Re:I Wonder... (Score 1)

• It would be an interesting test to take two people who have never used a computer before and see if they can more easily learn MS Office or StarOffice. You could use the results of that test to improve the interface of whatever product performed worse. My point is that these big, bloated office suites are becoming indistiguishable from one another.

Interesting aspect and definetely worth looking into.

But contrary to the claim that office suites are becoming indistinguishable IMHO there are differences between the various office suites and even though they offer much of the same functionality the handling and implementation is quite different.

But the more common problem instead of new users learning the basics is teaching people to switch over from MS to SO. Things just dont work the way they are used to.

At the moment we are trying to migrate our lab from MS Office to Star Office (were soooo tired of the constant file format changes and the upgrade spiral that even our profs noticed it.. ;) ) and as sysadmin I get loads of questions related to that area. But more and more people that took the step and switched over and invested some effort into actually reading the help pages found that Star Office is in many cases equal if not superior to MS Office. The 5.2 release is definetely one to look into, hope they took care of some other minor complaints that I had with it... Now if only I could get my people to switch to gnuplot... ;)