Slashdot Mirror
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?
The district suggests they buy a discounted version restricted to educational use. Tough luck if the home PC is for the whole family.
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.
So the parents will all band together and get Office 2007 for $100. Some will download that compatibility pack. Finally, some will try OpenOffice and will probably suffer no hiccups at all. Someone should do a study on this situation and report back. We'll be waiting...
My teachers were just glad they didn't have to try and decipher what I call 'handwriting' and the rest of the world calls 'gibberish'. They didn't give a damn that it was written with wordstar on a 4" amber lcd. Oh, and daisy wheels were the bomb!
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
For what they do in most grades, notepad would be all they needed.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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.
As a paid shill for Microsoft and Transcend, I think parents should also buy Vista Home Premium, which can be easily installed on Transcend compact flash drives.
"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?
I use OOo Calc everyday, with excellent success. Would you mind expanding on your opinion that "OOo Calc is horrible" ?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
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 one of the main reasons they will see this in the corporate world is everyone is already used to it. I'll be the first one to admit that Microsoft Office is a much more robust tool than Open Office but 90% of the things people are using it for can be done equally well in Open Office. So if we can get kids to learn Open Office why not? It's free and it helps build inertia for Open Office in the work place.
but guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college.
I really don't understand this argument in the least. We should be teaching kids (well, anyone in fact) how to learn new software packages, because they'll spend a lifetime doing it. If these kids are all bone stupid and can't learn something as simple as a word processor or spreadsheet after having used a different word processor or spreadsheet, I'd agree with you.
Honestly, is Office 2007 that much different from Open Office than Office 20007 is from Office XP? The "I can't use Microsoft Office because I used Open Office", or vice-versa argument just doesn't hold water. A word processor is a word processor, and if you can't translate your skills from one to another, you're useless as software interfaces (especially GUI ones) change all the time.
AccountKiller
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.
The big picture is that the kids need great teachers who challenge them and parents encourage their kids to work hard in school. The rest is mouse nuts. If you pick this battle, then the more important one will suffer.
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"
If it's plain, but if it includes any complex formulas or scripting. Then its hit and miss.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
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.
What would be wrong though is if the school recommends a specific product without having it freely available in their computer labs. If the children can't have access to Microsoft's products at school after the teaching hours then there is a problem. Before recommending parents to buy a product I would make sure the kids can have access to a good computer lab.
>>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?
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 )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college."
And why is that? Why, it is because all the bosses and 90% of all the (non-IT) people never used anything but Word in High School and College! So yea, as long as you tell everyone in highschool to use Word, that's what they'll see in the workplace. Of course, if you used a variety of things, there would be much more variety in the "real world" and businesses might even be able to make an informed decision! Can't have that! Point is, there is no real reason to upgrade to office 2007 unless you just like giving microsoft money, to be perfectly honest.
And as others have pointed out, all high school students are computer illiterate and can only use one piece of software.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
It teaches your kids to think for themselves and take action when they are being screwed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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!"
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
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.
I recall using it quite a bit in Physics classes for lab results.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
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.
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.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Requiring its use is unnecessary and wasteful. There are already free alternatives that do absolutely everything and beyond what is required in a highschool setting. It's straightforward to use them generally, there's no reason to "train" to know how to use a Microsoft product specifically in preparation for college and beyond. Pushing for a totally unnecessary product to be bought by parents will win over only an ill-informed populace.
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.
I do XY plots with multiple sets of Y values all the time, and I get the expected results. What do you get?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Office works pretty well, but I have spent large amounts of time trying to get it to not change the formatting on its own. As I recall, I did eventually manage to do so, but I had to check about a dozen different settings menus before I finally found the one which would do it for me.
The main reason why people complain about the alternatives is that yokels insist on emailing only native word docs. Stupid to do and dangerous from a security perspective, but people expect to do it anyway. The majority of people don't need all of it, rtfs work just fine in most cases.
As for me, I pretty much use abiword or Open Office. I have access to MS Office, on my mother's computer, but I have yet to find a reason why I need to use it. The basic functions, the ones that most people use are reliable, even going between office suites. The argument that it just does basic letters is quite misleading, as people really shouldn't be doing a whole lot more than that anyway.
The more advanced the features, the more likely that a bug is going to pop up or that it is a feature that works differently in a legacy version of MS Office. And considering how often the word format changes, it will happen. Expecting that that many families will buy new software is ridiculous. Even if most/all of the families have the money, expecting to effectively spend $150 of each families budget is ridiculous.
That isn't necessarily to say that Office is crap and nobody should buy it, I am sure that there are some people that have a legitimate need, but expecting for that many people to buy it for features that are best not used anyway seems a bit backwards.
Where one camp say: "Listen, Office is in fact demonstrably better than any Free(tm) alternative,"
and the other says: "Nobody needs all that functionality anyway."
Oh - you meant MS Word right? When you spoke of clunky copycat? That would be MS Word. A clunky copycat of Wordperfect - they even tried to borrow the name.
This was before Windows mmkay.. Before it got even clunkier by adding a GUI to try and make things harder^H^H^H^H^H^Heasier.
Today's openoffice, based in part off of Sun's Star Office works very well, even for advanced documents.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I have personally survived 3 years of engineering at U of Maryland using only Calc for spreadsheets. And yes, I survived high school too.
--
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.
Having used all three, I would say yes. The differences between Open Office and Office XP aren't that great, but the difference between Office 2007, previous versions of Office, and Open Office are wide. It still does the same things, but the interface is so different that it will require retraining for many users.
My Sysadmin Blog
I think:
People just aren't comfortable with computers, they're still unsure. So as a sysadmin your main job isn't to give them the best option in an objective way, the main chunk of your time should be spent making them comfortable with their system. Give them MS office, cos they know office, they like office, office worked in the passed, office was always what they used why change now? They don't care if they call you 100 times a day to get it to work, they're comfortable. Then of course they want 2007, its new, its got more stuff, they're sure it'll do everything they need. Of course when you talk to them they'll know that Open office is a perfectly good substitute, and they don't need 2007, but they're aren't sure of it, not like they're sure they like and can use MS office 07.
That's not the real problem. The real problem is that 10% of the simple, everyday and compatible things people are using it for are different enough, or buggy, or hidden. For example, if you open a MS Word document with tracked changes the Word brings up the Revision toolbar where you can immediately work with changes. OO 2.2.0 does not even have the toolbar, and the only access to the revisions is through the menu "Edit" | "Changes" - which I had to search for in the help, so well it is hidden from view. Death by a thousand cuts (or a hundred of little problems) is not any less deadly than a death from one major defect. Besides, it's easier to fix one deadly bug than to change hundreds of stupidities that are entrenched in the controls and spread everywhere.
Open options or preferences, turn off "Auto-Correct." Took me about 30 seconds after switching over from Corel.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If it's anything like the $60 version available to students on my campus, it means that they cannot upgrade it and receive no warranty. They have to pay another $60 for a "full" academic version.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending that parents of high school students upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007."
The students aren't required to use Office 2007 at home, it's merely recommended.
All this means is that, if people buy Office 2007 and they have problems with it, they can talk to Microsoft. If they didn't buy Office 2007, as the school recommends, it's their problem.
If the school recommended, say, Openoffice, then they would be expected to stand behind that recommendation - and to provide an explanation, if it ultimately turned out that OpenOffice is a complete lemon. As recommendations go, it's not an especially safe one. But people still have the option of using it if they like, regardless of what the school recommends.
Bow-ties are cool.
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?
Besides the price tag, OOXML, Ribbon, and system requirements... is there an actual reason why Office 2007 is just bad?
MS Office 2007 Home & Student OEM CD & License $129 at the near by tigerdirect Retail Store in Naperville, IL
What did you need to do in those classes that Calc couldn't handle?
Because Microsoft wins anyway. Everyone will know how to use their software, cos the normal kids grow up learning MS Office, and the smarter ones look further for better things, and choose thigns like open office for its moral compass and things, but almost invariably, these will be the same people who have an affinity with technology so would be able to pick up use of MS Office fast anyway, so in the end microsoft gets what it wants a generation who grows up invaraibly able to use their software or at the least learn to use it very fast.
School is most importantly about learning to learn.
Not really, your retention level is low. They don't really teach critical thinking until college/university. Before then it's rote memorization unless you were fortunate to find a "good" teacher. Grade school, middle school, and high school is much more about keeping your kids busy while you worked and giving the kids a good early dose of propaganda and start them on a career path. They may learn stuff too but chances are it wasn't taught in a way they'd really retain much.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
No. One of the main reasons why they will see it in the corporate world is Excel, which there is no alternative too.
My Sysadmin Blog
People always focus on presidential elections, but pay scant attention to anything below that. You know who votes in schoolboard elections? Teachers. They have a direct interest in it - these are the people who they negotiate with about salaries (next time you hear whining about teachers being underpaid in the suburbs - kick them in the shins, most suburban teachers get paid extremely well and get better benefits, sickdays, and healthcare than most of us).
Anyway, most schoolboards are filled with people who have no problem spending your money on bullshit. Also, many teachers are extremely reluctant to use software they are familiar with - thus they would rather spend your money than take a day to familiarize themselves with anything different. I can't blame them, but it misses the big pictures on costs and licenses.
That was my response to the school board here-at a public meeting. The Board members that required Office lost the last election,too
Geek Hillbilly
As I said above, the reason why they will see it in the corporate world is Excel.
My Sysadmin Blog
And after having seen your second sentence, I think you should hold off the spelling Nazi comments lest a grammar Nazi comes after you.
By the word or by the post?
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
Likewise, you can easily switch between Corel Draw, Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and MSPaint without problem. All these apps simply adjust pixels on an image, where the difference is in the procedure (which could be learned thorough trial and error or be reading the basic docs.)
As a more practical example - would you hire a secretary that is so used to computers to a degree where pen-and-paper would be useless backup? 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. Most likely, that's a flawed college course (unless it is meant to teach a specific calculator) - even if the calculator is the best in the world.
In day-to-day use, I don't have access to a TI calculator - instead, I have access to a notebook-sized programmable calculator (where I can use either the stock config, or grab an alternate skin from a recent contest). Depending on how the course content was written, it may either help me, slow me down, or force me to study another section.
