[ale] [OT] Microsoft Office 13 license

[Phil Turmel]

On 02/20/2013 04:05 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 3:48 PM, Brian Stanaland <brian at stanaland.org>wrote:
> 
>> I should have read the article first. It says the regular license is tied
>> to a single PC. Not the subscription plan. That can be installed and
>> removed as many times as needed.
>>
>> Also, my family has been using Google Apps since it started. We like it.
>> It's great as a common repository we can all get to. But to do complicated
>> school papers you really need a desktop application. OpenOffice worked for
>> us for years until the kids got in High School and the papers got more
>> complicated and had to use specific templates.
>>
> 
> I found that nearly all M$ .doc templates worked fine in OOo as long as the
> liberation font set was loaded. Without that specific font set, all spacing
> and alignment was always crap.
> 
> That said, I've seen M$ templates generated on a Winblows system that were
> crap on a Mac with Word. I used those examples to indicate to the school
> why requiring a specific template outside of a web form was a bad idea. No,
> they didn't understand or change but they allowed a similar looking paper
> from a different system. Whenever a .doc was the required format, my kids
> would save as MS word 2003 .doc in OOo and the teacher never knew any
> different.

Let me echo Jim's experience.  I haven't had Windows or MS-Office at
home in over six years, and have always been able to help my children
use OpenOffice (now switched to LibreOffice) for school assignments.
Lots of teachers who said "It has to be Microsoft" were fooled.

I even gave up MS-Office in my business once OOo v3 came out--I have
been sending multiple Fortune 500 clients .doc and .xls files saved from
LibreOffice with no complaints.

It helps that formal stuff that has to look perfect is expected to be
delivered as a locked PDF.  LibreOffice nails that.

Phil