Switching to Open Office

Smart Company tech blogger, Brendan Lewis, has a post about switching one of his businesses to Open Office. He has a number of useful tips for anyone else contemplating this switch.

We offered this to clients a few years back and it was a disaster.

The biggest problem for businesses switching is user resistance. Office staff like having the Big Blue "W" or "X" to click on. We also have to keep in mind that many office workers have invested many years experience in getting to understand the foibles and menu commands in Office.

Transitioning costs are the financial killer. Brendan mentions this but I think understates it somewhat. Basically all your macros and templates are either going to have to be imported or recreated. The cost of doing that on its own outweighs the licensing costs of Office.

Another problem with Open Office is that many programs, such as Quicken, ACT! and MYOB, integrate with MS Office but don't with OO. This creates headaches for users and support.

The ultimate killer is compatibility. Brendan makes the point that you have to have one machine still running MS Office so you can make sure outgoing documents have all their features and formatting.

I found this problem personally early this week. I tried running a presentation I'd created in Powerpoint 2003 on my laptop running Open Office. It worked but it looked pretty ordinary and I couldn't have used it.

Of course, none of these problems are faults with Open Office. It's a fine suite of programs that's unbeatable at the price. I'd really recommend it if you are after a full featured office suite and you aren't fussed about sending documents to other users.

If you are a business though I just couldn't recommend it unless you are the type that like living on the bleeding edge with all the pain that goes with that.