I recently decided to prepare my class notes in statistics on the computer and I used OpenOffice for it initially. But then I decided, why not give LaTeX a try?

So I decided to use LaTeX to type in all my class notes. My lecturer was impressed with the results and he appreciated me for having done such a good job even though he was not curious enough to know how I did it.

But I guess this is one instance where Open Source tools produce much higher quality work than proprietary tools. Take for instance, MS-Word. I don't think I could have produced such a high quality text with mathematics with Equation Editor. I would have also taken much longer to produce the same amount of work. Using the mouse, clicking in formula would have taken far too long, whereas with LaTeX I was able to do it so fast and so easily.

So do anybody else have any incidents like this to share? Have you got appreciated for producing high quality work using open source tools? Do you point it out to your friends like I do when I use Linux and Open Source to achieve something? Share here!

My tutor last year liked the fact i'd e-mail my work in .pdf format from oo.o....

Yes and also I've vowed not to use Powerpoint for presentations any more. I use OpenOffice Impress, but unfortunately I am forced to convert it to PPT to show on other machines because other people simply won't have OpenOffice.

And yes. PDF is a great idea for large documents. Saves you several headaches of not losing your page layout and settings and also not losing your fonts.

My boss's nearly wet themselves with money-saving joy when I introduced them to ethereal. ( you know what these desk-pilots are like!)

Any chance you could run Portable OpenOffice off a USB drive in those situations..?

knoppix is your friend. OO comes with it, you just need to have an extra cd drive or a USB stick large enough to hold your Impress presentation *grins* life is grand.

yes i helped my wife with her "computer class" for school and her instructor was both impressed with the .pdf and the fact that she did not use front page to make her web site. i showed my wife how to use the OO web writer program and she was able to do all kinds of nice stuff like tables and crazy links etc with very little help from me. all i did was go in behind her and clean up some of the extra stuff that OO web writer added and cleaned up the tables a bit.

i have also had many customers bless me for bring my laptop into their LAN and cleaning it of viruses (love f-prot).

I use oo impress as a college lecturer and the students are non the wiser, prepared under linux and the shown on windows as oo is avaliable on both platforms. Working on getting knoppix to do the job, mp3 is the stumbling block at the moment as I use lots of sounds and pictures in lectures.

overall its a little extra work but I feel it is worth it.

Appreciated by fellow lecturers who appreciate my verve for either (as they view it):

1. Thinking outside the box
2. Fighting US hegenomy
3. Amazing them with k3b, amaroK and digiKam


Even impressed a Chinese collegue recently by burning his photos to CD in superfast time and via integrated software.

Why should you be appreciated for using open source tools?

If anyone should be appreciated, it should be the developers.