade is more expensive in money, time, and effort than switching to OpenOffice.org.

This Too: OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office Currently Look More Similar Than Office 2003 and Office 2007
Training your users to go from Office 2003, or before, to OpenOffice.org, might be easier than teaching them the whole new Office 2007 system.

Here's the current Microsoft Word toolbar, and the toolbar for OpenOffice.org Writer. Right now, they're really similar.  Click each to see a bigger image. See how long it takes to tell which is which.

And here's an OpenOffice.org screen shot. Not that different.

Retraining Aside: Do You Need the 2007 Features?

As a commenter on this blog, George Wenger, states, "The vast majority of users in a so-called "average" business setting already have no use for 90% of the existing features of Word, let alone a whole set of new features."

Your job is to make everyone else's job easier. When you walk by the software users in the hall, you want them to say, "Hey, Jim! I can do that mail merge now!" and maybe offer a high five. 

Does Marsha in Accounting or Bob in Contracts need ribbon toolbars and a new UI paradigm?

How many of the new features does your organization actually need? Have the support staff been begging you for this one?

"We're also enabling a new mobile scenario with OneNote Mobile," Jaffe told me. "So literally you'll be able to have a OneNote notebook available to you on a mobile device, like a Windows Powered Smartphone. You can take notes on your Smartphone, or read your [PC-based notes on the Smartphone. The pages in that Smartphone notebook align to the information you have in your PC version of OneNote. They sync up through ActiveSync."

And think about these questions:
- How many complaints will you get about how everything's different?
- What will the overall attitude be like when users come in Monday morning and their desktops are different?
- How much will you spend on training and documentation to get people up and running on Office 2007.

Here's a blog on this topic: Dave Rosenberg states that Vista gives you an opportunity to really compare the actual cost and the actual benefits, and he quotes Jon Oltsik from Enterprise Strategy Group.

"

Later this year, Microsoft will throw a $500 million PR and advertising party aimed at convincing users to upgrade their PCs to Vista. This provides a perfect opportunity for the Linux crowd to persuade CIOs to evaluate Linux and compare pricing. In this way, Microsoft will likely open the door to some unintended Linux desktop momentum.

I have every expectation that Vista will be a much better OS than XP, but do users really need it? Perhaps. Then again, many CIOs may conclude that the more prudent choice would be a Linux desktop and Open Office migration offering good enough functionality, at 10 percent of Microsoft's price."

Switching to OpenOffice.org Means You Can Have Your IT Cake and Eat at Least Part of It, Too
With OpenOffice.org, you can be the kick-butt IT guy who gives your users software that might even be easier to learn than Office 2007, and saves the company money. The VP's assistant Chris loves you, and the VP loves you. Doesn't get much better than that.

If after careful evaluation of 2007, the alternatives (OpenOffice.org among others), and what is involved in upgrading, you still think MS Office 2007 is the best solution for your users' needs, go ahead and upgrade. (Keep in mind that users do not need to be "cool."  ;>  They do need health insurance.)

But it might not be, and it's important to think about your choices. If your job is to deliver the best product for the best value and have your users be able to do their jobs well, please think about the choices.

References for switching to OpenOffice.org: See this post on the process of migrating a group of users who might be resisting the process, and this post on top ten reasons to switch to OpenOffice.org (besides the one covered in this post).

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Go Ben! Energetic coverage of the goal to advertise OpenOffice.org

Ben Horst continues to hit the virtual bricks and get coverage of his effort to make sure everyone knows about OpenOffice.org. Every time I look around, someone's asking me "did you know about this?" Including people not in the OpenOffice world.

Here's the gist.

A group of grassroots activists in the OpenOffice.org community have just announced they are going to undertake a similar media campaign to Spread Firefox, starting with a free (as in beer) New York City daily newspaper called "The Metro," published by Metro International. Most penguinistas know what a huge success the grassroots Spread Firefox ad campaign was. Through ads in the New York Times and the Frankfurt General Newspaper, and the hilarious Firefox videos on the FunnyFox website (video link here), Firefox has probably gained greater popular name brand recognition in the general public than any other free open source software (FOSS) project. 

Read more.  Or click here to contribute.

It's not just sending out emails to everyone he knows, though--other efforts have failed. As the Factory City blog notes, "It’s interesting to see this effort emerge organically — especially after the initial thrust to create a SpreadOpenOffice project fashioned after Spread Firefox died on the vine owing to internal struggles over branding control. A similar project SpreadKDE made it out of the gate, but it’s unclear whether it ever took off."

Ben's currently about 75% of the way to his goal.

I'm amazed at how well Ben's spreading the news. We met at Comdex 2003  and I was impressed then with his technical knowledge, his ability to learn the Las Vegas bus system. I was impressed at how such a clean-cut, nice guy could look so  scary in an Army Surplus outfit, which was extremely effective in keeping people from bugging us on our way through some of the more alarming Las Vegas neighborhoods. ;>  But I didn't know he could get people's attention like this.

Ben, I'm tellin' ya, when you get done with this ad, do the same thing in Chicago. That's all it'll take to get Oprah to do that show I'm always fantasizing about where she gives away a free  Linux laptop to everyone in the audience.

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Microsoft makes concession to rival Office format

Not a phrase you hear all that often.

I yipped "Yes!" extremely loudly, scaring all those around me, when I read this.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/104761.asp

From Todd Bishop's Microsoft blog.

Microsoft says it will sponsor an open-source project to create tools for translating files between the OpenDocument Format, which arose from the OpenOffice.org program, and the Office Open XML format to be used in Microsoft Office.

Read more.

Also see coverage from CNet.

Of course, we all know what happened when Microsoft decided to support Java. But it's a noteworthy move, nonetheless.

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