I’ve been looking for an alternative to Microsoft Publisher since the dawn of time…  Ok not quite but I’ve often thought that if an alternative existed the school could drop the $7000 per year cost of maintaining Microsoft Office.  The Macs could run Neo Office and the PCs could run OpenOffice.  Or both could run OpenOffice.

The two main advantages are cost and familiarity.  The cost is, of course, free.  Being that OpenOffice is cross platform is a big advantage because the interface is identical no matter if it’s Windows or Linux or Mac.  Currently we have Microsoft Office 2007 on the Windows computers and Microsoft Office 2008 on the Macs.  While MS claims them to be the same, they are not.  The interface is very different and MS doesn’t offer Publisher on the Mac side.

Scribus- alternative to MS Publisher?

The biggest holdup has been publisher because so many teachers use it to create newsletters to send home.  I’ve been waiting for a good alternative to present itself and while OpenOffice doesn’t yet have a clear cut choice it appears that another open source package, Scribus, might do the trick.  At least during my five minute trial and test of features it appears to work very much the same.  It doesn’t have some of the polish and word wrap appears to be funky but it does do many of the things the teachers want and think they need.

This discovery will weigh heavy on my mind as I try to investigate the possibility of eliminating MS Office from the school’s standard software and by doing so save over $6000 per year!

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