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School District To Parents — Buy Office 2007
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.
"If students use an older version of Microsoft Office at home, it is usually possible to translate their projects back and forth between different versions of Microsoft Office,"the letter said. "However, this can be a tedious process, and information may not be always be translated properly."
Basically what they're saying is, "We standardized on crappy software that probably isn't even compatible with its own previous version, so you better buy the newest one too so your kids won't be stupid."
Having worked in a school district IT department was a real eye-opener. There were tight budgets with no money for building critical infrastructure. But we'd all be damned if we didn't have the latest versions of Office and new computers to run them on.
I pushed open source wherever possible, even in the back-end, but it was a real uphill battle. We'd buy the $299 Adobe Acrobat when all they needed to do was make PDF files, and for that, something like PDF Creator http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ is great - and free. And even after I demonstrated how easy it was to use and how good the results were, there was still resistance.
I wonder what kind of break the school district gets for pushing parents to upgrade?
The people who passed with reasonable scores knew word processors
Unfortunately, the testers didn't. Pagemaker is a desktop publisher, not a word processor. They might as well have told them to write in Eudora, it's close enough.
And yes, I get the point they were trying to make.
screw that, what's wrong with office 97? It's 5 times faster than Office 2003 and honestly feels overall far better than Office 2003 or newer.
Even if you do the advanced Access Database stuff, it's just fine for 90% of what businesses do and 98% of any school needs.
honestly I cant understand the mental illness of "gotta upgrade". My daughter's school was icthing to upgrade their horribly out of date 3 year old Mac towers in the Media classroom to new intel mac towers and buy Final Cut Studio 2 for each of the machines. I stood up and asked...
"is it wise to replace WORKING computer and software with over $15,000.00 of new when the kids dont even have enough decent cameras to do the projects? how about actually buying cameras, tripods and lighting gear instead of replacing perfectly good editing computers and software that is STILL state of the art?"
The school IT director tried to come up with a reason, the funniest was "updated virus protection" where I could not hold it in and blurted out a laugh, and said, "That is not an issue, ask anyone that is an IT professional."
I called for a vote and the parents sided with me, which utterly pissed off the It director as he had to hand $15,000 of his budget over to the Media director... I'm betting that shenanigans were being pulled and he wanted to spend it on something else.
A couple of other parents then started questioning his other requests, like vista upgrades. It was an entertaining and long night, being a private school all paying parents get a vote in school policies and get to call school officials on the carpet at these meetings.
If high school students learn on final cut 5.1, they will not ball up on the floor crying when they see final cut 6 in two years at college. The exact same thing will happen if they use an older version of office or god forbid and alternative.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Only if you define 'excellent' as 'uses flawed methodology' or perhaps 'gives wrong results'.
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http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+formula+flaw
You shouldn't be using the "display equation" in Excel, since it doesn't have any notion of significant figures, and can give you crap results if the intercept and the slope differ by orders of magnitude. You should be using the slope() and intercept() functions for linear fits (which also exist in Calc) so that you have the numbers in cells. You can format the cells to display the proper number of sig-figs, and have the numbers available in a cell for further calculations.
If you need to fit more than a line, then you should know how to transform the data into a linear problem. If you need something more sophisticated than the ordinary least-squares fit to the transformed problem, then you probably should be using a tool other than a spreadsheet.
Displaying the equation on the graph will only work if you have few sig-figs and all parameters of the fit are of equal orders of magnitude. And even then, you won't be able to DO anything with the numbers other than display them.
"Uh... yeah, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?" --Pinky
Printable http://www.kcchronicle.com/articles/2007/07/27/new s/local/doc46a9cc9908105330494432.prt
Why UNIX?