[sf-lug] Progress at the school with Linux

[David Sterry]

bonjour
> He has not yet installed the Power Grade app on Microsoft Windows,
> since the vendor offering that program has been slow in getting back
> to him the data that was somehow locked up in their proprietary
> cloud.  He just got the data this afternoon, just 10 mins before I
> spoke to him.  That app is moving entirely to the cloud, hopefully
> soon, so he will soon be able to browse to it, and will be able to
> dump the proprietary client app used to access the data.  Hopefully. 
> There might be a Microsoft Excel tie-in, and while OOo is quite good
> at opening 955 of Excel spreadsheets, it does not work on the massive
> behaviour-tracking spreadsheet that they use to keep the kids behaving
> well.  We have repeated tried to open that spreadsheet, and even on a
> fast dual core machine with 2 GB of RAM, it takes 9 mins to open that
> spreadsheet, and whenever you want to add data, it also takes about 5
> to 9 mins to process the changes.  So it is possible that Power Grade
> will be tied to Excel, and thus another obstacle to a complete
> migration for this teacher.
There's  just something fundamentally wrong with a spreadsheet that
large. An Ubuntu LAMP server might be a nice way to transfer away from
that monstrosity if someone's game. They'd just need to import it into a
table and build a php interface for it. Would take time but it would be
worth in the end if someone on staff is interested in learning some
application development.

-David Sterry
http://trygnulinux.com