A Modest Proposal

No, unlike Swift I’m not going to suggest eating children…I have a much more radical idea.

One of the “givens” in the realm of computer use is that every computer on campus should have (and every employee and student should use) the Microsoft Office Suite. I must admit that I have been one of the major proponents of this view, and I used the uniformity of Office as a benchmark of our development as a technology-rich environment.

Fifteen years ago there was good reason for this. Mater Dei and other organizations were working to bring uniformity to the productivity applications that were created by several different companies. Many of you remember WordPerfect WordStar and others. They had very different user interfaces, and they did not speak to each other well. In this Tower of Babel, MS Office stood as the gold standard. The applications were well designed, rich in features, and they worked well with the Windows OS. They also were the first office applications that bridged the PC Mac gap. The general perception was that MS applications prepared one for the workplace and were the mark of a “professional” organization. It was technological Darwinism…and the dinosaurs all disappeared (strangely enough WordPerfect still exists in the Lotus Suite…though the next person I find who uses this will be the first).

Move forward 15 years. We have taught an entire generation to use Word, PowerPoint, and (for some) Excel (Access remains a mystery for most). The brand has become generic, like Kleenex or ipod. I don’t even ask at interviews whether candidates know how to use these programs because I assume that they do. It’s a Microsoft Office world, and we live in it.

The problem is the Office is not only a tool, but also a product. Years ago Microsoft recognized that the company could not grow if consumers and businesses bought one copy of Office and used it for the rest of the life of a particular machine. Therefore there is a constant need to innovate and release new versions. Many of these innovations have been great. However, after a certain point the program began to include features for features’ sake. I don’t really use any more of Word 2002 than I used in Word ’98, and (editorial comment to follow) Word 2007 is a bloated mess that is much less instinctive and much harder to use than any earlier product (not to mention the new .docx extensions!).

Coupled with this is my discomfort with our position as “inculcators” of the Microsoft message. Participating in the technology program of the school is a four-year commercial for the inevitability of their use of Office. We don’t do this with any other aspect of student life. If we use Dell computers, we don’t conceal that other brands exist. If we only offer Coke in our vending machines, we don’t deny the existence of Pepsi. Except for a few Mac users who use the excellent Mac Office Suite, very few if any students could name an alternative to MS Office.

But there are alternatives. Google offers a document program existing only online. Users don’t have to download any software to use this suite, and though it is not as robust as the MS product, it has some great collaboration options. There are many other online document editors, and any student or adult with Office familiarity can jump right in and get started.

Outside of these “cloud computing” options, there is a very solid desktop product. Openoffice.org offers a free, downloadable office suite with 6 applications:

  1. Word Processor
  2. Spreadsheet
  3. Presentation Editor
  4. DataBase
  5. Drawing Editor
  6. Mathematical Calculation Editor

The program is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and though it is a hefty download (don’t try to download it on a dialup connection), it is much smaller than MS Office and runs faster (particularly on less powered systems).

Opening the different programs in the suite, there is immediate recognition of the general layout and commands of each. Though a few of the commands are on different menus, it is easy to edit and produce complex documents without any special training. All of the more advanced editing features are available. Best of all, it opens MS Office documents and saves documents in MS Office format for easy carryover to other machines (it doesn’t currently open the .docx format from Word 2007, but word 2002 doesn’t either).

I’ve been using Open Office on the Eee pc for about 5 months now. A few weeks ago I loaded it on to my regular desktop machine and I’ve started to use it there as well. With a few exceptions, I have found the experience to be seamless.

So I guess the radical suggestion for consideration is whether schools should consider teaching students using free open source software assuming that they can make the jump to MS Office when (and if) they need it.

We could also talk about operating systems…but that’s another entry.

6 thoughts on “A Modest Proposal”

  1. By happenstance I just found another online word processor. Buzzwords is an adobe product that runs on flash. Though this is currently an early version (Adobe says that they will be adding features in the weeks to come), I think it is one of the easiest, best looking products that I’ve seen. Best of all, it’s free. Try it at buzzwords.adobe.com

  2. Greg,
    Your proposal is an excellent one. Problems with the new MSOffice Word .docx documents are occurring more and more often with students trying to open them at school (even though the new Leopard OSX can open them in textedit).
    I have tried Google docs and found it confusing and frustrating, in fact I did not even complete the document I tried to write. Buzzword on the other hand seems to be a beautifully designed (yes, the design is very important) user-friendly “real web-based word processor”. I think it could be an excellent tool and alternative to paper waste and hard copy assignments. I like the ‘share’ component and think the English teachers would also; it allows the document to be a read only (similar to a .pdf), allow comments and/or co-authorship.
    The other writing tool that could be very helpful form a teaching perspective is the History tool which allows viewing and saving several versions of a document. A writing assignment could be submitted as a first draft, saved to the server, commented on by the instructor (no papers to collect or carry back and forth from class), rewritten, commented on, revised and then graded, with all the versions saved for a writng portfolio.
    All in all Buzzword seems to be a great possibility – but the site is Buzzword.acrobat.com or http://www.buzzword.com. I also like the fact that it is an Adobe product, I use the Adobe Creative Suite and all the Adobe programs interface with each other seamlessly!