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.
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."
You need to point out the long list of organizations rejecting both Office 2007 and Vista, particularly the US FAA and DOT. If the school district wants to be in step with government and business, it needs to hold off and consider migrating to gnu/linux.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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?Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
everyone has their hand in the pot $$$$$$.
someone's getting paid off.
You know, I was totally floored when my 10th grade chemistry teacher laid this out on the line for me, and dispensed with any pretense about teaching me knowledge. It was quite the eye-opener.
Now, of course, it seems obvious. And it's kind of sad, really. Learning is fun, it's just a shame that it doesn't happen in the school system.
EOM
The big picture is that the kids need great teachers who challenge them and parents encourage their kids to work hard in school.
Great teachers cost money and don't need expensive software that others have rejected. Even if you don't spend the money on teachers, you can spend it on something that can help students learn, rather than a DOCX translator. One outraged resident did a good job of expressing this:
This tells us that a large part of $74,000,000 was wasted on computers that no one needs, and software that no one else is running. The thourough investigation of the business affiliation mentioned in the article might send someone from the school's administration to jail.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A clunky copycat of Wordperfect - they even tried to borrow the name.
As an aside: when it comes to trying to borrow the name, nothing beats when Lotus changed Ami Pro (formerly from Samna) into "Word Pro". Ami was a pretty good word processor and according to Wikipedia was the first one that came out for windows. I wonder why it didn't become more popular.
Today's openoffice, based in part off of Sun's Star Office works very well, even for advanced documents.
I can't ditch Office at work because I use Outlook, but I find that the only feature I miss in OO Writer when I use it is the Outline view (it does wonders to help me get started on documents of more than a couple of pages).
No sig
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
Outlook 2007 puts all the emails that you flag for follow-up
.net 2003,
in a list in the "todo" bar. Makes them easy to find,
reminds you there are there. That is the one thing I have
found.
I recommend against developers upgrading to 2007, if you use
as it seems to have broken things for me. Or try it on a test
machine, make sure things work after.
emt 377 emt 4
Since when has MS word standards on upgrades. With each upgrade the user has to learn the new way things are done.
The problem can be even more screwing than what it appears to be right now. The difficulty with schoolteachers are that they no more have the habit of learning new stuff. And as they are not familier with OO.o they would force their students as well to use something which they are comfortable with. This problem is not new. There are many places where the prof. have penalised students and have discouraged them from using GCC or IDE's like DevCPP bacause these old aged, head in the coffin and legs in the grave profs don't find themselves comfortable with the error messages which are not generated by Visual C++ or Turbo CPP for that point. What needs to be done is that the institutions all across the globe should try and make their faculty members aware about the latest Open Source tools and validate use of Open Source tools as a standard alternative.
Yes, but the cost of purchasing the software is only part of the equation. What about training costs? Most people are quite familiar with MS Office, but I would say less than 10% of the kids would know how to use OO, and the percentage for teachers would be even less.
--Scott
The statistics formulas in Excel are excellent and I could not find an equivalent in OO.o. Having said that, I've had no need of it since my Engineering Statistics class and I nearly exclusively use OO.o when the choice is given me.
There is a spreadsheet component in OpenOffice, and it reads and writes Excel files.
It doesn't work so well at loading and running VBA macro viruses, though.
Gnumeric isn't strictly gnome. I'm running it on Xfce. Gnumeric's dependencies are pretty straightforward to install, in case your system doesn't already have those libraries.
Auto-correct is an active spell checker, not formatting. For that you need to find all the auto-formatting tools, like the ones that make bulleted lists.
Yea, I turn off auto correct as one of the first things on a new Office setup for myself. Cept it still does its own formatting bullcrap. Lists are what I hate the most about it. I've just been too lazy to find that setting though.
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.
Then we get dramatic articles about how, "the money is better spent on free software."
Uh, the money is better spent on textbooks, and new books for the library. And chalk and paper and stuff.
And the money can be contributed to '*real* injustices in the world' so to speak.
The last thing it should be used for is to subsidize the free pop coolers in Redmond.
Msft shills seem to think so. All this: "the kids have to learn what they'll use in the real world!!" crap.
Want to guess how much time it took me to learn a WP? None. I just figure it out as I go. I suppose there are some specialist who make extensive use of the advanced features of their WP, but is that why kids go to school?
For what most people word processors for, how long does it take to go from OO to MS, or vice-versa? It didn't take me any time at all.
Speaking about getting paid to reply on internet posts, how do you contact with HR to apply such a position ? It seems that companies don't publicly advertise these jobs on their websites.
Do we HAVE TO work at contractors or even off-shore or can we find a confortable offer too from the manufacturer itself ?
I also received e-mail SPAMS for such offers which reached about all the Internet community, but seem to come from irrespectable sources. So what's the point not being able to contact directly the recruiter, I'm sure much better employees could be hired this way.
Not sure I follow, but that MS Word is a de facto standard in itself is my point. I've used MS Word since around version 4.0, and with the exception of new features I never really noticed my work flow to change much over the iterations. I might have been lucky in that respect though. If you were asking whether I was saying Microsoft upgrades = standards, then yeah, why not? One thing Windows and Office instilled in me over the years is this constant psychological need to upgrade. It's an illness for which the only cure is Macintosh. *wink*
Actually, this is one of the major things that drove me away from OpenOffice and AbiWord. I couldn't get my documents to print properly. The fonts always came out looking funny, with letters shifted slightly to one side or the other, sometimes overlapping a little with other letters. Maybe I am not using these products properly, but before I finally decided to buy Office 2004 for my Mac, the only way I could get a paper printed properly was to typeset it with LaTeX, which is a little bit overkill for a writing seminar paper if I do say so myself.
There is wisdom to this indeed. Most college Computer Science programs didn't start migrating to teaching primarily Java until they saw that the high-school advanced placement program for computer science chose to do so.
There does tend to be a trickle-up effect from primary education to higher education. Whether the effect extends from higher education to industry and enterprise remains to be seen.
From my personal, high school, college, and work experience, I've used spreadsheets 98% of the time for text. The other 2% used numbers and simple formulas. If I got real crazy a chart.
Really? I did all my Electrical Engineering lab reports in Star Office for OS/2. Either that or DeScribe ... but I digress. I suppose that if you want to have the prettiest report, you may need stuff only found in Office 2007. But if you merely want to report your results so you can get the mark based on your understanding of the topic, and the execution of that knowledge, and then move on to your next class, OOo is more than adequate for the task.
(For those who may be missing some of their Geek Points(tm), DeScribe went defunct a decade or so ago, having produced one of the most innovative object-oriented word processing programs available for OS/2 - when they ported to Windows, they found themselves to be a small fish in a big pond dominated by Word Perfect and MS Word, and, as I understand it, couldn't recoup their extra porting costs, and died. Star Office is what OOo was before Sun bought it.)
Sometimes I dream of our country rising up and demanding that formal logic, or at least the top x logical fallacies, be taught around 5th grade. I suspect it'd make a huge difference in the world if the average person on the street had a solid background in the subject on graduation from highschool. As it is now, just as you say, someone's only going to get it at university level - if even then.
Everything will be taken away from you.
They're not particularly straight forward on Slackware. Before you say I should try another distribution keep in mind that I don't actually like Linux, I like Slackware.
The Farewell Tour II
Vendor Lock-In sucks hardcore.
To everyone in the second camp, I have an easy demonstartion of what Office 2007 can do that Open Office cannot: Easily interface with Office 2007, which is on the school's computers. Whether the school computers should have Office 2007 is a totally different subject. Hence, parents with students in the school who want this feature should update.
And if I'm wrong, tell me about it here, sure. But TAKE ACTION, and write an op-ed to the local paper and advise them that OpenOffice.org will offer a free alternative office suite.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
We actually learned how to use Excel Macros as part of a physics course, for analyzing experiments. (This is uni, not high school though.)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The only reason I can think of is the additional font sets. Some of those font sets are supposed to be easier for most people to read on a monitor for prolonged hours at a time. Supposedly they come with both Vista and Office 2007. The bad part of Office 2007 is the new format *.docx isn't as big of a corporate standard as even *.odt (OpenOffice.org default standard that can be changed to MS-Office 97-2003 standard on saving). Anything were Works would mostly work OpenOffice is a great substitute, for other projects one would need to consider other software and keep in mind what would be required for the software to work for their needs. Could a class project add it to the software? Is there a bright programmer who would love to add to the project needs that would make it closer for some extra credit [Computer Science class or class related to the project (i.e. Grammar modules in OO.o for English class, adding history sections with correct information to a game, ...).
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. Microsoft give education discounts. I got Office 2007 Ultimate for $70AUD (~ $50USD), where for a non-student it would cost a completely absurd $1500AUD.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
When I was in school...no, we didn't use clay tablets and styluses, or papyrus, shut up, whippersnapper...we learned how to use a word processor.
It wasn't Microsoft Office. It wasn't even Microsoft Word, the standanone version before there was a monolithic Office. It was Bank Street Writer, on an Apple II. At home, I used something else, on my 386...I actually don't even remember what it was...maybe PFSWrite.
In High School, I was introduced to Word. At the same time, I was using Wordperfect at home. I still managed to type up the 3-5 papers a year that were required to be typed and even got into an argument over a threatened "F" from my sophmore English teacher who refused to believe I could do a "rough draft" of my final paper on the computer as well as I could on actual paper (I eventually wrote out verbatim what I had originally saved as my first draft, she wouldn't take it, but she didn't fail me as she'd threatened, I think she finally realized it was a stupid requirement).
At college, we used both Word and WordPerfect as well, and I also used Abiword in the dorm room on my Linux (Slackware, running kernel 1.0.somethingEarly, installed from floppies) and printed across the campus to the labs where I had a friend working their shift grab my papers off the printer.
The point is...as some poster in here commented...these aren't "Ofice 2007" classes these kids are taking. They're learning to type and use computers in general. Learning and using a different word processing package is mostly trivial if you already know how to use one. That the school district is "strongly suggesting" (as in, "We strongly suggest you buy our protection insurance, we'd hate for something bad to happen to your family's store, ya know?") that families upgrade to MSO2007 indicates that the school ddistrict itself doesn't really understand just why they should and do have and need computers in their schols in the first place.
