OpenOffice: Taking the Plunge

Dan Clark, Riverside Military Academy
Gainsville, GA

The November 2007 GaETC Conference included numerous sessions on using and implementing open source or freeware software. One of the most intriguing software packages that was frequently mentioned was OpenOffice, a free alternative to Microsoft’s Office package. I came away from the conference with a determination to implement OpenOffice in a lab setting.

One of the older labs at my school is equipped with 333 MHz Pentium II computers. The computers have 128MB of ram and 4GB hard drives. The computers are primarily used for word processing and prior to this installation, had Microsoft Office 97 installed. This was the perfect situation to install and test OpenOffice.

To install OpenOffice, one will need the installation software. The software can be downloaded from the Internet at http://www.openoffice.org. The setup file is about 100MB in size so the download can take minutes or hours depending on your internet connection. A CD containing the setup file may also be acquired by paying a distribution fee through offers at the same http://www.openoffice.org web site.

Once the software has been obtained, the installation is quick and simple. Open the setup file, read and accept the licensing agreement, and install using the default installation settings. You may want to select the check boxes to make OpenOffice the default application for opening Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.

Testing revealed two tweaks that needed to be implemented. These involve the registration screen and the default file types used when saving files created by OpenOffice.

The first time that a user accesses OpenOffice on a computer, he is prompted to register the software. In a lab situation where many users are sharing the same computers and where a user may use a different computer each time he enters the lab, the user may see this registration screen numerous times. There is no need for every student at my school to register the software and no need for that student to see the registration screen on every computer that he accesses. The fix for this is to replace the default shortcuts created during installation for the different OpenOffice components with new shortcuts that have the switch “-nofirststartwizard” appended. Editing the original shortcuts does not work. New shortcuts must be created. My shortcut to launch the OpenOffice word processor Writer is:

"C:\Program Files\OpenOffice\program\swriter.exe" –nofirststartwizard

OpenOffice, by default, saves files created by its components in a format that Microsoft Office does not recognize. Since we are not 100% OpenOffice, it is necessary for us to always save files in a standard format. A user can select the file format when the file is first saved but it works better for us to set the default types to the Microsoft formats. That way everyone will be able to open the documents whether they are created in OpenOffice or Microsoft Office.

The default files types for saving are specified in the OpenOffice “xcu” files. To change OpenOffice Writer format to Microsoft Word 97 format, change the ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter specified in the file Setup-writer.xcu found in the directory

c:\program files\open office.org2.0\share\registry\modules\org\openoffice\setup

In my installation I changed the line:

<prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter"><value>writer</value>

to

<prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter"><value>MS Word 97</value>

Similar changes can be made to change the defaults for Excel and PowerPoint file types.

My students were immediately able to use OpenOffice to complete their word processing tasks. The interface is slightly different from Microsoft Word 97 but the students were able to adapt and today I have hundreds of students regularly using OpenOffice.

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