Excellent pointoffice suites have a lot of similarities
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| solveigh Nov 04, 2005 4:35 AM EDT |
This is an excellent point in the article. "The fallacy of of this argument lies in the assumption that 100% of the users will be using an office environment so new and foreign as to render them 100% useless until trained on the new software. " That's absolutely ridiculous to assume. Users who could find the B icon for bold, the printer icon for printing, and File > New in the old software, already know how to do all those things in OpenOffice.org or StarOffice. As a trainer, I try to make sure students feel confident that they can master the new office suite, as early as possible. I start each class with a comparison of the two basic toolbars to show how similar MS Office and OpenOffice.org are, and to show the students how much they already know how to do, in an office suite they haven't touched yet. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 05, 2005 9:00 AM EDT |
Copying the feature set is often used as an argument that MS products are inherently better, since everyone is copying them. Then MS turns around and makes sure that every "total cost of ownership" study has vast training budgets for anyone not using MS software. The idiocy of it is that the differences between two major versions of MS Office far outstrip the differences between MS Office and OpenOffice, if for no other reason than the users don't have a false sense of security that they already know where everything is, only to be caught flat-footed and surprised when Office12 doesn't do things the way that Office97 did. The overwhelming majority of Office-Software-Suite users don't use the overwhelming majority of the features in the office suite they use. I've heard it stated as "90% of the users use 10% of the features". Most of the commonly used functions in all the office suits are in approximately the same place (the print, bold, text colour buttons for instance). Training is a very good idea any time software is changed, if for no other reason than to break up the monotony and find out how folks are doing. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!