As another poster said...contact the school board and administration. Explain why they're wrong. If they still don't get it, make sure you vote at the next election, in most places, that's in about 4 months, you have plenty of time to spread the word about how your current board and administration are more interested in spending their hard-won budgets on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Microsoft software while cutting programs in your students' curriculums.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I agree 100%. OSS is like a religion: in order to be a believer, one has to choose. People saying that schools should only have OSS software are missing the point that in order to have true adoption of OSS, the parents, the students, corporations etc. should adopt OSS solutions before the people doing the education will get the point. People are just buying MS software because that is what they are comfortable with.
I use Office 2003 and OpenOffice almost on a daily basis and don't have a problem. But I'm not a n00b to alternative software. I also use Firefox, but I'll be damned if I try to force my mother to use anything but IE (which she is comfortable with).
The game.
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.
My biggest pet-peeve about computers is programs that think they are smarter than the users. Things like auto-correct, auto-formatting, auto-linking, and a bunch of other "auto" stuff that I never asked the computer to do in the first place. I liked it when word processors didn't try to guess what you were doing, and just did what you told them to.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
First, many employers are going to be looking for MS Office on the resume, and will test for MS office. They often will not be very tolerant of someone who has to look for commands, not do they need to be. Even at higher level jobs, I have seen ads for MS VS, or MFC, or Qt, when in fact if a person is trained to program, they can program in any language, and the employer should be more concerned with design and problem solving skills. Still, even employers who might know better still seem to want training ina specific product.
Second, the teacher has to support the software choice. If the student is running open office, the techer has to know how to help on that applciation. Now, since the average teacher test asks questions like "what is a word processor" and list the components of MS office, I don't think there is much training going on in the general word processor category. BTW, this question is from a national test from a well funded progra meant to educate college bond students. It is meant to test for college literacy, as if knowing hwo to use a single office suite makes one literate.
Third, and this relates to the other two, students can be minimally motivated. Students can do no work for a week because they were not given a pencil, and then complain to their parent that the failing grade is not fair. They can be taught how to solve a linear equation, and the complain to their parents that the test included negative numbers. This is to say that students, as all children, will tend to do more work trying to get out of work, and those that actually try to do work might have trouble abstracting the concepts. Even adults do this. I have seen people never lean that file open actually opens a file on the disk, and any command, evern c-x c-f does the same thing. I have seen people not understand that IE just loads file from the internet, and firefox does the same thing.
So while I think that it is a great waste of taxpayer money to pay for MS products, I do agree that a single product is probably the right choice. I think that OO.org could be a better choice, but that would require a level of sophistication that does not appear to exist in the average school district. We are talking IT people who state that IE poses no undue significant security risk, so there is no reason to support other browsers.
This is also why workaround with older versions of MS is silly. If the software does not work in the exact same way as at school, and the student gets stuck, that is the teachers fault for not teaching, not the students fault for not trying. So if the file is saved at school as 2007, and taken home, and it cannot be read for any reason, the student often gets a walk. Likewise, if the ribbon is taught at school, and all these menu present themselves a home, the same thing happens
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Fermilab is located in Batavia. Population about 25,000. In 2000 The median income for a household in the city was $68,656, and the median income for a family was $81,689. Batavia, Illinois
Yeah, it sucks that they are going to a non-free option where the cheapest version is about $150 USD
Assuming you qualify for no deeper discounts:
MS Office Home and Student 2007 is $122 at Amazon.com. Retail boxed. Three seat license. No. 1 in Amazon software sales. Excel, PowerPoint, Word, OneNote. No academic ID required.
Office Professional 2007 - Academic Edition $170. Excel, Word, Outlook, Power Point, Access, Publisher, Accounting Express. Bare minimum for academic pricing is student ID for grades K-12.
I hate it when it takes "-----" and turns it into a solid line across the page. Don't leave that line there, because if you do, it'll take a long time before you figure out how to get rid of it! (You have to use table/borders, IIRC, even if there's nothing that looks like a table on that page.) They might have fixed this in Office 2007, but I doubt it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
What?
download software == piracy == illegal "hacker" activity
And, of course, they don't give a damn about actually doing their homework and reading the open source licenses (GFDL, creative commons, etc), either. But then again, most people don't read the Microsoft EULAs, and just click on the 'agree' button, too. Plus, there's also the problem that these people are not really listening when they hear all the hype about "downloading software" and "viruses". Their buddies just tell them, "don't download anything on the internets!" And they listen to it, without recognizing the difference between a "good" download and a "bad" one.
Of course, a lot of people are also just more incinded to purchase a product in a store, because it's easier, than, "going to the intarwebs and navigating all that techie stuff." They're just, "not familiar with 'downloading'," and don't want to screw up their computer.
I have two children in high school, although not in the USA (Ontario, Canada).
A couple of years ago, I had a long talk with the teacher because they are teaching an obscure language that has to be licensed (for a fee). If you care to know, it is called the Turing Language.
My view was : why not use one of the cross platform free languages, e.g. Python or even Java? So we don't have to use it on Windows. Arguing with the teacher was futile. He agreed with me, but said the decision is from the school board. I left messages to someone at the school board, then got a call a week later, and explained the situation, but nothing came out of it.
Then, a few months ago, the other kid was asked to do something in MS Power Point as part of learning that software. I called the teacher and explained that we don't run Windows, but rather Linux and that there are free alternatives, such as Open Office that are cross platform. She first recommended that the work be done in school on PCs that have Windows already, then said that doing them on Open Office is fine in the end.
Why do school boards spend taxpayer money on proprietary stuff like that: because they don't know that alternatives exist. One more area that can use open source/free software evangelism, and will influence generations to come.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
People surely don't list proficiency in software as generic as a word processor on their resume (unless they're applying for a position as a secretary)? More specialized stuff like Photoshop or 3DS Max is one thing, but typing and printing to PDF is pretty damn standard across all software. I mean, my resume says something to the effect of "proficient in HTML, CSS, and PHP with MySQL; familiar with Javascript and AJAX," not "master of TextMate." Software is a tool, results are the outcome of skills.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
i feel the same way
Yeah, because it's such a "tedious process" for whoever sets up their computers to have .doc as their default saving format instead of .docx. The last time I checked any version of Office, their Preferences menu was quite capable of that.
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'.
s
http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+formula+flaw
The most prominent feature I noticed in Word 2003 is the "Reading Layout"; it reflows the document into "screens" as opposed to pages, and makes it easy to page through the document just by hitting space. Word and Excel both got side-by-side document comparison (diff). Outlook got "Search Folders" which dynamically update their contents based on search criteria, as well as "Cached" mode, which makes Outlook actually work without locking up when your connection to Exchange goes wonky. Worth paying for? Probably not, but I didn't pay for them, and they certainly made my life better.
;-)]. And then there's that Ribbon thing. I've used it, and I can find obscure features way more easily... YMMV. I do know that MS kept having focus groups with Office users, asking users what new features they wanted... people kept asking for features that Office already had. Frankly, I learned a lot about Office 2003 just playing around with Office 2007.
As for Office 2007, someone else already mentioned Outlook 2007's To-Do list for flagged items. All of the products can now save as PDF. The Word font/style changer does this handy live-preview thing so you can see exactly what your document will look like before you select a font/style. Excel now goes up to 1M rows [a dangerous feature if I ever heard one
Anyway, I think you knew there had to be new features, and I'm not saying these make Office 2003/2007 worth paying for, but there are definitely new features in there of non-zero value.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
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.
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.
"Well enough" isn't good enough for OpenOffice to gain any traction.
I've said this before, but it will bear repeating. There isn't an adult education program - on or off campus - within 150 miles that isn't offering courses in MS Office. Employers want these skills. The volunteer agencies want these skills. They are marketable at any age.
Your ticket out of welfare and SSI. I've seen it happen.
Teaching these courses - offering these courses - is money in the bank.
You know, I sometimes think it is this attitude that perhaps best explains why no one ever quite listens to the Geek.
if it is Florida State University, Go Noles!
Screw FSU, Go Gators!
(I have no problem losing karma over that, it was worth it.)
Not to be a Microsoft apologist (please see my history of posting) but I have to say that your approach is wrong. Inserting a table with at least two columns and one row would be all that is needed. Justification in the individual cells would serve the task nicely.
It's one thing to say "I like this way of doing that better" but another to say "This is better because I cannot do things with this tool the way I know how in the other." The reality is that it can be done as you would like with relative ease... you just have to know the tool well enough to know what approach to take.
(The reality of this posting is that I started writing before I tested my presumption... but then as I was writing it, I thought "oh crap, what if I'm wrong?" So I opened up vmware+windows, start word 2003 and did just as I expected and it worked. This was the first time I had ever done that... I presumed it could be done that way and I was right. What does that say about Word? It's good I guess. I like OO.o just fine too. But if something is good in Word, it should be recognized... and copied. Don't hate Word just because it's Microsoft... take what you like from 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!
Well, if it's OK for the school to 'recommend' that the students (or rather, their parents) cough up the dough for software, why not 'recommend' that the students / parents be responsible for pencils & books as well? Remember, this is the case in places like Mexico, and as much as I love Mexico, their education system has crippled their economy, in addition to all the other problems such crippling causes.
How about if schools were to use primarily FOSS? It would be OK to include awareness of proprietary software packages in the curriculum. I seem to recall a recent Slashdot article on this topic....
In the "corporate world", your employer pays for Office. If the school thinks students need to use Office, then the school needs to pay for it.
As a 2003 graduate of Batavia High School(and current resident) I will say right now that not only is the school system in Batavia ass backwards but the town itself has many issues. Batavia is a town where no one wants to make a call on anything. The least of the problems right now is making sure every kid has a copy of Office 2007 at home. Maybe they should fix the over crowding issue at Batavia High School? Field house maybe? or that auditorium instead of a cafe-torium?
My home is decked out in Linux machines, and we use OpenOffice, even on the one last remaining Windows box. If the teacher can't read it I'll be happy to print it out for her on paper.
Really the nerve of some School boards, trying to upsell a useless upgrade.
