by Katie Parkinson

This year the administration implemented LibreOffice as the school’s word processing program. This change from last year’s program OpenOffice, has been met with many student complaints.

“It is just so different from OpenOffice,” junior Maria Luna said. “We all got used to OpenOffice and then [the administration] changed it.”

However, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are very similar, according to Mr. Jeff Zimmerman, an administrator of the Technology Team. The company Oracle bought out OpenOffice and put restrictions on the development. This caused many of the original developers to leave OpenOffice and create LibreOffice instead. Although they have different names, both programs use the same code.

The school switched to LibreOffice due to Open Office’s uncertain future. Oracle just recently abandoned the program and gave it to the company Apache.

Next year the Technology Team hopes to use Microsoft Office as the word processing software on the Netbooks.

“It is up in the air,” Zimmerman said. “We present [the idea] to the administration and they tell us what we can do.”

According to president Nan Bone, it is possible that Microsoft Office will be downloaded onto the Netbooks for the upcoming school year thanks to support from a Microsoft representative.

“I think we are going to go with [Microsoft Office],” Bone said. “The administration has a version of Microsoft on our computers, so we really had to listen to the students. We talked about even doing it this year, but decided it would be too complicated because we would have to pull all the Netbooks [from the students] to put it on. ”

According to Luna, it would be a lot easier to get work done if the Netbooks had Microsoft because converting file types would not be necessary.

“I would like having [Microsoft Office] because I know how to operate it better and it works quicker,” sophomore Emma Mullen said.

One of the main issues students have had with LibreOffice is its slow loading time. According to Mullen, LibreOffice will not start up sometimes and she has to reboot her computer to get it working.

The Technology Team recently posted a workaround tip on Moodle to help solve this problem. According to the tip, when LibreOffice first opens, click on ‘Tools’ in the top left hand corner. Then click ‘Options’ and ‘Memory’ and check the box that says ‘Load LibreOffice during system start up.’

“The tip did help,” Luna said. “It cut down the loading time by about 10 seconds. Now it takes about 30 seconds to a minute to load.”

According to Zimmerman the problem is not LibreOffice itself. During the imaging process, a time over the summer when updates are put onto the Netbooks, some files became corrupted. This caused the slow downloading times students have been experiencing with LibreOffice. However, since the workaround tip has been posted on Moodle, the problem has basically gone away.

“[The tip] helped for a little bit, but now it is going back to how slow it was before,” Mullen said.

According to Luna, another part of the problem is LibreOffice’s alternate format.

“All the buttons I got used to on OpenOffice are not there and it is just really irritating. A 20 minute paper takes an hour,” Luna said.

LibreOffice is also more complicated than Microsoft in terms of figuring out how to insert and format pictures, according to Mullen.

“I just really like the idea of having Microsoft,” Luna said.