About Having "Had It"

Last night, to an empty house, I announced "I have just had it with OpenOffice." It felt so good to say it out loud that I said it again, with more emphasis. I wrote it later to Joel and said it to Hiromi after he got home, and this morning I said it to Judith.

I did have second thoughts during the sermon this morning when I realized I was not rejoicing the slightest bit in my trials. I'm still trying to figure out what further action is needed, either in the attitude adjustment department or in the software purchasing department.

I've whined before about the trials of getting a presentable booklet in print with the limitations of the software that all the students have access to at school--the free OpenOffice one. Because I knew that I could never hope to have them learn to do such a project on their own, I was determined to figure it out for myself and then teach them how to do it. After a month of working at it, and learning how to solve many problems along the way, I have reached the conclusion that it's really NOT WORTH IT for such a complex project. It's better to use a more sophisticated program to start with.

Besides me, three men who all have plenty of other things to do, have invested a number of hours to help get things figured out--Harold N., Wesley S., and Joel I. Some or all of them could have earned enough money in the hours they spent on this to have bought one of the better word processing programs. I have used a good bit of paper and ink to print online instructions for some of the workarounds it took to solve problems. I suspect, furthermore, that most of the students have a better option at home than OpenOffice. If that is the case, why are we wasting their time at school by teaching them the intricacies of a version they may never use again?

The crowning insult on the Rural Roots booklet project was that after everything finally looked good, it printed only in a miniaturized format. The suggested workaround for that was so ridiculous, I gave up in despair. The print area was to fit on an 8 1/2" x 5 1/2" sheet, so I set the paper size to that. Apparently I should have made the 8 1/2 measurement something like 13 inches so that it would spread out over the sheet properly. That's what I mean by ridiculous. At his invitation (after I announced my complaint) I emailed the manuscript to Joel in an attachment and he transferred it to Microsoft Word and cleaned it up for about another 3 1/2 hours and then printed a nice copy.

To be fair, I should add that OpenOffice does work fairly well for most of what the students do at school--writing study notes for themselves or completing written assignments. At other times, when it doesn't work so well, I agree to accept something that is clearly second best, because I feel it's unfair to ask them to go through the contortions it would take to do what I think would be better. Case in point: For footnotes on the research papers, I saw that the superscript numbers in the text and the endnote numbers where the sources were listed . . . both were in lower case Roman numerals. Arabic numerals would clearly have been preferable, and I checked to see how it could be changed. There might be a way, but I couldn't find it, and they couldn't either, so I said to leave it the Roman numerals way. No teacher I know will want it that way, but that's what they've done, because of the way the program works.

I wonder what other small private schools do for word processing software, or more importantly, what we should do. Any ideas? Needless expense is to be avoided, of course.