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Ace_NoOne
OOo Enthusiast
Joined: 05 Feb 2004
Posts: 104
Location: Germany
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 Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:39 am Post subject: The reason OOo should be used in a business environment |
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I'm currently doing an internship at a big IT company. My current task is to finish translating a concept document.
The document was created in MS Word, and several people have worked on the translation before. Needless to say that this has created a huge mess, with spaces and tabs used for formatting all over the place - to the point that I'd be afraid to publish the document for fear of making the company look like a bunch of incompetent morons.
That made me realize how great OOo's styles actually are: Had there been a proper template with all the required styles, the mess would definitely have been less severe (providing some basic training for my colleagues, but that shouldn't be a big deal). Plus there would have been a proper sense of Corporate Identity.
Too bad it's never gonna happen...
I just wanted to voice my anger/frustration, sorry for blocking the airwaves... |
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DiGro
Super User
Joined: 02 Jun 2004
Posts: 1208
Location: Hoorn NH, The Netherlands
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| Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:14 am Post subject: |
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No problem,
great to here from you and your experiences.
Why not try to educate them ?
DiGro |
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Ace_NoOne
OOo Enthusiast
Joined: 05 Feb 2004
Posts: 104
Location: Germany
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| Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:44 am Post subject: |
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| DiGro wrote: | | Why not try to educate them? |
Well, this is a big company (~1000 employees at my location, around 40k in total), and as such, it is resistant to change. Imagine the effort it would take to make 40.000 people* change the word processor - that'd be insane!
One example of how resistant to change people are: Recently, I created a few image files for use in a PowerPoint presentation. When my colleague inserted the image into the presentation, she didn't just use the "insert image" command - instead, she opened the file in the picture viewer, made a screenshot (using the PRINT key) and inserted the screenshot into the presentation (via CTRL+V). Then she cut off the borders with PowerPoint's built-in image editing feature.
Okay, so she didn't know any better, no problem. But I explained to her - calmly, respectfully - that she'd made a huge detour (not to speak of the poor quality due to the manual editing) and how it can be done a lot easier. Yet, she's still using the same method today (kinda reminds me of my mother  ). Now, do you really believe it'd even be possible to make her adjust to OOo? I don't think so, unfortunately.
Disclaimer: I don't mean to disrespect my colleague here, she's neither dumb (she's got a university degree) nor balky (we're getting along great) - she's simply representative of the majority of humanity, which is a flawed species in itself. 
* You can't have 20 people use OOo while the rest uses MSO. That'd require perfect interoperability (i.e. no loss of formatting or even content), which simply doesn't exist yet. Maybe that'll become possible when MS switches to an open XML format - but I'm still skeptical about their willingness to be open in any way. |
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