Free Office Software for Education in the Cloud

Media reports indicate that the free open source LibreOffice software suite is being ported to run from an on-line server, only needing a HTML5 web browser on the client device. The software is also being ported to Android and iOS operating systems. This could be a useful alternative to Microsoft Office and GoogleDocs, particularly for educational institutions which want to provide students with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, but respect the privacy of the students.

For the last year I have been using LibreOffice. Previously I used OpenOffice, but when I upgraded to a new version of Linux, it came with LibreOffice and have not noticed the difference. The word processor has reasonable compatibility with Microsoft Word, the spreadsheet less so and the presentation tool is not so good (and less compatible with Powerpoint). I have been using OpenOffice/LibreOffice for several years teaching at the tertiary level and it has been adequate.

Having the option to supply the students with free office software which runs in a browser, on a tablet computer and on laptops and desktop computers would be very useful. One issue with cloud based applications is where the data is hosted. If the server is in another country, then there is less control over the data stored. If the educational institution can host the application themselves, or arrange for commercial hosting in the same country, this lessens problems.

Microsoft Office 2010 support for OpenOffice

Microsoft Office 2010 is due for release in May. A Beta version with the new features of Word, Access, PowerPoint, Publisher, Outlook, InfoPath, Excel, SharePoint Workspace, OneNote and Communicator is still available. The new version will be able to create and read document in both the Microsoft sponsored OOXML format (Office Open XML, ISO/IEC 29500:2008) and Sun sponsored ODF (OpenDocument Format, ISO/IEC 26300:2006). This will better allow the interchange of documents with the open source OpenOffice.Org office suite.

OOXML was provided with Open Office 2007 and ODF in Service Pack 2. However, it seems likely that many documents will still be created in the older proprietary .DOC (Word 97-2003) format to maintain compatibility with older versions of Word and other pre XML formats.

Neither OOXML nor ODF can be read directly by a web browser. My preference would be for a HTML based format. Microsoft tried this with a previous version of Word, with a HTML based format which could be edited, however it did not become popular. However, newer versions of HTML and CSS provide more features and so fewer workarounds to implement word processor features. In addition both OOXML and ODF are conceptually similar to HTML based ebook formats, such as Epub and the Amazon Kindle format. These all consist of an XML formatted document, plus formatting and images, zipped into one file.