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School District To Parents — Buy Office 2007

Posted by kdawson on from the no-more-parents'-dirty-looks dept.

WS Nick writes "Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending that parents of high school students upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007. Why not use one of the free alternatives and relieve parents of some of the financial burden they face to buy all the stuff for their children the school requires?" A comment from a reader points out how easy it is to interoperate with Office 2007 from earlier versions.

4 of 632 comments (clear)

  1. BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    If you want a clunky copycat with about half the functionality, sure, go ahead and install OO.o. But the SD is smart to recommend that the students use something that will actually get the job done (assuming "the job" is anything above and beyond a plain text letter), not to mention actually prepare you for a workplace that demands Office in almost every case since OO.o doesn't cut it.

    1. Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE by aichpvee · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      FUD? "Goodies" in Excel spreadsheets? I'm talking INTERFACE. Calc is ridiculously hard to use to even do simple tasks because it's interface is poor and even when it can do something (which I'm not always sure it can) it's impossible to find out how to do it. Most of the time when I go looking for how to do something the answer is "it doesn't do that and we like it this way."

      Just because Calc blows and I realize it doesn't mean I have anything to do with microsoft.

      Fuck that. And fuck you.

      --
      The Farewell Tour II
  2. Re:And we all know that kids can only learn one th by erik+umenhofer · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Reality is, when you see "Staroffice, PDFCreator" on your resume after college. Geewiz, I could give 2 craps how fast they could learn office or adobe, the resume says they don't know it now. All the care about is the key words. You completely missed the point.

  3. Stop using the term 'grammar Nazis' by Simonetta · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Slashdaughters, please stop using the term 'grammar Nazis'. The Nazis (a shortened version of the German words for national socialism) were a group of very evil and dangerous men who started a war that left 70,000,000 people dead and half of the civilized world in ruins in the 1940s. They systematically murdered nearly every Jewish person in areas under their occupation.

        The term 'nazi' is not a acceptable metaphor for those of us who request precision in language structure. It insults the memory of the good people who were slaughtered by this criminals. Perhaps 'grammar martinet' after:

    martinet \mar-t'n-ET\, noun:
    1. A strict disciplinarian.
    2. One who lays stress on a rigid adherence to the details of forms and methods.

        And there is no reason to criticize precision grammar anyway. This shit is important. We can't make functional language translation software if people don't use precision grammar. The difference between (its and it's) is just as important as the difference between [ *(function_name) and * function_name].

        But seriously, stop using the term 'grammar nazi' or anything 'nazi'. It is assured to cause you social embarrassment outside of the geek community.