Ribbon, pffft. That's right I said it. pffft.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Simply getting them to learn what buttons to press to get a mail merge in MS Word isn't going to cut it. They need to learn what a mail merge is, and how to find out how to do it in $SOFTWARE.
By your logic, since MSO2007 is the new de facto standard, schools that taught any previous version would not have "give[n] children the skills they will need in order to make it."
Teach Office Suites, not MS Office.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I've been using MS Office 2007 for two months at work. It sucks, for the first time, I'm actually better with OpenOffice.org and I've been using oo.o since 1.0. Oh, and access '07 is the worst, sometimes queries just don't f*cking run, click on them and they don't run, no errors, nothing they just return an empty set when they should return data. Now I need to spend $50 on a book so I can develop my trivial scratch-an-itch databases, it's dumb. I type in a keyboard shortcut, and the damn thing asks me if I want to continue with with the old shortcut combo - WTF is that!?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
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
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).
Yep, it's true what you're saying, but at the same time I've seen people that knew MS Office left with Open Office because that was the roll out, they knew nothing and it was really quite sad that these schools couldn't have taught them word-processing rather than just how to use "MS Office".
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
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!
By your logic, since MSO2007 is the new de facto standard, schools that taught any previous version would not have "give[n] children the skills they will need in order to make it."
Not my logic. I would have been against standardizing on software rather than standardizing on an output format. I was probably unclear. The precise version of the application doesn't matter. I doubt the school district thought one moment about whether students should learn using MS Office 2007 or the previous version. They defaulted to the current version. The importance as they saw it was in forcing students to develop skills in word processing as it will be a necessary skill in the future. Sadly, many people equate mastering MS Office with mastering word processing in the same way many equate mastering Windows with mastering computers.
Teach Office Suites, not MS Office.
Absolutely, and I've done my part. Did anyone do theirs and teach the guys who made the decision?
Fair enough.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Um.. The Air Force does start out pilots in Cessnas and other small aircraft. That's how training works: You start out in a machine almost small enough to take off crosswise on most runways, and slow and forgiving enough to correct your mistakes. They don't exclusively use Cessna as their aircraft supplier however.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Perhaps that's what it's about in practice, but it shouldn't be. Why continue to make decisions, of any kind (including software acquisition) on the assumption that's all it's about?
Back in 1977, my dad was the owner of one of the first microcomputers anybody had ever seen within a hundred miles of us, a TRS-80 Model 1 with Level 1 BASIC and a whopping 4K of RAM. I was specifically FORBIDDEN by my teachers to use it for anything useful at school. At the time, it was only barely acceptable that I typed book reports and other detritus on a used Smith-Corona Super Sterling manual typewriter... using a computer -- even for "word processing," a term that barely existed then anyway -- was considered cheating and I'd have gotten a fail for doing it. We couldn't even use crappy Novus 650 Mathbox calculators in class.
Now they're telling parents they ought to buy that POC from Redmond? My parents didn't even like buying me pencils (my dad had bought the Trash to manage his small portfolio of stocks, and had written -- in Level 1 BASIC -- the software to do that).
ODF, anyone? Anyone?
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
No. One of the main reasons why they will see it in the corporate world is Excel, which there is no alternative too.
There are numerous alternatives to excel, and almost all are better and less buggy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah, I can't quite figure out where the hell all the money is going in K-12 education now. I have no idea why kids are paying "lab fees" for more-or-less-required science classes and "participation fees" for things like cheerleading and sports. Next thing you know it'll be like college, where you're expected to show up to school -- school you're required by law to attend until 16 -- with your own books.
Free and open education?
Horace Mann is doin' about 4500rpm right now.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
The problem can be even more screwing than what it appears to be right now. The difficulty with schoolteachers are that they no more have the habit of learning new stuff.
Well, yes. Look at how Teachers are selected. It should be the best and the brightest, but it typically is the lazy, bordernline stupid and those left behind, with a very small number of enthusiasts that are then slowed down by the others. Expecting a lot of studtents is non-optional but only works if the teachers do the same for themselves. Example: One of my english and french teachers was learning spanish in order to not forget how it feels to learn a new language. But most teachers cannot be bothered.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I say people should use what they own. If you have works, word, wordpad open office or what ever software suits your fancy use it. I found out that it is just easier to save in the rich text format and know that it will open in any word processing program.
Go UCF Knights!
Sports are lame.
I don't get it, with all of the word processors out there. I don't like the whole idea unless that software was that specific to the class. In reading a lot of the comments, I get the feeling that if said software is $150 or less - than there is no issue. I read in an earlier post of a college stating what Mail software to use. I guess if it were free, who cares. Come on, can't you see a very bad picture here??
If you actually NEED an "office suite," that is. I spend at least 10 and often 16 hours a day in front of a screen, and I never "need" an "office suite."
Most people spend most of their time in Office in the word processing module. Word processors are for putting things on paper. Why are they putting things on paper?
If paper IS still the medium of choice for communicating schoolwork, then hoogizzashit how it got ONTO paper? And if the files are electronic, they should be in an open, interchangeable format (and again, hoogizzashit what software you used to produce that open, interchangeable file)?
Fark it, kidz... hand your stuff in HAND WRITTEN!
Do they still give out grades for penmanship?
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
"People want what Microsoft peddles"
We do?
I've conducted a fairly thorough de-redmondization of my house in the last year, and neither I nor my fiancee (nor the cats) miss Office, Outlook, Word, MSIE, Works, FrontPage, or pretty damn near anything else they've ever produced.
I've sometimes enjoyed Flight Simulator, though. However, X-Plane on Linux and Mac rox.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
It is such a common misconception that we need to teach kids how to use certain computers and software packages. ALL of the education research shows that it is irrelevant, and that students need to learn higher order thinking skills that are enabled by technology integration, and that concentrating on specific OS and software skills is a waste of time. School districts that think we are teaching future job skills by teaching HOW to use computers are throwing money down the drain. Also, who is to say that Office is what will be used in the job market when our children enter the work force? And finally, you must be kidding to think there are major difference between Microsoft Word (any version) and, well, any word processor ever written. Stewbacca M.A. Education, Curriculum & Instruction/Computer Education
Batavia is an old name for Jakarta under Dutch colonial rule. Jakarta is the capital of Java.
Parts of OpenOffice (such as OpenOfficeBase) require the use of Java. Thus OpenOffice is the perfect office suite for Batavia's school district...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Alas...if I could only edit my response. Point noted.
An example of disadvantages, when I was in school, i couldnt afford to purchase the novel we were reading in class. So I had to get it from the library. Of course I couldnt find the exact same version/edition in the library so when we did readings in class, the page numbers didnt match etc. I had to scramble to keep up. All that for a $5 paperback. And NO, we didnt have even that much to share. So definitely, I am in favour of as much equality as can be achieved.
I ran into this this very semester.
Excel has one big advantage over Calc: Both will let you create a graph with a trendline, but Calc won't give you the *equation* for said trendline. Kind of important when you're looking for the slope and/or derivative...
Go Go Gadget Copter!
Before Microsoft, it was Apple. Before Apple, it was IBM's Selectric. Before the Selectric, it was the Ball Point Pen.
To any parent reading this, "My children have used Open Office since Elementary School, and one child is in High School; Taking AP classes. She has had NO, I repeat, NO problems uploading her homework to be read by the Teacher's computer." Her major complaint is that Windows is maddenly slow. If Educators, and Parents are to busy to check into which computer software is cost effective; Ask yourself, "What am I getting for my money's worth?" $500 hundred dollars can buy a lot of things.
When you have to hand over your paper, they will most likely ask for a certain amount of pages. in a certain fontsize. That should mean that everybody has the same amount of work to do.
What you do is resize the dot from e.g. 10 to 12. Not noticable, yet saves you much work in the end.
Sorry I can't find the video on how to do this.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
that stands to make a killing from all the students being herded into the corral ... ... for the _mental_ slaughter.
I used to really like PDFs, but Adobe has bloated the whole mess beyond comprehension. Every version of the reader seems to take twice as long as the previous one to load. My only out is Apple's own reader in OS X which, for some reason, opens a PDF almost instantly.
And, of course, every asshat webmaster jumps to the new version of the format 30 milliseconds after it's released, and you can never permanently turn off the "createde in a new version" warning despite clicking the little check box.
Software engineering is a dead art. It's all fukced over by the MBAs now to feed their cocaine habits and trips to San Juarez to kill people for sport.
Or, with better grammar (Why the subject line has that length limit is beyond me.):
Good teachers will not willingly cause their students to become addicted to things which stunt mental growth.
So, I disagree. If you want good teachers in your school district, this _is_ one of the important battles. By supporting good tools, you support good teachers who are willing to use good tools.
There are better ways to do this than walking in and insulting Microsoft users indirectly by insulting Microsoft, and there may be timing questions, but this is one of the battles to choose.
Calc can't make a bar (note: not "box") graph with "whiskers," which I was once required to do for a materials lab.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
or just someone who doesn't want to use computer programs that come from 1994?
> Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending ... upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007. Why not use one of the free alternatives?
Office 2007? Does anyone even use that? Maybe Microsoft has found an easy way to recruit beta testers? The Batavia school district superintendent sounds pretty clueless. They probably bought him off with a comp copy of 'Microsoft Bob(TM)'.
Do me a favor: use Calc's charting function to make a bar graph with "whiskers" (to show the extents of the range of values in each bar). I had to do this for a materials lab a while back, was unable to accomplish it in Calc, and was forced to use Excel instead. I don't believe it can be done.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I mean, honestly, and not trolling?
I'm thinking that most of the "innovations" in that list are basically fixing features that already exist in ways they didn't need to be fixed, in fact, in ways that would tend to even further discourage the student from thinking for him/herself.
To my way of thinkging, that list is more in the way of proof that the board of education that requires MSOffice 2007 is not living in the real world.
Not that you should tell _them_ that in so many words. There are ways to tactfully tell people they've publically humiliated themselves.
jdz
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
why can't people think for themselves?
These kids can just as easily use open office, ms office 97, ms office 2000, ms office xp, or ms office 2003.
their docs can all be read on ms office 2007.
