Office 2007 and Open Source email to faculty

I just sent the following email out to the faculty that I work with here at the University School of Milwaukee. I wanted to share it in this blog post in the event that this could be of use to some of you. I really believe in the power of open source as a means to address issues of equity and social justice. Office 2007, to me, is bloated, expensive, and has way too many unnecessary features for student use.

Anyway, enough of that...here is the email:

Here are the bookmarks Steve and I assembled for you to peruse as you’re getting acquainted with the new office interface:

http://del.icio.us/mjmonty/usmoffice2007

For any of you delicious users, if you find any good Office 2007 professional dev sites, tag them “usmoffice2007” and they’ll show up at the following link:

http://del.icio.us/tag/usmoffice2007

Cheers!

Matt

Additionally, I spoke with a few of you about some free and open source office options to Office 2007. Office 2007 licensing is extremely expensive, so you might consider taking a look at some of the following tools. I’ve used all of them and have found them to be great alternatives to paying for software:

Free and/or open source software options:

NeoOffice (for Mac) - http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

OpenOffice (Mac, Linux and Windows) - http://www.openoffice.org/

Google Docs (for any computer that can connect to the Internet): http://docs.google.com - google docs now offers the option of accessing your files without having to be connected to the Internet

If you’d like to read more about the value of open source and how it addresses issues of equity and social justice, visit:

http://www.infinitethinking.org/2008/02/promoting-digital-equity-with-web-20.html