Open Office for Uni Courses - SHU Biomedical Science

Hmm... not sure if this post really belongs here or on my work blog.. I think here.

I had a teeny run in with a Uni recently when it was suggested that Microsoft Word and Excel must be used for production of various assignments. I'm wasn't suggesting that the eventual hand-in couldn't be a .xls or a .doc but purely that mandating the tool wasn't a legitimate thing to do, and indeed that I felt it was ethically very shaky position for a uni to adopt, particularly given recent EU rulings. Anyway, long story short, the official party line is that students can use whatever tools they like, provided that they hand in something that can be opened in word or excel. Peachy!

We all know the truth tho, sometimes, OOo does have subtly different menu structures and features to different versions of the MS tools (Just as different versions of the MS tools themselves do) and sometimes, documents don't open in different versions of office as they do in OOo. I offered to update the Excel for Biomedical Sciences workbook with annotations for OOo, an offer which met with stony silence, go figure. But the problem remains, how do we organise it so that Biomedical, and other science students generally, can use OOo toolset and be confident that the output will be acceptable in it's .doc and .xsl forms, and that it's easy to find out how to perform a function that is located in a different area to the MS Office toolset.

So, in the interests of being community spirited, I'm going to try and use the following delicious tags SHUBioMedSci and OOo whenever I find a resource about using OOo for Bio Medical Science at Sheffield Hallam, yielding the following Search for SHUBioMedSci AND OOo which will hopefully return useful resources to anyone interested.

Peace and Love,
e.