So why the need for an upgrade?
Isn't everyone a bit tired of MS dictating how everyone does business?
I use open office where ever possible. I try to convert all my clients to it.
It does the same damn thing and it's free!
They're using their grammar skills there.
I'm sorry, but you've obviously been duped into thinking that the vocational school you apparently went to was actually the same thing as an genuine "college." It's not.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Funny how OSS is always about 'choice' until someone has the gall to choose something other than it.
Without OSS, the only choice for PC's would be Hobson's: Microsoft, or nothing. Let me illustrate from Linus himself, commenting on the latest brouhaha over the Linux scheduler:
(Emphasis added.)
The difference, though, is that Microsoft doesn't always work with people who report problems; sometimes they simply ignore them forever. Apple has been guilty of the same thing. That's what makes OSS different: the demand for accountability will always be met, either with compliance or by a forked project that will comply.
Actually Batavia isnt that hoity-toity, certainly a lot less than nearby Naperville. However one really interesting thing about Batavia is that it is one of the few towns that has a lot of people that are a) highly technical and b) use linux because it hosts Fermilab, home of the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. Fermilab is an all linux shop (although you *can* find the odd windows box around) and hosts a lot of research into distributed computing using linux systems. In fact it even has its own Linux distribution (Fermi Linux, based off Red Hat) although these days its effort is now behind scientific linux which is mainly developed at CERN. So its interesting that Batavia would do this as a) it has probably the highest percentage of linux desktop users in the state and b) actually has a linux distribution developed there :)
and whenever they start teaching it i pull out my laptop and get back to working on whatever program i was coding last. as far as teaching technology at my school goes, well it sucks. Other than the programming classes, which are taught on a linux lab that is free of district bullshit and student maintained, all of the technology lessons are mostly repeats of what they taught us to do in elementary school. We recently got a brand new computer lab, new hp desktops with LCD's and win xp, but the district techs are idiots and the current technology specialist is an idiot and lazy. I don't go to a bad school ( well actually i do but for different reasons ) but why are districts always pushing bullshit that even the schools don't want?
n ta+vista/
among our districts genious decree's:
no linux webservers
linux is a social disease
sites about linux or open source are "hacking" and blocked
only the head district tech can get around content filtering ( not even the pricipals can bypass )
all internet for all the schools is routed through the district office
it goes on
WHY! WHY ARE IDIOTS RUNNING THE SCHOOLS? FUCKING THINK OF THE CHILDREN, THEY'RE SMARTER THAN YOU!
and for anyone wondering what school this is, your answer is: Monta Vista, i suggest looking it up on urbandictionary.com
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mo
Jayne: "These are stone killers, little man. They ain't cuddly like me."
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smok
Stories like this always bring up the same tired arguments. In the one corner you have the OSS zealots who are championing Open Office et al, while on the other side of the ring we have the blunt 'real worldists' who point out that professionally, nobody uses Open Office anyway.
The problem here is, I haven't seen a convincing argument as to why schools should start using Open Office/your choice of OSS Office suite.
Sure, it's free. But most places have an IT budget. They can afford to spend money on this stuff. Please imagine trying to explain to a non-tech savvy headteacher why you think he should switch from MS Office. The best you can get is "It has all the same features as Word". So? This guy will be inundated with complaints from parents asking why their kids are being taught this crazy mumbo jumbo. They're getting their kids IT lessons; they expect to hear familiar terms like Microsoft, Office, etc etc.
I'm not saying we should pander to people's closemindedness. But we can't try to advocate open source all the time, because as far as I can tell, Office, and Word in particular, is considered one of the few areas where Microsoft have got it right. Let's not give up the fight, but there are reasons why every business uses the Office suite and why most people won't be persuaded to change.
Unless you know anything of the base mathematics, in which case you can come up with it yourself readily.
Your name is extremely appropriate for a discussion relating to Batavia, IL.
sigfault. core dumped.
.. if you want a license to run Office at home, they'll sell you one, plus media, for a nominal fee that is supposed to cover media and administration. All you need is a hyperlink from your company IT department, and you can get it for £17 in the UK (probably $17 in the US).
They don't want people taking their work home and discovering that those nasty, smelly hippy, open source office programs can do most of what they need anyway. Especially not anyone in charge of purchasing software.
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?
It's under Data Series/Statistics. There's a selection of bars and indicators.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Living in England, for my GCSEs (end of compulsory schooling exams for 16 year olds), the IT exams/courseworks were very very strict on not using microsoft names. Eg you couldn't say Excel, you had to say spreadsheet package, or presentation package instead of Powerpoint. However, when it came to submitting my work, they would only accept the Microsoft format. I tried ODFs, HTML, PDF, plain text, but they refused to accept any of these.
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.
I disagree.
I think you should teach concepts, not tools.
Teaching them MS Office 2007 may help them once they graduate and use MS Office 20xx.
Teaching them what typesetting is, how to organise a spreadsheet and how to summaries your points in a presentation will help them no matter which version of whatever tool they end up using.
It's like learning programming languages. Once you learn a few of them, you not only actually start to learn how to program (I don't think any single language can teach you that), you also find that picking up new languages becomes almost trivial.
It's under Data Series/Statistics. There's a selection of bars and indicators.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
OneNote
The best thing Microsoft did in the last decade.
-
Well this summer in an English class I wrote a paper in Open Office. Something changed in my header format when opened in whatever MS product the teacher used. Lost some points and joined a group petitioning to allow the use of Open Office. It's just a junior college and you would think this would be a slam dunk. First reccomendation was why didn't I buy the latest MS offering in the Student Store with my Student Discount. Well nobody wanted to listen to my responses to this (But there is a program that will work on everybodies computer and it's FREE!!). So yeah there is a copy of MS office on the other side of this dual boot, and I will use it the next time I write a paper for class. I am so looking forward to the learning curve.
Cart
"Burn down the Mission, people we just got to try"
My boss still uses Wordstar(a DOS based version!) because it can do things that Office cannot. He is the MD for a successful (MS based) software company.I think that says it all really.
I teach IT is a high school in England and our IT manager recently decided to forego the £8,000 per year MS Office site license and go with open office. Now I'm certainly an advocate of open source software, but let me bring a few realities home to you:
Open Office is still not entirely stable. In terms of word processingand DTP it seems to be fine, but some of the spreadsheet functions that the kids need to use in projects (like webquery) make it crash. In fact, it crashed when the whole staff were being demonstrated it when the idea came up...
The Database software is no good for teaching; A-level and GCSE projects require the use of Macros, and teh database software does not have these. This means we have had to buy a 100 user license to MS office just so these kids can do their coursework. The alternatives of using Java and the like are unrealistic.
For most people it is a big step: many have used nothing but office, and that means they'll be confused come September when new programs are thrown at them; we're going to have to take some time out to familiarise the kids (and staff) with some of the features and quirks. We also have a huge number of books on spreadsheet and database use that would be defunct, and hundreds of teaching resources that we need to redevelop in our own time.
The reality of it is that making a switch to open office can be something of a nightmare, and I imagine that many organisations won't bother. The savings would take a good while to manifest themselves after the initial confusion/retraining/whatever. We were told last year that come this year there would eb no MS Office, Open Office was on the network and we should use it to keep familiar with it, but of cours nobody wanted to do that so now they're all doubly screwed.
if the school is recommending such an upgrade are they going to be liable when I get a bunch of spy ware on my computer because I had to install windows to run their software?
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.
And God only knows, *none* of us in the Internet/HTML world, would *ever* dream of using something structural like a *table* to achieve *formatting*!
(I do agree with you, and wish Word, early-HTML, etc., *did* have better logical structures and formatting, so such hacks were never necessary.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
What else have you been working too at a PC besides Office? I think officeXP, the one i used extensively, provides one of the worst user experience ever. Pick a shareware mac application, 9 times out of 10 it is better designed than office. Basic usability errors (no feedback on save?), lame online documentation, slow operation compared to OO under linux on same hardware, more unstable in a dedicated workstation with less then 10 apps installed than OO beta on debian unstable with a thousand packages installed.
Anyway, back to the topic: the school district is not in a vertical market with peculiar needs for data formats. Forcing office, the latest, means their IT department sucks. Let students deal with multiple data format: THEY WILL HAVE TO, IN REAL LIFE LATER.
Just hope for the sake of your kids that the rest of the organization is better.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
You are over-thinking the statement. Since the courses were geared around the TI, there was a small amount of time in different parts of the course reserved for teaching how to operate the calculator. The functions and the results are the same between the TI and the Casio I used, however the operations to get to those results are different.
I remember not being allowed to use calculators in earlier classes. I wish it were still the same. There are a lot of knuckle heads coming out of math courses that cannot do anything unless they have their battery powered brain in their pocket. And God forbid that a calculation comes out wrong because chances are it will not be noticed.
There are a lot of things in college courses these days which would make people cry.
AH HA! Oh, man, did you write that one yourself? Can I give you one of the "Troll" mods I was given by a fan-boy for my OP?
Actually, I did attend a real university, thanks (or as you put it, "an college." I apparently came out better than I thought.) As a "late bloomer" my experience far exceeded my education making it very difficult for me to stomach a number of classes, as well as having to balance between class work and a growing, very demanding career. I tutored a good number of students from the graduating class the year I was tossed from CS and eventually I dropped out to run my business. Now that I have exposed myself I am sure you will be happy to continue the spanking.
The school districts I've been around in Cincinnati are great for one thing: begging parents for stuff. A friend of mine has 4 kids in school and their school supply lists are ridiculous. For the youngest, in 1st grade, the teachers actually tell the parents what brands of crayons and glue to buy, all of which are the most expensive. Then the high school is even worse, requiring computers, software, and the like.
It's bad enough that the school can't provide some of the stuff, but the worst part is that the list includes tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, and so forth for the classrooms. I can live with parents needing to buy their children their own supplies, but if the school can't afford paper for the children to wipe their asses with, they need to reprioritize.
Maybe spend less on computers, recordable marker boards, and gymnasium floors and more on basic needs. What's hard to understand about that?
