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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.
Why is it that so many school districts are so quick to buy expensive Micro$soft software when free (and sometimes better) alternatives exist, then turn around and complain about not having enough money?
What functionality is OO.o lacking that would prevent junior from writing an essay and printing it out to turn in?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
It is a bit strange to propound that managing interoperability between the two versions is a tedious process. I think that a sheet of paper with instructions would be sufficient, even for the most computer illiterate students, few though they may be.
Concerning free alternatives, I don't think that we should expect widespread adoption of things such as OpenOffice, at least in public schools, for quite some time. Not all teachers are geeks, and they want to use that which they are accustomed to using. Even the slightest change can throw some people off.
This is quite a contrast to, say, university computer science departments, which are often filled with Linux computers, while the rest of the campus uses a plethora of Microsoft suites. It's just a different culture, with different expectations of what their computers and their computer software should do. When I tried to get my parents, who are not computer illiterate, to use OpenOffice, they became irritated, because they didn't want to have to learn something new. They just want it to work as expected, so that they can do what they need to do, in the way that they know how to do it. That's not unreasonable.
When moving to a new system, one must always weigh the cost, in time (and, consequently, money), of educating the people in the new software. Most of the world uses Microsoft Office. Unless someone releases something so similar to Office that it is nearly indistinguishable, this will likely remain unchanged, no matter how equal or superior the alternatives, free or not, are.
Yeah, because there are just a million things you need to use spreadsheets for in high school (or college for that matter). I can't recall using very many (if any) during my school years... I certainly didn't have to do anything that would have required MS Excel that any other spreadsheet program couldn't have done just as easily.
Given the high cost of education now, with education costs often comprising the vast majority of the municipal budget, especially for small towns, it is highly irresponsible for schools *not* to be considering and using as much free software as possible. If they are further going to drag parents into it, then it is doubly true as it becomes just another tax, unless companies are willing to provide free software to both schools and parents. Commercial software companies such as Microsoft have every right to a profit motive, but school districts also have a responsibility to use the least expensive recourse and there is no sustainable argument that commercial software is better than free software for education purposes at this point.
First of all, school isn't (strictly) about job preparation; it's about education. And they'll encounter any variety of things in the corporate world, not just Office. If their skills are good, they'll adjust to whatever they've got put in front of them. School is most importantly about learning to learn.
But aside from all that, if schools start using, say, OpenOffice, you might start to see corporations do the same. And since it's taxpayers funding the software acquisition, I'd rather the district stick to the free option so long as it works well enough for the students' purposes.
And we all know that kids are incapable of learning more than one piece of computer software in any genre.
Which is why video game sales failed. Once the kids learned to play Tetris, they couldn't learn to play Counter-Strike.
Everyone knows that you cannot teach the kids HOW to write. And then leave it to them or their employer to teach them the keystrokes/mouse moves for the word processor that they will be using. You have to teach them on the only software package they'll ever be able to use for the rest of their lives.
And spreadsheets work fine in OOo.
I've always found it funny that every time you install a new version of Windows, during the blue install screen it keeps popping up features that are new about this version of the operating system. I specifically recall going from 98SE to ME (which was a nightmare, I might add) and laughing audibly at the "We have made keeping your photos and music organized easier than ever!" and "Now ME makes it simpler to use your computer to do..." Basically, these were all vaporware statements.
With that said, aside from it being "easier than ever to do..." can someone give me a REAL example of how office has changed from 2000 to 2007? I'm serious, I want to know what features have been added (and I don't mean changed to the GUI that make it prettier) that actually ADD FUNCTIONALITY. This is the real reason that this story makes me mad. I don't believe that it has really changed at all, let alone enough to charge me a $100+ to upgrade.
All I know is that 2007 is looking to be the first step for Microsoft to begin its DRM document implementation where it can lock down it's DOC format that will require people to stay with a certain level of Office or higher if they don't want to lose their documents."Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
>>By the way, Batavia, IL isn't exactly a poor area. I bet most of the families in that Chicago suburb could afford the $150 expense.
