In this article I am going to present a few tips to help you help others migrate to the open source office suite. In the end, your users will enjoy a full-featured office suite that will cost $0.00 per seat to use (CAL about that?).

1. Change the default file type

For most users the default “save as” file types in OpenOffice will cause more trouble than not. They will create a document and then, when their co-workers/instructors/friends/etc recieve that .odt file, have no idea that Microsoft Office won’t be able to play nicely with their work. Although I prefer the open document format, I generally switch all default file types to the Microsoft equivalent. This is done in Tools > Options > Load/Save > General. Make sure you go through the drop-down and change all the necessary default formats so that when your user saves that precious document, it will open in other office suites.

2. Avoid the ribbon

I don’t know about you, but I am not a fan of the 2007 Ribbon interface of Microsoft Office. Of course there are plenty of people using it. Now if you are coming from a standard interface to a ribbon interface the migration is much more difficult. I would imagine coming from a ribbon to a standard interface doesn’t hold nearly the challenge. But even still, what do you do? If you’re really desperate you can hold off until Project Renaissance comes to fruition. This project aims at create Open Office’s very own ribbon-like interface. Otherwise, ween your users off of the dreaded ribbon before migrating them to OpenOffice (if you think they will have any issues going back to a standard interface.)

3. Tool for tool, feature for feature

One thing that always surprises new-to-OO-users is that the open source suite does contain just about every feature they are used to using – and more. You will want to show the new users where all of the Open Office tools are: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Base (if installed). And once they see where all the tools are, show them that generally OpenOffice mimics MSO feature for feature. Keyboard shortcuts are similar (<Ctrl>c, <Ctrl>v, <Ctrl>p for example), menu entires are similar, spreadsheet formulas are similar. One of the best ways to ease a new user into OpenOffice is by showing them how little difference there truly is.

4. No personalized menus

MSO offers a feature some users grow to depend upon. After using a feature a number of times that feature will find its way to the top of menus in MSO. That is not the case in OO. Instead, in OO, the menu entries are static, so your users will need to get to know the full location of all the menu entries they need to use.

5. Auto-correct/auto-format

This is a huge feature in both suites. And fortunately, for new OO users, it works very similar in both suites. But OO offers one other tool that MSO doesn’t – word completion. You will find this in Tools > Autocorrect > Word Completion.

6. No side panes

Starting with Office XP, Microsoft introduced side panes to MSO. OO does not have side panes. The closest OO has to side panes are docked and/or floating windows for Navigator, Styles and Formatting, Gallery, Function Wizard, and Data Source Explorer. If your users insist on having sidebars in OO you can open the equivalent floating window, click on it’s title bar, and drag it to the side of the OO window until you see a dark outline where the window can dock. When you see that outline release the title bar and the window will dock.

7. Where is Print Preview?

Many users like to view their documents before printing. Print Preview allows the user to see what that document will look like in printed form. If you look through the OO menus you will not find a Print Preview. You will find, however, a Page Preview (File > Page Preview) They are the same thing.

Final thoughts

The migration from other office suites to OpenOffice really isn’t that difficult. In fact, many users might hardly notice the difference. But there are users that might wind up in a panic when they see their old friend MSO was replaced with OO. With these tips it shouldn’t be all that difficult to ease their worries. What about you? Have you found a tip or two to help ease the migration? If so, share.

Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager is available as a free download from the official Microsoft homepage. It comes as a 2.7 Megabyte download and an Office 2007 Online Migration Guide which explains the usage of the migration tool.

To achieve this Microsoft created a set of tools for the purpose:

• The OMPM File Scanner which is included in the whole package can scan for conversion issues
• A set of tools to import the findings of the scanner into a new SQL database
• A reporting solution based on Microsoft Access 2007 that provides various report about the analysis
• The Office File Converter that can convert previous Office documents into Office 2007 format in bulk
• The Version Extraction Tool which makes it possible to extract saved versions into different files.

The Office scanner is a command line tool and a user who wants to use it has to edit an .ini file of the same name to add the drives and folders that should be scanned for Office documents.

One interesting tool that comes with the Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager is the bulk Office 2007 converter which can convert Office documents that have been created with previous versions of Office into Office 2007 format.

Ofc.exe is available in the tools directory of the unpacked archive. To make it work the file ofc.ini has to be altered to at least contain a path to a folder with Office documents. Upon execution of ofc.exe those Office documents will be converted into Office 2007 documents.