Yes, the money is better spent elsewhere. I don't think anyone would argue against you there. However, don't think for a second that the money they saved from not upgrading Office unnecessarily would then be given to charity. It would be whittled away elsewhere. The situation is suboptimal, obviously. But it is silly to think it is a big deal. It is more crying about sour grapes.
Nor do I care for the debate. I refuse to get emotionally invested in a particular technology. It is ridiculous how logic is thrown out the window because someone's pet technology wasn't chosen in a random school district. Then they get all worked up and write a blog posting about it, and somehow, it is "news."
Actually, I attended a full university, then a community college, then another full university, all divided between two states. I am sorry to have to tell you that there really is not much difference between them aside from the student population. As oft maligned as community colleges are, even the CC I attended was approaching critical mass on population and now has an amazing campus size which rivals some universities and ranks 24th in the nation.
And I did mention that it was my high-level math classes, by which I meant the classes at the core of my major taken at the university.
Irrespective of my educational experiences, I still stand by my statement. While the concepts of typing, spell-checking, printing and so on may translate between word processors, more intricate tasks such as formatting, tables, and so on do not translate so well. If you do not believe me, try switching work between Word, WordPerfect, StarOffice, and Lotus sometime. The procedures for the same concepts are not the same between products. (Or for that matter, even the same between different versions of WordPerfect.) I would speculate that this partly due to fear of litigation for violating look-and-feel or some unknown patent on a process, or simply because one company thinks its way of doing something is better than another's.
None the less, the driving force right now is Microsoft products. You do not have to be limited to only Microsoft products, but you damn well better know them. If you do not believe me, go to any state agency job listing in Florida and find me a job worth a darn which does not require Microsoft Office knowledge. I would hazard that this is the same in most other states as well, and even federal.
Being that we are living in a world of alternatives in software, teachers would be well-advised to know more than just one product. Though it is not always feasible. I remember being taught word processing in elementary and junior high on Atari 800s and Apple ][s, and I had a teacher who used Mac. At home I used a TI, and a number of my friends used Commodore. Many times the lament was that teaching word processing would be so much easier if only there were a single standard.
I cannot for the life of me remember on which of those computers we learned spreadsheets (I want to say it was the Atari as I swear I remember the character set.) In later years (high school, right about the time my school got a PC lab put together) we were using an Apple ProDOS-based word processor and spreadsheet application. Just the differences there make me cringe if we had to do them between all the different platforms.
I will admit that for having learned across so many platforms, I feel much more rounded than today's Microsoft-numbed brains. I especially feel lucky to have been present during the time of maturation of such products and processes. But in the end of it all, one product and one process has been selected as the standard, and we had all better at least know how to use it. Learn how to use other products at the same time as you can, and enough of you might be able to make a difference later on down the road.
Personally, I do not care which or whose product or process comes out on top. I would just prefer a single product that lends itself to ease-of-use rather than beating the user to death over simple things like a margin change for one paragraph destroying the formatting of an entire document. Such a seemingly simple situation was my indoctrination to Word after using geoWrite for so long.
For the sake of noting it, I never had an English class software requirement until later years when we were submitting documents to the instructors. In fact, I made it through many years of high school and college using geoWrite on the Commodore 128 and then WordPerfect on the Amiga. In the last couple of years when I was required to submit documents, I mostly did them in StarOffice and exported the docs to Word format for submission.
Thinking it all over I see a progr
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...
I don't agree with your first assertion - everything Word-like programs do is Wrong - rather I think it is that people try to use Word like programs for things it really isn't suited. Such programs are great tools for automating what was once done manually with a type writer - i.e. writing and editing text; essentially they are a modern version of paper tape and Baudot code.
Unfortunately, as features get added people started using the tool for things it wasn't designed to do (and where the developers didn't sit down and learn from the right tools how to properly implement features; the electronic version of using a pair of pliers as a socket set.
Which brings me to your second point - people ought to be marking up their documents in some semantic markup language - with which I agree. Unfortunately, most text markup programs don't function very well as word processors so people still need Word or it's clones to do the text creation and then must move the text to a layout tool; as a result most people simply try to do the layout in their word processor and develop a set of kludges and work arounds. For example, to accomplish the OP's text layout and do TOCs you can insert tables and use hidden text to keep the header information from which to build the TOC, but that, AFAIK, requires unhiding the headers when you update the TOC so you have to carefully, manually break the pages or risk the page numbers being in error do to the now unhidden text re-wrapping the real text.
Then again, we do our page layout in PowerPoint via notes pages - talk about a stupid solution.
Which gets to my argument - this is where OSS development misses an opportunity - instead of building a free copy (sort of) of Office - develop a whole new and better way of doing it. Unfortunately I doubt that will happen because it would require a consistent vision and someone to enforce that; which is not the way most OSS communities want to work.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
OK, so describing OO and alternatives as "clunky" and lacking functionality is provocative. But think about this from the perspective of the School District: How much do you think they know about installing and using open source software? The issue isn't the relative goodness or badness of non MS alternatives to Office. I mean, seriously, imagine you've got the knowledge and experience of the average computer user, and then think about which solution *you* would feel most comfortable with, and would minimize the number of frustrated parents complaining. I think it's a matter of convenience for the school board decision makers. Also, consider this! Who, from the open source community would be willing to "sell" their solution as aggressively as MS would, to an entire city? MS has profit motive to make their products look as attractive as possible, while open source advocates don't really have any sort of motive to spend their time selling their solution to the school board (or anyone, for that matter). The solution, (if this is really a problem) is a not-for-profit FOSS marketing group to spread awareness of the benefits of FOSS (um... free, anybody? and reliable and high-quality!) I mean, we can bitch and complain on slashdot all we want, but until we decide to actually reach out to average-joe-and-jane-computer-user, we can't really complain about MS's market dominance.
Why not just use a Standard format? RTF was a godsend when I was in middle/high school. Why? Every computer I ever came across could read it with no problem. Sure, you don't get a ton of flashy graphics/fonts. But 99.9% of the time, people struggle with plain text type documents. Or, why not just use ODF? If I were a computer teacher, I'd take a few minutes to teach the kids about file types, open vs closed standards, etc. Use Doc if you want, but ODF will always work between school and work. SOmething to that effect... You'd be AMAZED how pissed off young people get when we find out someone is trying to control their information/computers. At
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
Z80 processor, "Sinclair" BASIC. Assembly language. Membrane keyboard with no lowercase.
Then I compounded the mistake with a Commodore! A whole _different_ processor! Commodore BASIC! Single-sided floppy drives.
And then the avalanche: X86, 286, 386, 486, 586, K6-III, AMD XP, K8. With DOS, Coherent, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, OS2 Warp, XP, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian.
Sweet Jesus, the horror of creativity and adaptation! No, far better to teach only one computer system and one set of programs on that computer system. Because if we all concentration really, really hard we can make time stop, right?
[I sometimes wonder how much this mentality correlates with the idea that there is really only one book a person ever needs to read for all time.]
"I teach IT is a high school in England and"
..
.. For more information on OpenOffice.org Basic, select "OpenOffice.org Basic" in the list box'
..
..
I believe you, I really do
"some of the spreadsheet functions that the kids need to use in projects (like webquery) make it crash"
I hadn't realized webquery was deemed mandatory by the UK department of education. How the heck did I manage in IT all these years without webquery. But wait according to this you can also perform webquery in Open Office. 'I was able to make this Webquery example work on my computer with very little effort'.
"A-level and GCSE projects require the use of Macros, and teh database software does not have these"
I just opened Open Office Base and it says:
'Macros created with OpenOffice.org Basic based on the old programming interface will no longer be supported by the current version
"that means they'll be confused come September when new programs are thrown at them; we're going to have to take some time out to familiarise the kids (and staff) with some of the features and quirks"
You're kidding right, kids have to be familiarised with the software. If it's anthing like my old college, it'll be the kids who will be showing the staff.
"hundreds of teaching resources that we need to redevelop in our own time"
insert training FUD here
"The savings would take a good while to manifest themselves after the initial confusion/retraining/whatever"
Insert increased costs FUD here
UN body promotes open source in education
Open Source in Schools
Linux Case Study : Orwell High School
was: Re:A rock and a hard place
davecb5620@gmail.com
Hey, I am from Aurora, IL just south of Batavia. I am looking for tech people but they are hard to find. The only LUG is in Chicago. Who is there from Batavia? Please let me know if the author of the article is from Batavia and how I might reach them. In general, how do you find people interested in Linux outside of LUGs? Thanks!
I thought slashdotters tended to be minimally competent with technology... Those 3 Office suites you mention - and OpenOffice.org as well - work in *exactly* the same way as each other, and even open/save each others files. Sure there are minor differences in the UI, but that is about as far as it goes, and in most versions, even the toolbars look the same.
http://swiftcoder.wordpress.com
Kids (even in high school) often do not realize that one program will not necessarily open files from another. We see this ALL THE TIME in our high schools here in Pasco County, FL. Kids buy some piece of crap PC that comes with WordPerfect and then bring their files in on floppy disks in WordPerfect format and wonder why Office won't open it. We need two things:
1. Students need to learn that applications use proprietary formats and they're not interchangeable - you CAN save as text or rtf but you'll lose formatting, and
2. We, as a country (and as a planet, for that matter,) are really being hurt because we don't have one universal document file format type that all word processors can read and write. We USED to - it was called "text" or ".txt" as Windows users are wont to call it.
Telling kids they "ought" to fork out $150 for Microsoft software is irresponsible. We are a Mac based school district and as soon as OpenOffice runs native on OS X, I will be recommending it to ALL of our schools K-12, not as a replacement for Office, but as an alternative to Office. Then kids can, if they want, run the same suite at home and at school, for free.
Music - www.richardmac.com
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
...the families must buy and drive only Ford products. The district has made it plain they are not interested in teaching general "driving concepts" or other such OpenCar nonsense, only the specifics of driving a Ford product as Ford products are clearly used by everyone and meet everyone's needs.
In college I did all my lab reports in MutliMate. Along with all my other reports, and articles for the school paper.
I believe I used Eureka for solving equations a number of times.
If I ever had to use a spreadsheet it was Lotus 1-2-3 .
Now in High School -- I did my reports in SuperScripsit.
