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james kilty wrote: > On Sun, 2006-10-15 at 16:01 +0000, paul sutton wrote: > >> Can we have some ideas on how to rebut the MS is industry standard >> argument, >> > I see two. > The higher level argument is that if school children should be able to > use software, then they should have generalised skills to adapt to any > future programmes. Plus, Governments and Industry are moving fast to > GNU/Linux. > The lower level argument, is that MS has used the "Industry Standard" > argument to hypnotise everyone to believe they must use MS programmes > and programmes developed for Windows because that is what is used in > the world of work. Perhaps most of the training involves Office. oOo > not only provides the functions used in MSO but the menus and > presentation are very similar. This similarity carries across to many > other programmes (much to the disgust of many GNU/Linux users). Hence > it no longer applies. With regards to the differences between MS Office and OOo, I found some interesting Blog posts... http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2005/10/transitioning_a.html - This one is a guide to moving over to OpenOffice.org although it doesn't seem to go into much detail of what the equivalents of frequently used commands are in OOo over MS Office. And there is this... http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/02/microsoft_offic.html - A blog post about MS Office 2007. From experience the folks where I work have been using MS Office 2000 for a few years, I found going to MS Office 2003 to be a strange change to get used to but going to Office 2007 would be radically different (from what I saw at the Computer Trade Show '06 where MS was demonstrating Vista and MS Office 2007). Unless a whole load of users get training when going to a radically different version of Office then productivity could in theory go down quite a bit. At least OpenOffice.org isn't that radically different - okay some things are in different places but once you get used to it is isn't too bad. I found a howto called OpenOffice.org Writer for Microsoft Word users which seems to only cover OOo 1.1 but I guess something like this would be a good start for users who are used to Word - http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/word_processing/Word-to-OOo.html Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html