After taking a quick look at open office.org it seems to me that there are many similarities\u00a0with\u00a0Microsoft office.\u00a0 Now, I believe in students learning how to use computer technologies in schools.\u00a0 Most businesses require employees to use their software for communication and development of presentations.\u00a0 If I owned a business I would not be interested in training workers on how to use a simple word processor.\u00a0 I would expect that they would have been exposed to that during their education, especially in these\u00a0times which we are relying more and more on technology in the working world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Having said that why is it that students need to use Microsoft Word?\u00a0 After quickly looking at open office it seems to me that the interface is very similar to Word.\u00a0\u00a0Why is it necessary to have students or schools pay\u00a0for expensive proprietary products when they can just use the free OSS offered on the internet?\u00a0 Open\u00a0Office also states that their program is fully compatible with most other types of software so there shouldn’t be a problem transferring documents to Open\u00a0Office from other programs.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There are most likely subtle differences between Open\u00a0Office and Microsoft Word as well and between other applications from Open\u00a0Office and the Microsoft suite.\u00a0 In my opinion it is probably not going to be so great that it would cause a new hire to\u00a0undergo intense training in Word in order to be able to use its basic functions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Besides this brings to mind a\u00a0couple of years ago when I was working as a teacher and the entire school upgraded to the new Microsoft\u00a0Office 2007\u00a0product.\u00a0 The differences between the older version and the newer version were huge.\u00a0 Myself as well as many co-workers were very distraught with the fact that our work production was slowed because we had to\u00a0learn how to use a new\u00a0program.\u00a0 Things as simple as finding the line spacing format tab\u00a0and\u00a0the print preview button became frustrating examples of changes to the program that slowed us down as workers.\u00a0 Not to mention there were problems with viewing older works from other word processors that made reading some students work impossible, I’m not even going to get into the frustrations with Power Point!\u00a0 So even with new versions of PS coming out every few years workers are going to have to undergo some changes to what they are used to using anyway.\u00a0 If\u00a0employees are going to have to make changes anyway\u00a0why not just\u00a0encourage schools to\u00a0use the free software for their students so they can cut down on their costs?\u00a0 Better yet why don’t we have businesses using OSS technology and saving themselves money?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After taking a quick look at open office.org it seems to me that there are many similarities\u00a0with\u00a0Microsoft office.\u00a0 Now, I believe in students learning how to use computer technologies in schools.\u00a0 Most businesses require employees to use their software for communication and development of presentations.\u00a0 If I owned a business I would not be interested […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":891,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,146],"tags":[5232,6039,3869],"class_list":["post-2996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mod06-open-source","category-module-discussions","tag-di-palma","tag-m6","tag-oss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/891"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2996"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2998,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2996\/revisions\/2998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}