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

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.

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!