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readysetgo · Tue May 23, 2006 8:23 am

Those who've been in the Windows forums may have come across my help wanted post "deploying basics". Well, Open Office 2.0 is the office suite I've installed on about 100 PC's destined to be used by MS Office users.

My problem is simple: I need a heads-up on what kind of problems and pitfalls to expect when supporting first time users of Open Office. In a nutshell, I want to go into the situation with my "eyes wide open".

Examples of what goes wrong in the WORD, EXCEL, POWERPOINT to Open Office transition will be highly helpful.

thegleek · Tue May 23, 2006 9:51 am

Heh. I would seriously like to know the outcome of all this. Never have I seen such a deployment where a large amount of users are NOT using Microsoft for their software standards (excel/access/powerpoint/word/outlook).

Good luck and keep us informed!

Tue May 23, 2006 9:55 am

If I can work things out well enough, and prove that it can be used for 99% of our work, our MS-to-OO upgrade would affect around 800 users.

I just started beta testing of sorts in the IT dept. I'll try and remember this thread and post what we run into.

So far, it being Open and us having programmers on staff makes it look pretty versatile. We'll see how it goes.

fc34 · Mon May 29, 2006 6:11 am

Your biggest headache will be:

1. Teaching the users how to use OO

2. Migrating Outlook / Password protected files. OO currently has partial support for MS Word (*most* things work, but some dont) and AFIAK, the password protected documents in MSO don't like to be imported nicely into OO.

cheesyking · Mon May 29, 2006 7:03 am

I'd think about autotext and macro users too.

VTNC · Wed May 31, 2006 5:40 pm

Thanks to .doc's crappy format, you'll lose some formating importing files into OO. XML conversion helps, but not that much.

Most users also develop a dependency on Word's interface, but that's just a matter of time and it should help you "weed out the dumb ones"¹

Good luck fighting vendor lock-in, though :wink:

¹ Dilbert reference

fc34 · Thu Jun 01, 2006 6:30 pm

cheesyking wrote:
I'd think about autotext and macro users too.

I reckon that because of the closeness with VB and macros that some sort of conversion can be arranged.

You could try to convert to another format like RTF, although I agree that there'd be loss of some formatting, especially the Word only features.

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