The other arguments have be handled so I'll tackle this one. When you say "most" of the families can afford $150, what about the rest? Frankly, schools should NEVER allow a rich student to get disadvantages over poorer ones. There are enough ways to do so already (private turoring, cliff notes, etc.) Why mandate a new one?
As unfortunate as it is, Office dominates the corporate landscape, and Office 07 or greater will eventually be the status quo. It's to a student's advantage to spend considerable time with that application suite. They will need to become familiar with its interface, idiosyncrasies, and annoyances. Running Open Office is not the same learning experience, especially for those who are not as as technosexual as we are.
I've instructed digital media the university level, and I try to recommend free or affordable software as often as possible, yet their are some poison pills you need to swallow. Office is a god awful suite of applications and most kids will need to learn how to interact with it.
That said, hopefully they will setup good computer labs for kids who can't afford the software or don't wish to buy the software.
If anyone else needs me, I'll be the guy in the corner being pummeled by the guys with the Open Office t-shirts.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
As much as I want to sing the praises of Open Office, Microsoft's version wipes the floor with it, I mean, the new graphics and stuff in it make all the presentations and A3 posters which I am made to do at my school. Fact is: Teachers like perfect presentation. MS Office works, it looks good and makes things easy- Open Office is a struggle all the way and doesn't look any good in the end.
It lacks nothing a junior would need, but it's still a tough call. I feel schools have a duty to give children the skills they will need in order to make it. In this era, I think that means having rudimentary word processing skills. Maybe I'm off-base. MS Office is a de facto standard for business communications, and so forcing students to learn it and develop skills in it is a good thing. We're not talking about merely teaching kids to type documents on a computer. Were that the case, DOS and PFS First Choice would suffice... Man, I hated that program. Still, this decision has an unfortunate effect of steering potentionally new and uninformed computer users straight to Microsoft, and it forces parents to spend a lot of money on a product their kids really don't need.
I would have standardized on an output format, and then provide a list of applications capable of producing output to that standard. If you're capable of writing a term paper to spec using an old edition of Adobe PageMaker, all power to you. But what do I know, I'm only a scientist who things about shit like this all the time. The decision makers at the school district don't think about these things, and probably only considered Word Perfect as an alternative. We're dealing with an audience that likely buys all of their software shrink-wrapped, so it makes sense that OO.o wasn't chosen.
True, but if Office 2007 is what the kids will be learning at school, then Office 2007 is what they need to be using.
In college all of our high-level math courses were geared around the TI calculators. They are great machines, and I finally got my hands on a couple of them, including the TI-92. However, at the time I borrowed a friend's Casio, because I was dirt friggen poor. Guess what? I spent a LOT more time translating operations between the calculators than I spent on the course work.
I use Microsoft Office and StarOffice (Sun's commercial OO.o) and interact with customers in the two formats frequently. There are pluses for each one, but I lose a good bit of formating between the two, especially conditional formating and certain complex formulas. I work with it because I am familiar and comfortable, but in a learning environment one should spend more time learning the curriculum than how to work differently. If you want to use FOSS alternatives in school, pick a different school, or try to convince your school (or instructors) to use them.
The idea of corporations switching to software like OO.o instead of Office (or The Gimp instead of PhotoShop, etc.) is not highly likely. What is taught in school, especially at the college or vocational technology level, does not frequently drive what happens in the corporate world. A massive shift from corporate standards at the learning level would be a disservice to students: you enter college with the expectation that you will leave with universally marketable skills.
A better approach might be to offer alternative software courses which would count as elective courses towards a degree. Or even make such a class a requirement in programs like CS, IS, or MIS, so that students come out with a more rounded approach and understanding. I believe that would be more likely to induce a shift at the corporate level than a sudden change by attrition.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Here I go feeding the trolls again.
Let me ask this:
What is "wrong" with Office 2003? Forget about opposition to OO.o. Why upgrade to 2007? If there is something wrong with 2003, what is it?
