Free OpenOffice.org Training Videos

Rollie Hawk writes "Having trouble converting your family and office mates into OpenOffice devotees? NewsForge (Owned by the same people that bring you Slashdot) can now help you convince the visual learners around you that they can do it. NewsForge is releasing a series of free video segments that demonstrate OpenOffice in action from installation to day-to-day use. According to the site, these clips will play on any browser on any operating system as long as Flash is available. One practical topic that should be particularly interesting to the would-be business converts is 'making a slide presentation in a hurry.'"

Shame method

[saskboy]

If you're having trouble convincing someone to learn a new word processor, you can sometimes convince them using the "shame method".

I tell them that if my 85 year old, blind grandmother could learn to email, then can learn how to use Open Office. Sure she wasn't blind at the time, and was only 77 when she learned to use a computer, but some people just need to hear that someone older and frailer than they are, could do something they've never tried. It worked to convince my grandpa how to use the computer. My grandma learned first, and he got kind of jealous that she knew how to play cribbage on the machine and he didn't, so he put his mind to learning it too.

90% of teaching is convincing the person that they are capable of learning.

YouTube

[Life700MB]

They really should make use of tech like YouTube [youtube.com].

This will have an immediate impact for me

[viniosity]

I *just* went through a situation where this could have come in handy. We just completed a merger a month ago and some of the employees from the acquired company are now starting to relocate to the new HQ. On of the PHB absolutely freaked out when I told him we'd be installing OpenOffice. I've never seen a grown man go from mature manager to whining 4 year so quickly.

Sadly, we escalated the issue to a non-technical boss who decided that it was best to appease the other PHB and just buy MS Office instead. I'm hoping that these vids will make evangelizing the use of OSS easier for me and avoid it happening next time.

Yeah, I learned to be more proactive about educating everyone about OSS.. first demo/train and then install...

Program to make those 'videos'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great thing to help users by recording this kind of videos :)

Do anybody knows what program was used to mae thos videos?
Might be some ViewletBuilder opensource/free replacement?

Regards,
    Ego