[sf-lug] Progress at the school with Linux

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi,

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 4:46 PM, David Sterry <david at sterryit.com> wrote:

> 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.


We have been trying for some time to get them off of this spreadsheet.  It's
really tough.  They don't see a reason for it, at least not yet.  We are
going keep it up, though.
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