I'm really stuck for a business case for the upgrade... what might it be?
Upgrading is a viral problem the way I see it. And without using Microsoft as an example, I'll turn to Adobe instead. There's this supposed standard we call "PDF." Once upon a time, I was looking over some job opportunities. The forms needed for the application process were in "PDF" format. The problem was that my PDF viewers kept prompting me for a password to view them. When I contacted the potential employer about the password issue, they told me there was no password.
As it turned out, the "password" or key in this case was to use Adobe Acrobat Reader 8. There is something about 8's new format that stopped me from being able to open it with anything else. So much for it being a "standard" and "portable" format. While I'm sure that this problem will be addressed in subsequent OSS PDF readers, it would seem that Adobe has introduced some changes that keeps the target for "compatibility" and "portability" moving.
In the end, business and other non-entertainment computing is largely about data acquisition, processing, storage and presentation. For acquisition and storage to keep going into the future, "standards" must be maintained. As "standards" keep changing, problems are introduced. If these standards are owned and kept as secret, this limits potential for data acquisition and storage to that which the owners of the secrets are willing to support. They keep the secrets and ultimately our data.
When computing was a young and developing thing, the value of new technologies and progressiveness trumped compatibility. We are either in a plateau or at a level of maturity in technology such that truly new and novel technologies are rare and the value of these new technologies does not trump compatibility or interoperability with our ever-growing pool of archival data. (I'll remind all readers that there is clear example and precedent where new technologies are often suppressed in order to perpetuate an existing business models which may explain the plateau or apparent maturity of information technology as we know it.)
The irony of the maturity of information technology is that there's a great deal less true motivation for "upgrading." It is my view that people have just grown accustomed to "upgrading" without thinking about it. Costs involved are often just written into the budget and on and on... fortunately, people ARE, in fact, asking that crucial question: "WHY?"
Where on earth did you get that idea? School is setup to make you learn to follow orders and be a good little worker bee so that you can take your place in society. They don't care about educating you.
than I will and using more polite words, but:
What type of retard would not be able to use MS Office after having used Open Office?
And are they the same retards that will have trouble handling a transition from MS Office 2003 to 2007?
Your college math was geared around built in proprietary function calls that had to be translated to the point that you spent more time translating than working on math?
I was in engineering which is about as applied as it gets and we weren't even allowed to use calculators for the vast majority of our math studies.
All the real mathematicians are weeping if that is what passes as college math courses these days.
Apparently, the school board has realized that Office 2007 is not compatible with other versions of Office since MS-Word makes the new scary ".docx" files. However, instead of making everyone in the city upgrade, why not just go under options and change MS-Word to save as the standard ".doc" files. This way, the school board will only waste tax payer money once. Silly school board.
If you think you need this specific version of Office to make good documents then you are illiterate and no software will help.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Schools should be teaching how to use computers.
They are not supposed to teach "click here, then this happens, click there, to do that" just Microsoft software.
Bullshit. I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft - I won't touch their products whenever I can avoid it - but I think its ridiculous when people talk about their right to choose an operating system (or office suite) like it's protected by the first amendment.
When I was in high school, I was told what text books I needed (most were available to rent from the school for a reasonable price), what kinds of pens and pencils I was allowed to use, what kind of binders or folders were acceptable, what kind of calculator I had to have, and the list goes on. They also had a contract with Coca-Cola and weren't allowed to sell Pepsi products in district buildings or at school functions.
Now, when I was in high school, the district didn't require students have home computers, and the library was available for those who didn't. But if a district can require every student to own a computer, an office suite they can get for $25 is just another school supply. When I was in high school, we were told to use a TI-83 calculator. Some kids opted for other graphing calculators, but they didn't get to waste the teachers time if they didn't know how to use a feature. Likewise, I'm sure there will be a few tech-savvy students who get by with their own choice of office suite, but it's unfair to the teacher and the rest of the class to occupy the teachers time with software incompatibilities because you're too obtuse to buy the recommended software.
