Thanks, I really think I'm going to be able to convince her about the benefits of open sourced, free software. She needs a good calendar program as they paid for some calendar software and can only have 3 computers use it. What would be the best one that is very user friendly, and can be installed on all the present computers and will be only for their agency so that others cannot access it from outside the agency?

That's what I thought, but all of them had installed the plugin, and it just didn't work. I tried to get a buddy's Office 2000 to open .docx using the plugin, and I couldn't get it to work. I even went into safe mode to try to get it to install, but it just plain didn't work. Most people just don't know about technology, and yet we thrust it upon them, and demand that they know what they're doing. Most of them barely know how to use a mouse for crying out loud!

When I was in university, the teachers had absolutely no idea what they were doing, and so they would use the latest Microsoft format, which was the .docx, and you should have seen all of the students freak out because hardly any of them could open the files up or if they could it wasn't properly formatted. I had to show all of my teachers how to set it so that they would only send it in 2000/XP .doc format. What was surprising, was that nearly all of my classmates used MS Office, and yet they couldn't access Microsoft's OWN formats! One teacher even suggested downloading Open Office so that the files could be opened. Now, if that doesn't show how closed sourced a supposedly open format is, then I don't know what is! If the hospital demands that all formats within the agency to be odt, then little by little this will start a trend amongst the end users because they'll see how easy it'll be to use this open format and won't have to go through all the bs that Microsoft puts them through. This isn't going to happen overnight, but it will happen. I'm going to be volunteering at a non-profit organization, and they have a really old database program, and the executive director is thinking of using LO Base, so I'm going to push for it because if they can't afford the Microsoft tax they'll be able to move over to Linux with absolutely no interoperably issues:-)

I totally agree with you about the fact that there aren't any real "advanced users" out there! I would say that 99% of the people out there that are using office software wouldn't know if they were using M$ or LO. In fact, if you were to "only" have a shop that runs LO, and had the staff trained on it, then they'd think the MS Office would stupid and counter intuitive and really hard to work. Most of the people that I've worked with don't have a clue about technology, so the fact that 25,000 staff across 13 hospitals in Denmark will be switching to LibreOffice over the course of the next year indicates that someone has their head on straight over there in Denmark...finally!

Bill....Is that you?