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.

Comments

Students can't share a PC with their parents

[originalhack]

The district suggests they buy a discounted version restricted to educational use. Tough luck if the home PC is for the whole family.

I have the opposing problem

[falcon5768]

I have been for years trying to get people in my district to use Open Office, or cheaper alternatives. But Microsoft has people so convinced that word documents wont open with anything BUT Office that Im about to just give up already.

For what they do in most grades, notepad would be all they needed.

not surprised

[chantron]

As an IT employee for a public school system, I am not surprised at all. These people live and breath Microsoft products. Outside of the IT department, OSS is practically taboo in my district.

Its ridiculous to the point of sheer ignorance.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

[sssssss27]

My friend uses OOo Calc for her assignments and I believe she is attending FSU. So if it's good enough for them then I imagine it's fine for whatever high school assignment you need.

Vote them out

[nurb432]

Complain to the school board they are pushing a single vendor and not teaching. Contact your state representatives as well.

If they refuse to do anything, vote them out, and run yourself. And refuse to play this game in the first place.

Unless the class is "how to use office 2007" and an elective, they have NO right to dictate this, remember they work for you, not the other way around.. ( even if you can get educational versions for 25 bucks )

Re:Vote them out

[GPSguy]

> Unless the class is "how to use office 2007" and an elective, they have NO right to dictate this, remember they work for you, not the other way around.. ( even if you can get educational versions for 25 bucks )

Interestingly, two of my three kids have had to take State-mandated "computer literacy" classes, where they had to demonstrate proficiency in Excel and Word, and my daughter also took a"graphics" class where they learned to tweak images with Paint and Photoshop. Needless to say, we no longer treat as accurate any pictures she forwards our way...

I have OpenOffice installed on the computer at home, and after getting past some set-up hiccups, no one has ever had homework ("Must be written in Microsoft Word") refused, nor have they lost points. In one case where they were told to turn their work in as a PDF, my son was able to export directly... and without us buying Acrobat as he'd been told he had to do.

That said, my wife just bought Office 2007 because she got it for a steal -- and legally. She is afraid I'll ruin the middle kid's chances for good grades in his senior year because of my intransigience. Go figure.

I'm building up a new system for the 4th grader. It'll have to have a Windoze partition for some of his games, but he's gonna grow up with open source solutions as his norm, not the exception.

Ugh, it's everywhere

[sykopomp]

I recently became the sysadmin for a nonprofit. First thing they had me do was install 7 copies of XP on 7 P3 900mhz 256mb RAM IBMs that were donated. We also had 7 licenses for Office 2007, but I opted to install OpenOffice first and see if they were happy with that. Then the first person I upgraded for threw a tantrum because Writer didn't have a "diploma-style border" available and "it doesn't have the fonts I need! (neither did Word)". Needless to say, I gave them Office 2007, which runs amazingly slow on those computers. Everyone except this one woman uses word processors for very basic writing tasks, but now they all want 2007... and they were so incredibly happy when it got installed. Microsoft's influence is just that strong. People want what Microsoft peddles. It doesn't matter if it works better. That's what they're used to, that's what they know, that's what they've learned to use through rote tasks, that's what they'll continue to try and use. Hell, they looked at 'ribbon' and thought it was the best thing that was ever created for an office suite, and one of them started giggling with glee. Help me T_T

Re:Ugh, it's everywhere

[sykopomp]

I don't need to. Office 2007 already runs like shit on these computers. First one I loaded it on took 20 seconds to get to the document, choked up every 5 letters written, and all the ribbon buttons responded 1-2 seconds after being pressed. They don't *care*. Because it's Microsoft.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

[d_jedi]

I recall using it quite a bit in Physics classes for lab results.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

[ratboy666]

Even the SC spreadsheet does "complex formulas and scripts" just fine. TeX works for "complex formulas" much better than anything else.

Even troff is usable for most word processing. It is (arguably) superior to Word in several ways.

I will argue that since Word is not capable of SIMPLE formatting in a sane way, it is not a tool that should be used.

If you need a heading (for example) that has parts that are both flush left and flush right, a tab must be set on right margin. The tab cannot be set relative to the margin, and thus, when the right margin is adjusted, the tabs must be manually adjusted. Word fails at this simple task. Neither TeX or TROFF has this problem.