  3. Another alternative to the open source office suite is Thinkfree, another online word processor. Although not very light, Thinkfree is a super powerful clone of all of the Office applications. The first time you use Thinkfree, it takes anywhere from 30-60 seconds to load, but loading the application the successively is a lot quicker. The full-featured Thinkfree apps use Java applets, admittedly, not the most lighweight thing to use, but it includes all of the functionality of Office. Check it out

    MD Student

  4. Of all of the Office clones, the one that has been around the longest and I suspect will be around in the future is OpenOffice.org.
    You can open all Office docs (I haven’t tried a .docx or .pptx)modify them and resave as an MS document. I have tried the thinkfree, Google apps and one other whose name excapes me, but I always gravitate back to the Open Office.

  5. My harddrive on one of my old Dells, just recently died. It took along with it my Microsoft office 2003, and all of my files for the 2008 school year. Fortunately we only have two more weeks of school so I don’t have much use for my old documents, and I only need to type a couple more papers.

    As a result though, I resorted to trying Buzzword and Openoffice for two of my projects this week (an English Critique, and a Science Paper).

    Buzzword seemed to be a little bit easier to use and format with. But the fact that it was online was a tad bit annoying because I am right click happy, and I believe Buzzwords uses flash, which doesn’t allow you to right click. The application itself still had all of the options that I needed except for Times New Roman (which is needed for MLA) and it was a little awkward setting up a header. It also did feel that the program was a little barren option wise, though it does provide all of the essentials.

    Openoffice does have all of the options as Microsoft Office, and it is an actual program that can be saved to the hard drive, which I believe is a plus. My problem with Openoffice is that it is similar to Microsoft Office, but it works slightly differently as far as formatting, and menu layouts are concerned. But these slight differences just drive me crazy since I am so used to Office 2003. It also takes slightly longer to set up an MLA format in Openoffice. The main issue that I had was that I couldn’t find a dialog box to change the margins, and so I had to use the rulers on the side of the page. It worked but using the rules always makes formatting feel a little weird.

    All in all, I think opensource word processors are great if your hard drive dies out of the blue, and you only need to use them to write a few more papers before summer. The main flaw with these word processors is that they are more challenging to set up an MLA style paper on, which simply can’t happen given the school’s MLA based policies.

    For full time use, I still love Microsoft Office. Since I took IT as a Freshman, I was extensively trained in all of the Office Applications, and I simply feel more comfortable with the way that Office does things.

    In my opinion the change from Microsoft Office, to open source word processors is similar to America using our system of measurement as opposed to the Metric system. Both systems of measurement work, and one is not necessarily better then the other. They are just different from each other. Some people may like these differences, while others simply can not accept them.

    I think that the standard is Microsoft Office, and that we should stick with it.

  6. Here’s my experience with word processors…

    I’m a Mac user so this gives me two major options for office suites: Microsoft Office 2008 and iWork ’08. I chose the obvious mac-headed option and chose iWork.

    The compatibility that iWork has with Microsoft Office is astounding. If I need to bring a presentation or word .doc to school all I have to do is choose export from the file menu and it works flawlessly. Well.. not flawlessly.

    When saving documents iWork has a windows compatibilty checker that verifies that your work will actually save as you want to. It may say that a font is a non-standard windows font or say my image formatting cannot be exported. And it doesn’t just leave you sitting with those problems (unlike the .docx > .doc converter built into office 2007). In the case of fonts it offers you with a variety of windows compatible fonts that are similar to the Mac font you have chosen. If I have a unsupported image it gives me two options: 1) Save and rasterize all modifications you made to the image. 2) Save with original image. So this enables me to retain all the Mac-like shininess in a bland PowerPoint presentation.

    So I do use iWork as my main Word/PowerPoint replacement, but I did grow rather fond of Google Docs on my OLPC.

    And yes, I too believe that Macs do not really belong in a business environment just yet.

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