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Where is Microsoft Office - Word? Excel? PowerPoint?

In an effort to save the district money and cut costs, OpenOffice has been installed on your computers. Anyone who has recently purchased a computer either for themselves or a family member knows that the average computer comes installed with Microsoft Works or another product as a productivity tool. However, you may have discovered that you cannot create a document in Microsoft Works and then use it with Microsoft Office. In addition, if you wanted to install or add Microsoft Office to your computer, the average consumer would need to pay at least an additional $139 for a home / student version of that product and up to as much as $300 for a professional version of Microsoft Office. Now if you multiply the cost of Microsoft Office by the number of computers in the district, the amount spent on licensing becomes astronomical! That cost would total to approximately $528,000.

What is Open Office? Can I open my documents that I saved in Microsoft Office?

Open Office is a cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. Open Office was originally derived from Star Office, an office suite developed by Star Division and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free, open and high-quality alternative. It supports the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office '97–2003 formats, Microsoft Office '2007 format (in version 3), among many others. It is available in 16 different languages as well! What does this mean for you? This means that you and your students can download the program for free at home and bring your work back and forth to work and school.

Won't we be doing our students a disservice by not teaching them to use Microsoft Office?

You have to remember that you are teaching a concept. Just as you still teach reading or math concepts with every new textbook adoption, it is the same with technology. Microsoft Office will still be available to students who are enrolled in the Computer Applications courses. However, learning OpenOffice will enable you and your students to become more well rounded when using technology.

Where can I find out more on how to use Open Office?

To find out more, simply click on the link, Why Open Office for Education? Tutorials on all the features are available on the website, Tutorials for OpenOffice. You will find lessons on using Writer, Calc and Impress.

Office Suite
http://www.openoffice.org/

Desktop Publishing
http://www.scribus.net/

Image Authoring
http://www.gimp.org/

Typing
http://tuxtype.sourceforge.net/

PDF Creation
http://www.cutepdf.com/

Open Source for Windows
http://www.opensourcewindows.org/

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