Re:Just a quick question?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm starting to think that "god", as a way of referring to the Judeo-Christian God(whether or not you believe there's any such beast, atheists/agnostics are unlikely to care), has become part of the language, though, at least from a descriptivist model. Just like "G-d" is sometimes used in Judaism out of respect for the deity, "god" is increasingly used by atheists and agnostics who wish to use God as a rhetorical device(which is necessary to use many popular idioms) while explicitly showing that they do not intend to express any sort of faith in the Christian God.

Re:And we all know that kids can only learn one th

[budgenator]

A while back our County contracted for computer literacy testing for merit pay purposes for the office workers. The contractor asked which word processor the workers used and was told Microsoft Word, Well the contractors showed up and administered the test using pagemaker! The people who passed with reasonable scores knew word processors, the people who didn't just memorized click streams. If you can't jump back and forth between similar programs your just sorry and your job will probably be sent to a third world country.

Microsoft Tax Revolt

[florescent_beige]

It would be very interesting if someone got caught using cracked copies of Vista and Office 07 to comply with this.

Civil disobedience and subversion don't seem to be part of polite Western society any more, but still, one can dream. That society at large and a judge in particular would be sympathetic to a parent who is forced to pay the MS tax "for the sake of the children" when low-cost and no-cost alternatives exist.

I can just imagine a tired looking soccer mom and middle management dad sitting in front of the camera with fists full of back-to-school bills for clothes, calculators, cell phones, computers, printers, sneakers, band equipment, sports equipment, more clothes, paper, cool pens, text books, binders, and yet more clothes...holding up one more bill for Vista, Office 2007, and the new computer required to RUN THEM, and saying into the camera "Why should we pay for this when there are free legal alternatives that work just as well and when nobody asked our opinion before this decision was made. If there really is no alternative to using MS products then the cost of MS is a tax, and MS should ergo be expropriated in order to hold it accountable to the taxpayers that fund it. We therefore refuse to pay tax to MS until said company becomes answerable to its tax base, or until our school district specifies at least one alternative zero-cost software environment that would impart NO SCHOLASTIC PENALTY."

I know. But one can dream, can't one?

What about non-windows machines at home

[chipperdog]

What if a student's household only has a Mac or Linux computer
Maybe the school district should serve applications over the internet to students using Citrix, or MS terminal server, so everyone is on the same version, wether it is on the latest Windows PC, an iPhone, Mac, Linux, BSD, MSDOS

Not good enough

[iminplaya]

I think they should be forced to use a Cray, or an Eniac. That ought to weed out the riff-raff.

Seriously this is insane. We won World War 2, built the SR-71, flew to the moon and back, built and flew the Concorde without a single loss of life for over thirty years with a slide rule and a typewriter. Now, with all our fancy computational chicanery, we have a broken down space pick-em-up truck that was twice wrecked and can't be used more than twice a year, if even that, a fixer upper space habitat, a decrepit, half blind space telescope, and we can't get back to the moon if our life depended on it. And the schools think that a secretary's office program will save the day? We are in a heap of trouble. The art of learning is going straight down the toilet.

Open Office

[Suicidal Gir]

I work in the IT Department at a fairly rich public school district, and we have made the decision to go with Open Office. Obviously it makes no sense forcing kids to upgrade to Office 2007, and this way we will be saving over $100,000 in licensing fees and may be able to hire extra staff with the saved money. This also solves the problems of kids bringing in documents saved in open standards and not being able to open them up at school (quite the large problem).

Re:Why not?

[jgrahn]

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.

Which will most likely be built on the foundation of MS Office. Search Google for "MS Office integration" and you'll get 80 million hits. Still unconvinced? Open the "Help Wanted" section in your metro Sunday paper.

This is getting ridiculous.

People very rarely use MS Word beyond the functionality that Wordpad offers. And they very rarely use MS Excel as anything but a way to arrange text in columns and rows.

So, not only will these students be able to use different tools; they will also learn very little from it. And when they get jobs in the future, noone will expect them to have learned anything -- because everyone treats MS Word as if it was Wordpad.

It's a mystery why so many organizations are fixated on Microsoft software. But it's a bigger mystery why, when they have that software, they don't use more than a tiny fraction of its capabilities -- less than they ought to in order to use it efficiently!

Re:Expected from Establishment

[hazee]

Even the slightest change can throw some people off
But surely Office 2007 is far more different to previous versions of Office than Open Office is?