The table does not need changing - you just need to know how to make a table fill the entire page width without manually adjusting it - so, need to know the tool...
hackerkey://v4sw5/7BCHJMPRUY$hw3ln3pr6/7FOP$ck6ma8+9u6L$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
I had this argument with a teacher and was told I was arrogant, didn't see what that had to do with the discussion.. . ahem. You must realize the teachers "think" they need to "learn" each new program (even though many of them know nothing more about MS products other than Stupid Office Tricks), and that trying to teach another product would cause them undue harm. I tried to get a school to put at the end of a class (last day/week kind of thing) a little "other products" lesson but they would have none of it, even if I did the "showing" of the other products. Even though for a school district, OpenOffice is free, and SO IS STAR OFFICE, (fill out the form and they send you a disc that ALL YOUR STUDENTS and FACULTY may use), they see they are getting a great value discount "from $500 to $84". It is the old, "but it was on sale" mindset.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
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.
I've heard this mantra repeated endlessly on Slashdot.
It doesn't matter, fundamentally, whether a function is used rarely, what matters is that it is there when it is needed.
It's a mystery why so many organizations are fixated on Microsoft software.
There is no mystery here:
The temp comes into work stone cold. She is given a space and shown the heap of shit that has to be cleared from her desk before noon.
This is not a problem.
What she needs from Office will be in Office.
What she needs from the apps that integrate with Office will be in the apps that integrate with Office.
I used latex for my lab reports. It looks a HELL of a lot better, and the formatting options are significantly nicer. Plus once you get your basics written, it's much easier to create a well formatted document in latex than screwing around with word. If you're smart enough to be performing physics labs above 101, you should be smart enough to learn latex...
The dancing paper clip.
Parents are asked to buy books for their kids that are used once and then sold back for much less than what they bought it for. So I don't see what the big deal is in asking parents to purchase software that will last them several years that costs about the same as a single college textbook (if they get it discounted, as the article mentions). Asking parents to fork out $500 is unreasonable, but asking them to fork out $80 is not.
Speaking from experience, earlier versions of Office used to be just about as unreliable as OpenOffice. I, too, used to use OpenOffice, but mostly because it could export to PDF. Office 2007, however, is much much more reliable and I have never lost my work. OpenOffice still has issues with data loss.
Also, kids don't know that they have to save to Office 2007 format from OpenOffice. They'll save in the default OpenOffice format, and get yelled at by their instructors for not having the right version. They'll also get yelled at because of formatting issues. Whenever I converted between OpenOffice and Office 2003 I always had to edit my paper.
For the first couple year of college, i used my old Apple with Visicalc and Applewriter. I had a Mac at work that I was doing relatively advanced spreadsheet and flat database work, and PCs and Macs at school for other software. However, when one is producing a paper 2-3 times a week,and production time often occurs between midnight and eight in the morning, efficiency is key. So analysis was done on in Visicalc, formatting and formulas were hand generating using ESC sequences to the printer in Applewriter. The only difference two significant differences between what I do to and back them is that I know have an equation editor, and I don't have to paste pictures in at post production.
That is to say that WYSIWG is in many cases a distracting toy and not tool. For anything one does in college, unless professors have become truly insane people that no long value content over form, a nice text file should be ok. In science and engineering I suppose one could use Mathematica and latex. In later classes, I could get mathematica for free, so much of my analysis was done in it, with word processing in word, as it was cheap and at that time, better. I am actually moving to Latex now as other equation editors are just too inefficient. And this is even though Grapher pulls images and equations directly into pages. Now, much superior to word.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The whole purpose of using a computer, of course, is to avoid learning to do things yourself.
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.
In certain school districts, the BSA has audited or threatened to audit them for compliance. Since then, any software that is not distributed with a license or does not have some sort of license will be feared as being considered pirated software. A lot of school IT staff or administration have no concept of FOSS and only understand commercial proprietary software licenses. Teachers are also afraid of viruses, and refuse for anyone to bring outside copied software that isn't on an "original disc" (i.e. something that was professionally pressed).
On a tangent, having software that students can easily make copies of and take home with them to learn or do homework with could be benficial. The same could be said of "open books", books aimed at schools and students that knowledgable people collaborate on. If students could freely copy their learning materials, then learning would be less restricted to those with less money.
Twinstiq, game news
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.
The purpose of the computer was to have it alleviate the need for you to perform repetitive tasks. That's what it does very well.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
That's not what they said. Read it again.
And by your logic all prior versions of any spreadsheet (or software for that matter) are unusable. The only thing worth using is the latest version.
We all know that is not true. It isn't a question of perfection, it is a question of reality. Please don't distort reality in your quest for perfection.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Why don't they just offer the Microsoft Work At Home http://www.microsoft.com/Education/WorkHome.mspx ; after being told many years ago by the courts MS has now created a "policy" of "allowing" you to have software from work on your home computer :) but this is a special education license ahem..
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Next, I can see the school taking a position of getting the next generation of software cheaply while they could. This isn't automatically a matter of bad thing even if it does present some incompatibilities. However, I grew up with word perfect, MS office, and a few others. Today, I can switch to about any word processor with ease compares to what others do when going from versions of the same application.
There is no reason why the school is locked into a single unit of anything as if it is the end-all be-all. Back in the 80's when I learned the stuff, the school had apple 2 computers and very few MS based ones, I didn't get my hands on a Intel based computer that I could do much with until 93 or so, it was after I was out of school. I seems that quite a few people from my era who had to switch because one place required something that the last place didn't learn more by accident then those coming out of a structured MS only world. Some time change is good.
RMS and Linus say you have the right to do that freely, but Microsoft says you must pay them a tax even if you aren't using their device to do it, because they must have some patent on that act of butt fucking. Only they won't tell you which patent covers their act thus fucking you over.
And in Microsoft's world your privacy is gone and your quality will go down as they DRM you into oblivion.
Dude, get it straight. We can do with our computers what we want. The world isn't Microsoft's. It is ours. Stop getting so fanboy excited that you are creaming in Ballmer's coffee.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
There may be no free alternative, but it's high time that systems pay attention, and start realizing that the free stuff will one day be just as prominent in the home and the work place as the non free stuff, and start embracing it. The bells and whistles that come with office will be matched one day, though the usefulness of much of it evades me. Yeah, it's all nice and all, but if a teacher used OO and had the students to use OO, then bingo, assignments would be turned in exactly right, no problems with compatibility. Sorry, kids but Windows is a dying breed. As more and more people become computer savvy, more and more people will skip over to Linux. That's the future. It's inescapable. Argue all you want, but think about this: 8 years ago, who would have predicted Ubuntu would be cathing on like it is? The future looks bright and free.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
"From my personal, high school, college, and work experience, I've used spreadsheets 98% of the time for text."
Then you're using the wrong tool.
You asked for features that improved Words functionality, not just made it prettier or gave it a new GUI.
Why does it seem like almost EVERY reply talks about the new look. The few "new features" that do get mentioned have NO BEARING on what a student would be doing. This is for high school for Goddess's sake, how many of use needed features like 3D shading and soft shadows? Do those things even show when the document gets printed? And will a teacher even care how pretty it looks on their screen if the student can't get their punctuation right?
In my opinion the school district has lost sight of what they are supposed to be doing, teaching students how to write, read, and balance their check books. My 2 cents, this is stupid and going to end up costing the school district money later, either with support/training/hardware issues or a lawsuit by some parent who hates M$.
It figures. The whole idea is batty.
Considering the expenses of raising children, upgrading Office seems to be a lowest priority.
After the educational discount, the latest Office is a good way to obtain further non-backward-compatibility lockin. If the parents use the new Office and convert the business versions to the new Office, the ripple widens. So goes the old strategy. I wish Office would actually merit upgrading.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Yeah, it sucks that they are going to a non-free option where the cheapest version is about $150 USD, but guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college.
Guess what -- in the corporate world you don't pay for your own copy of Office from your own fucking pocket.
There probably isn't much difference between these two constructions. My mistake.
But my point is that you won't just throw symbols around in precision code and not expect it to make a difference. You don't tolerate sloppy C language structure because it would destroy the functionality of your work. Same is true with English language structure. And English is a lot easier than C to express a complex and subtle meaning or thought.
i would rather see schools make some modest donation to OOo (or some other worthy alternative) and create a nice robust free alternative. that would benefit all citizens, and students.
there is NO reason to train grade school kids to use Office 2007. even if 90% of businesses use MS Office, they won't be using Office 2007 when these kids are out of college in 10 years. same reason it's stupid to train them to learn MS Windows when they are 10 years old.
if anything they should be using a computer as a tool. they should have basic computer use skills, but there is no reason for them to only learn, for example MS Vista, when it will be long gone by the time they are older. if they want to take computer programming classes, teach them the fundamentals, hell teach them html or something standard.
I've got mod points, but I can't find "+1 Sad but true"
I don't doubt that it called itself that, but like American Intercontinental "University" or DeVry "University," I still believe from your description that it was a vocational school in disguise. Care to tell us the name of the place?
Phooey! I usually don't make mistakes like that; if I had to guess, I'd say I probably initially wrote "actual" then replaced it with "genuine" and forgot to fix the article. Either that or I was being stupid, anyway.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Think about it though -- let's say that first thing Monday morning the OMB in conjunction with the National Archives and Records Service make an announcement that, henceforth, the Government will use only an ISO standardized open format to exchange documents. Assume also that they have the balls to make it stick. From the get-go, all 50 states and all government contractors have to switch to software supporting this open standard. From that point forward, it's a done deal as the rest of the economic food chain adopts the new software so that they can continue to communicate with the various federal state and local governments, contractors, subcontractors, etc.
It won't happen, but that's the only way to force the issue -- not up from the school level.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Hm, I'm using LaTeX a lot. I do not have any problems with the text creation. I just use the editor of my choice. (No, I won't dwell on which exactly. :)) Since when is Word a powerful text editor? I understand Word might be easier to use for the average person to quickly write a letter and such. Then again, maybe not even that -- possibly many people simply don't know about alternatives. Often you don't need any fancy formatting at all and can stick to plain text. In any case I would not recommend Word (or any other word processor for that matter) for writing a complex document.
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
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
What else have you been working too at a PC besides Office?
