The great laptop experiment ends

The experiment that had me trying to see if we could have a couple of pool laptops to go to trial sans MS Office officially came to an end today. Much as we don’t want to, it looks like we’re going to have to order the 5 user open license of 2007 so we can have downgrade rights to 2003 on two laptops.

I had my boss and our CIO in for a show and tell today, and like I mentioned earlier, the real hang-up is presentations. The Open Office Impress just didn’t cut it at all. Word processing and spreadsheets, no problem, but there’s just no easy and reliable replacement for PowerPoint, and since our folks tend to do quite a few presentations as part of cases and arbitrations, we just couldn’t ask them to learn a whole new way of making changes to the presentations with IBM Lotus Symphony. Maybe if Impress handled timed effects and animations the way Symphony did (just like PowerPoint), or Symphony had the Office-like menus and GUI like Impress does, I’d have something but as it is, there’s too much of a learning curve for our users.

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