Re: [libreoffice-marketing] LibreOffice vs. MS Office

On 01/12/2013 01:00 PM, Kannan Moudgalya wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I would like to re-open the discussion on this topic, which was 
> discussed a couple of weeks back.
>
> I already mentioned in a previous mail that we offer LibreOffice 
> workshops for clerical and support staff of many organisations, such 
> as government offices and universities, free of cost.  What is 
> interesting is that the participants learn advanced features of the 
> software, for example, track changes and the like.  Most of them, 
> however, are not aware of such advanced techniques in MS Office.  The 
> reason is that no one teaches these things on MS Office - the training 
> programme is possibly expensive or only limited seats are available in 
> a training programme.
>
> Thus, even if LibreOffice is less powerful (for argument sake), it is 
> used effectively - even the advanced features are known to the users.  
> In comparsion, the MS Office is used less effectively, even if it is 
> more powerful, once again, for argument sake.  Thus, the LibreOffice 
> users end up being better users of the software, compared to the MS 
> Office users.
>
> The above observation got corroborated in a blender workshop that we 
> organised.  Here is a feedback from an official of the organisation, 
> where we conducted this workshop.
>
> /"The workshop as informed to you earlier over phone was really 
> successful. By the end of four days the participants were very happy 
> and confident in developing 3D animation. Earlier they were using 
> licensed products which did not actually fulfill our requirements of 3 
> D animation. Added to that they were also introduced to interactive 
> game development using Blender. In the four days they were introduced 
> to modeling, lighting, 3D Animation and interactive games. The best 
> part was the spoken tutorials helped them get ready with the 
> installation, interface and utilities of Blender before  the physical 
> workshop in the IGNOU campus. Spoken tutorials were really useful as 
> the participants could use them time and again as reference material 
> even when the physical workshop was on. We are very happy with the 
> workshop and looking forward to an advanced level workshop."
>
> /Kannan

I know there was a link about "spoken tutorial" for India. It was an 
article link.

Yes having "spoken word" tutorials can be easier for people than printed 
text.  Yes, we need more public workshops for the use [and marketing] of 
LibreOffice.  If I did not have a "communication issue" brought about 
after 3 strokes, I would do one locally in my library, or even in a 
Adult Education center.

It would be great if some "professional quality" presentation is created 
for teaching LO to users.  That that presentation and display it in a 
room of users via a projection monitor system.  Have handout material 
included.  Make it all on a DVD set of disks that can be downloaded.  I 
was think about having videos along with Impress presentations and have 
some working examples worked through showing the users how to do these 
things.  Make these free so local marketing people can present LO in a 
workshop.  I do not know how to do many things that are not "basic" or 
things I have never needed to do, but that does not mean I would not be 
willing to do a workshop if someone created the materials for me that 
would show the workshop how to do these things.

MS Office is "more powerful than LibreOffice for one main reason, it is 
bloated with so many features that it takes "in-depth guides" to know 
they even exist.  There has been figures like less that 1% of 1% of the 
business users either know these features or know how to use them.  Do 
you really need to do things like edit a spreadsheet table inside a Word 
document?  Do you really need to do things in LibreOffice that are used 
by 1 out of 1,000,000 business users? Sure some feature are going to be 
used, but using a package like Word or Writer for desktop publishing of 
a 100+ page magazine with all of the fancy text and image options you 
can think of, might not be very useful to the users we are targeting LO 
towards.  Sure, making newsletters and other multi-column text/image 
documents under 20 pages or so is useful, but more than that may not be 
for our market.  I would not even want to try it with Word or LO, but I 
know there are those that do use a word processor for very large desktop 
publishing needs.  Doable but not recommended.

The key is ease of use for the "standard user" not the 1 in 100,000 
user.  The key is not adding so many features that it takes 1 to 5 GB of 
disk space to install the package and 2 or 3 minutes to load up to the 
point where you then can type or edit the document.  I still work 
on/with desktops and laptops that take 3+ minutes to boot up MS Office 
2003 to the point where it can be used.  Those same system take less 
than 30 seconds to get LO to that same point.



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