Counting the cost
The one thing every student needs is access to a word-processor. Yes, there are cluster rooms, but these are dull and dreary places to work at the best of times. At the worst, you can’t even log on because the server load is too high. Rubbish. Use your own. The problem is, the most basic version of MS Office 2007 costs £73.48 at time of writing, and that’s a lot of money for a student to stump up. In fact, by using the free OpenOffice you save that entire amount, which is equivalent to:
- 43 pints of lager at my student union (which means that, given I’m in London, this will be higher elsewhere) with some change for a couple of packets of crisps
- more than 90 songs on iTunes (we won’t get into that discussion here, this is for illustration only!) [Edit: this could soon be even more songs if this BBC article is right]
- 54 pints of Sainsbury’s semi-skimmed milk (4 pint bottle). That makes a lot of cups of tea.
My nan used to say, if you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves. I’m saying, if you look after that £75, you can buy some very useful items instead of bloated, proprietary nonsense.
Worth pointing out that you can as a student get the Ultimate edition of Office for much much less via the Ultimate Steal: http://www.theultimatesteal.co.uk/
Doesn’t get round the proprietary bit though!
Swat
January 9, 2008 at 10:43 am
That’s a fair point, actually! But still, £40 is a lot to pay for something when you could get the same for free :)
jerichokb
January 9, 2008 at 10:57 am
We should also remember that OpenOffice has features that M$ Office doesn’tr have. OODraw, for example, is a vector drawing program with no equivalent in M$ Office. OpenOffice also has one-click (plus dialog box) export to PDF. Again, there is no equivalent in M$ Office.
In an enterprise environment, the savings offered by OpenOffice are very significant. I jsut finished training around 30 persons in the use of OpenOffice for Windows. They worked for a popularm high-end Philippine resort. It turns out that the cost of a single M$ Office license (around Php18,000) would have cost the resort more than the expense for three days of training I had just concluded! How’s that for cost-effectiveness?
Manny
January 9, 2008 at 2:10 pm