I do think this is a poor decision on the school's part. I think it's a wasteful expenditure when OpenOffice.org is available for free and will do everything a high school student writing a report could possibly need. I personally don't like that they're supporting Microsoft, but be realistic - a set of software is no different than any other school supply. The district may have certain obligations with respect to what expenses they can place on their students, but otherwise they can choose a software suite just like they can choose a calculator or a certain textbook.
Deal with it.
So, your job's pay was dependent on you knowing how to use pagemaker, even though you don't use it in your day-to-day job? How is that merit pay?
I understand most people should be able to pick up on any word processor put in front of them, but that's not relevent to the question at hand. Maybe the people were Microsoft-product literate. A better test would be to ask the people to do the work in a Finnish version of Office. Those who got reasonable scores would know the keyboard shortcuts and how the menus are laid out, which is all an enduser needs.
And, about your last statement, my reply would be: If you cannot use proper grammar, you're just sorry and your job should probably be sent to a third-world country. See how that's more relevent to word processor skills than knowing 'F7' means spellcheck?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Your approach is interesting -- but I don't think it works. Try changing the page margin after this operation. Does the table need adjusting?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
or just someone who doesn't want to use computer programs that come from 1994?
No, your approach is wrong. Why? Because semantically, it's not a table, it's a heading! If you hack up your document using a table instead you might still get the same visual effect, but the structure of it will still be very, very Wrong.
Among other things, this would screw up the outlining function, table of contents, parsing by search engines, parsing by text-to-speech engines, etc.
Of course, then you get into the issue that everything Word-like programs do is Wrong, and that people ought to be marking up their documents in some semantic markup language (e.g. TeX, DocBook) instead. But I digress...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Unless you know anything of the base mathematics, in which case you can come up with it yourself readily.
our local school district has some sort of deal worked out, where local parents can buy OEM software through a distributor and get really fantastic deals. Office 2003 was about $40; Acrobat was less, etc.
When my friends first asked me about it (I have no kids) I thought they had come across some sort of spam site selling pirated software- but it's fully legit, they just have an arrangement to channel all the sales to a particular vendor who gives a big discount on top of the educational pricing.
So any school district with a good # of kids is looking at some powerfully persuasive arguments to get good pricing for their students; and as a parent, having access to all this software for a fraction of the list price is pretty nice too...
(that being said, Office 2007 is a pain. I like how they have redesigned it, but I am LOATHING how much work I am going to have to do to get our users swithched...)
EOM
In other words, "Blah, blah, blah, American schools suck, they don't teach, and they're only about indoctrinating kids into needing government to take care of them." Congratulations, you're on the bandwagon.
What "dose of propaganda" are you referring to? Are you one of those religious nuts that refuses to believe in evolution? Or just a malcontent who things schools are sanctioned by the government in trying to turn all of our children into Socialists? Either way, it's no wonder kids are turning out badly with parents who have such disdain for our educational system.
Here's a thought: Public education was never intended to be the be-all and end-all of a child's education. You are supposed to be (gasp!) a partner in your child's education. If there's something you think your kid needs to learn that the school isn't teaching them, you are supposed to teach them. People who drop their kids off in the morning, pick them up in the afternoon, and expect all of their educational needs to be met with no fuss and no muss are idiots, and there are a depressing number of those people around now.
Are there problems with schools? Sure. Surprisingly enough, just like everything else in our world, I'll be the first to admit that they're not perfect. It's reasonable to expect that a few times in your child's educational career, they'll have a bad teacher. This isn't a failure of the entire educational system, it's called LIFE, and believe it or not, even that teaches children valuable lessons in dealing with people and situations they don't like. Guess what. Once they get out of school and into the work force, they'll probably have a few bad bosses, but oddly enough, I don't see people using that as an excuse to say that capitalism and the free market is a failure.
