The SurRural Librarian

Now that Apple has sent AppleWorks out to pasture in favor of iWork, I feel like it’s a good time to transition the school to something different. Many of my older machines still have AppleWorks, some have Office, and some - so far - nothing. I can’t afford to buy something new for every machine, so I need to make some decision on what to promote.

I could go all Word. All my kids 5th and up are addicted to PowerPoint, so I could go for Office. But I certainly can’t afford enough licenses for the school. I had planned on just getting PPT alone. Buying the complete Office would mean fewer machines with PPT.

I could just move on to iWork, but it only has word processing and presentations. (I’m particularly bummed, because I was going to try out creating an easy AppleWorks database with my 3rd graders this year. And Access is out of the question.) Drawback, again, I don’t have the dough to cover all the machines.

I could go with NeoOffice. Free, open source = whoopee. But, I’ve had it on my iBook for a year, and stopped using it when I got Office because it was so slow to load, and not too exciting. However - the new version based on OpenOffice 2 is available in Beta, so I’m going to try it out. This might be my solution.

Then there are web-based word processors like Writely & Zoho. I might try these out with my JH kids who move back and forth between their own PCs and the school’s Macs. It might solve some compatibility issues for them. Then again, it might be a bust since *if* they have internet at home, it’s mostly dial up.

The open source solution is the only one that could give me coverage on all machines. But I know that brand loyalty and comfort level are going to make it tough to get everyone to buy into using it.

My first challenge is to get everyone to stop saying “Appleworks” and start saying “Word Processing”. It’s like getting people to say facial tissue instead of Kleenex.