[ILUG] Star Office

[Niall Walsh]

philb at vodafone.ie wrote:

>5. You can create PDFs directly from OOo documents. This is a single step 
>procedure and works really well. This is how I send out invoices, letters 
>etc. To get the same functionality on Office 2K, you need to buy acrobat 
>distiller which I think costs about €600 per seat. This is a big win.
>  
>
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

GPL and Windows (but you were talking about Office 2k so that limit 
should be ok).

Any OS/Desktop/Whatever should be fairly easy to setup to produce pdfs 
Freely by printing to file.

And to be strictly accurate creating the pdfs from OOo requires 3 steps, 
choose to do it, choose what level of compression to use and finally 
choose where to save it.   You can remove the second step (and even the 
third if you  wish) by presenting your pdf production as simply a 
printer to your programs.

Having said all that, for a standalone user who isn't creating mountains 
of pdfs, using OOo's inbuilt features is simple and straight forward, 
and even in more complicated scenarios it may be the way to go, but I 
don't believe anyone would ever need to buy Acrobat Distiller to get the 
equivalent function from MS Office.

>You can potentially sell it on security and the fact that people can legally take 
>away a copy themselves and install it at home.
>
I'd sell it on offering the staff a bonus, if it's still there after a 
year anyone who has to use it gets a one off bonus equal to the cost of 
an MS Office license (big difference of course whether you choose full 
retail price or the best deal you could get).  Now the staff have a self 
interest in seing things work so hopefully you'll be asked "how do I do 
XXX?" rather then "XXX doesn't work, I need my Office back, why did we 
have to change, your killing me, I'm going to tell YYY, this is a joke, 
your wasting my time, clippy made it so easy for me to write a letter" :-P

Either that or if your the BOFH (and have the authority) tell them 
anyone who wants MS Office will have all licensing charges deducted from 
their salary.

Niall