Or maybe you're one of these nuts who supports publicly-funded school vouchers to private schools. If you want to send your kid to a private school, more power to you. But don't you dare ask for my tax dollars to do so if you don't like the school that my tax dollars has already provided for your kid. I find it extremely stupid and hypocritical that the people yelling because they're having pay for public schools that they don't want to send their kids to are asking for other people to help pay to send their kid to a private school.
Or perhaps you just think we should privatize schools. I've got news for you. Until around 1870, schools were privatized. Why do we have public education now? Because it didn't work, at least not very well. The result was that rich people's kids were educated, poor people's kids were not. Our public education system was one of the key factors in our country becoming a superpower, and almost all modern nations have public education and have greatly benefited from an educated general public. As hard as it may be to believe, even rich people greatly benefit from an educated general populace.
As for the rote memorization and other teaching methods, I hate to burst your bubble, but some things are a pain in the ass to learn, and the best way to do it is to memorize it. If you think that memorization doesn't serve an educational function, please don't ever sing the alphabet song to your kid. That kind of thing is way too rigorous. Don't teach them to spell, either, I guess they'll just pick it up through, I dunno, sleeping with a book under their pillow and absorbing it through osmosis I guess.
Besides that, I don't know what kind of schools you went to, but by the time I was in ninth grade or so, my classes actually rather free of rote memorization. In English, I had to write essays about symbolism in poetry. In history, I had to write about the impact of some battle to some war. In government/economics, I had to create projects that demonstrated methods of advertising. Even in math, the most rote class there probably could be, I had to use a wide base of knowledge that spanned the previous decade of learning to solve difficult
I don't suppose submitting your assignment in PDF format is an option. That's what I've been doing. Besides, that's considered to be the appropriate format for finished products.
It sounds like a hack, not a solution. We're talking about headings here, not tables. TeX is very straightforward about formatting. In TeX, to make text flush with your margins is like saying exactly that, make the text flush with the margins. To make Word do this you need to add a non-intuitive object reminiscent of HTML in order to get the formatting you want. Word is a nice tool for people who're uninterested in knowing the internals of formating. However, I've never thought that mixing formatting and writing
would result in anything but poorer writing. It's hard enough to write well as it is, let alone when you're worried about making it look right at the same time. I'm ranting Knuthisms, sorry. Cheers.
I used spreadsheets for many years. I started with Lotus 123 for DOS. I also used Excel for years. I have also put considerable work into Open Office Calc. Take the time to friggen use it before you start spouting off. Hell, it reads and writes Excel files. That means it understands how to use the goodies in those spreadsheets. Stop with the FUD, sheesh.
I'd created spreadsheets that were massive, did huge calculations, look up, multi sheets, multi files, huge charting, printing, and macros.
What you are saying is that no product but the latest is a capable product. It just isn't true. Those older products were immensely powerful and capable spreadsheets. Open Office calc is far far far more advanced and capable.
So, get off your high horse. Open Office is a good solid alternative and should be the recommended choice by these educational institutions.
They are probably receiving funding from Microsoft through grants to get students to use their product because they believe that those students will demand and purchase those same products when they graduate into business.
BTW, the whole pre-college system was designed around the blue collar businesses to get workers trained for blue collar jobs. It is well documented.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
If you agree with me, why did you use <b> and <i> instead of <blockquote> to quote me, and asterisks instead of <em> or <strong> to show emphasis? (I won't comment on your apparent use of <br> instead of <p> for paragraphs, because for all I know Slashcode mangled that part itself.)
; )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In the end it all boils down to what objective do you want to achieve and how much time do you have to do it.
...
TeX is incredibly powerfull and can do pretty much everything you want to have a perfect document. The downside is that mastering TeX takes a long time and creating any document which is not long enough so as to justify designing a clean, well defined, structure and set of structural elements takes a lot more time with TeX than with (Open) Office.
The thing is, most of us don't have that much time available for documentation in our professional occupations since that is not our core occupation, and just want to finish the damn document so that we can go back to doing the real work.
It's not by chance that TeX is only really popular in academia and with those whose work is to create perfectly formated document (for publishing)