A lot of software going back to DOS and Windows 3.1. I've always liked Microsoft's development tools. They really do well in that department. I remember Office XP, strange interface. It was an interim upgrade for me before I said I had enough of Windows.
Anyway, back to the topic: the school district is not in a vertical market with peculiar needs for data formats.
Yeah, you're right. It's been a while since I've looked at an organization that didn't have particular format needs.
I would have preferred that the school district chose Linux. The TCO alone should have made Linux the only real choice since few schools have the funds to do hardware upgrades. It would have even been a good idea to use BeOS. Mac OS X wouldn't have been a good choice only because the schools were predominantly x86-based. I can't fault the district for not knowing about the options available to them though. So many people buy Microsoft products just because they know Windows is a Microsoft product, and it just follows that you buy Microsoft apps to go with your Microsoft operating system. It's the kind of logic we used long ago with hi-fi stereo; you keep within the brand, otherwise you'll have a nightmare of incompatibilities.
Good points, all of it. I still think the basic premise holds though. It's just that the school district likely made the same mistake so many people make in assuming that learning Microsoft Word means that you learned word processing. They're not idiots. Surely they would scoff at anyone claiming to know how to drive a '96 Honda civic but not know how to drive cars generally.
Off topic: It's been a while since I've been in highschool. When I was there, if you wanted to learn typesetting you burned an elective credit on a journalism class. This gave you practical experience by putting you to work at producing the school paper and the yearbook. My high school computer programming classes were all in BASIC, but I did have one teacher that was cool enough to install Turbo C and Turbo Pascal for us. I would hope that somewhere in America, there's a high school that teaches at least Python.
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)
I like MS Excel in general, by the way - in spite of its intrusive design elements.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Final Cut?!?!?
Holy crow. When I was in high school... I learned to video edit on an Analog setup that had sound and basic video effects (star wipe, anybody?). We had two "Local News Quality" cameras and a nice lighting setting in the media studio/classroom. For filming outside of the room, we had 4 or 5 handheld Sony VCR camcorders. This easily served the needs of 3 or 4 classes of 10 kids during each semester. We popped one or two "source" VHS tapes into the editting board, and then cut the scenes onto a third "final" tape.
That was in 1999, and less than a decade later, kids are using Final Cut? What a waste.
By the way, in case you doubt the ability of learning with "old fashioned" systems... check out my recent collection of videos done with editting software that is far inferior than Final Cut. In my opinion, the only reasons for using FC or Avid is if you are actually doing professional video that is meant for broadcast (or if you are in a college degree which aims to teach this). Simple high school learning? Stick to the basics...
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
I don't doubt that it called itself that, but like American Intercontinental "University" or DeVry "University," I still believe from your description that it was a vocational school in disguise. Care to tell us the name of the place?
I am curious, though rhetorically, what in my statement makes you think that I attended such an institution, for which you seem to hold much disdain.Quite frankly, Troll, I am not obligated to provide such information to you or anyone else. However, as I have hung my credibility on the legitimacy of my claims, I first attended Troy State University, then later attended Florida State University.
Now you may commence with the "a college in Alabama is hardly a college," or "FSU isn't a real school, you should have gone to UF" or whatever useless argument you may compose in light of your initial assumption being proven incorrect. Believe me, I have heard most of them already and they make little difference to the current amount of my success. Have fun talking to yourself.
As someone who has used both OO.o and MS Office extensively I'll say this:
IMHO, MS office is reliable, easy to use, has a smaller memory footprint, and is universal in the business world.
OO.o is free, in every sense of the word.
If your class is Business Admin 101, tell your students to get MS Office.
If Timmy needs to write his book report, save the $122 and spend it on something else. Hell, $122 will buy school supplies for the rest of the year
Just my $0.02.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
I honestly don't see what the big deal is here. Those parents who are able to think for themselves will simply make sure their children are able to produce compatible documents, and those who are not will blindly follow the recommendations.
The only disturbing thing is much larger the latter group is, but that is not, much as I hate to say it, Microsoft's, or even the School Board's fault. Microsoft is doing what makes them money. The School Board is doing what keeps them from being sued. (Little Jimmy got an F because he couldn't load his document, and it's because nobody told us we needed the latest version.)
Until we start forcing corporations to act ethically, and requiring individuals to take responsibility for not using their brains, the big news will be when this sort of thing does not happen.
I also have not noticed that much of a different from MS Word and OO Writer whenever I have to use either one. My point is the students should not be trained on a application that cost hundreds of dollars, when there is a free application that can do the same thing.
Think about the poor.
Foxit Reader, a free PDF reader app. Works pretty good.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
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
Yes and people very rarely use the brakes on their car (they're only applied 10% of the time or less if you're driving smoothly). Lets save money by designing cars without brakes.
I think you've made way too broad a generalization here. I use Word to do complex formating, track revisions etc. every day at work. I also use Excel well beyond it's text abilities. For all my distaste regarding MS, Excel still is one of the most versatiles tools I've ever used. For a long time in my early 20s I used it for a contact manager. In my late 20s it helped me do astrophysics assignments when everyone else doing the masters course was using a calculator and having to repeat everything 6 times to makes ure they get it right. In fact rightly or wrongly (and I'd say wrongly) I've seen Excel used at a corporate levels to do work that should have been done by a much more specialized system. Call me atypical, but I've seen plenty of others in IT, and business (finance/banking/insurance) use more than couple of features you describe.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
Yes because we all know that if one person (of unknown skill) doing one degree in one way doesn't require a feature to do their job no one else will need it.
Honestly I've known incompetent coders who literally didn't understand iteration (could grasp the syntax of a for loop in a pascal like language). That doesn't mean we should do away with iteration in all modern programming languages.
I've tried OO calc and while some stuff was there and ready to use there's plenty that's missing and that I'm use to in Excel. Oh and by the way I've used Excel to do astrophysics homework at Masters level.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Leaving aside the obvious retort that others have already offered about how the worthwhile skills are the transferable ones, -- by what magic have you come to know exactly which software packages are going to be in use in the business world, not just in ten years' time, but apparently for the whole of the century?
And is the implication of your suggestion true -- that is, that Microsoft Office 2017 is going to have an interface identical to that of Office 2007? Did you also use sorcery to discover that fact?
I thought they *required* not *recommended*?
If i mis-read the story review ill offer leniency to the school if it was a recommendation, not a requirement. If i didnt mis-read and it was a requirement, then i stand behind them not having the right.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
and because using straight TeX is a PITA, God (actually Leslie Lamport) invented LaTeX =)
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
no, his job's pay was dependant on he knowing how to use a word processor, not a specific version of a specific software belonging to such category.
besides, measuring knowledge of Office's menus and keyboard shortcuts would be useless, given that it was a test of *computer* literacy, not Microsoft Office literacy, and a literate computer user ought to be able to do basic tasks (and/or find out how to) in *any* piece of software, not just the Microsoft-made product for the respective market.
sorry, but how you got modded Insightful is, frankly, beyond me...
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Oh thank god it's about education and not jobs. Because we have great cushions in America for those who don't want a career path. Just look at our Medicare! And food stamps!
Yes, I understand that spreadsheets aren't the correct tool. A lot of times in IT, you don't get a lot of say in the tools you use either because of management, budget, or someone else has switched the tools fifty times already. During high school and college, I maybe used a spreadsheet twice. Personally, I used it to track expenses.
I work for a city government. I learned a long time ago that trying to push open source software is pointless. Gov't organizations don't want it. They don't want something for free. It screws up the budget process. If we can save $10K on something, that will only hurt us for next year's budget. We can't have a lower budget. We must increase it every year and then actually spend that money. Otherwise, the budget office will slash our budget.
This is why I hate my job. No incentive to save.
Parents to school : "Give it to me for free or STFU".
(2) To the school district: (a) Please provide the cost for a Windows computer, and (b) please provide the cost of the software you are requiring. If 'a' and 'b' are not satisfactory, then remove the requirement/recommendation.
Honestly, I believe the was something else stating that Illinois was a Microsoft state; so this is really another ploy by Microsoft to get OOXML approved as a standard.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The question we should be asking is exactly why the school district is wasting tax payer dollars on Microsoft Office 2007. We should be asking why they are expecting parents to purchase software that they do not need and may not be able to afford. I did a cost analysis OpenOffice v. Microsoft Office 2007 for my employer. By my calculations, even assuming that Microsoft Office required absolutely no troubleshooting, which is laughable, it would still take us approximately 6-10 years to recoup the cost of purchasing Microsoft Office 2007, by which time Microsoft would have released 2-3 newer versions of their office suite and would readily expect us to buy their damn software all over again. For what? Microsoft Office doesn't fundamentally do anything that it didn't do 10 years ago. There are many companies out there that still use Office 97! The only difference between then and now is that it's now more expensive and runs slower. Viable freely available alternatives to Microsoft Office exist and our schools should be using them. To think that our School Boards expect us to believe that they pinch pennies to save money... My taxes are high enough without this level of irresponsibility, thank you very much.
P.S.
The irony in all of this is that at least half of the Pro-Microsoft arguments seem to come from people who make their living supporting Microsoft's shitty software.
http://www.google.com/search?q=San+Juarez+bloodspo rt - had to search for it - sick
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
nobody, but nobody, should use math in a professional context that they do not understand. It is definitive of being unprofessional. Any school that teaches this should be burnt.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
If there is something wrong with 2003, what is it?
Apparently, the menus weren't confusing enough.
The ______ Agenda
What is this "outside of the geek community" of which you speak? I really hope you're not talking about myspace.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
If your school wasted time teaching you the specific key combinations of software, did they teach you to manually program your VCR? Did they recommend your family buy a Sony, because anything less can leave kids behind in this rapid-paced dog-eat-remote-control world of VCR maintenance and if you child learns the wrong brand it's nothing but government cheese for them! The horror!
Thank god that this school system realized that the pace of technological change has stopped here. (Thank god they didn't jump the gun and say this in 2006, hoho!) Nothing shall ever be invented from this day forward so there's simply nothing left to do but teach people how to use the ultimate fruits of society, Office 2007.
We'd mock a mechanics class that recommended parents buy students only Fords, because even if Ford is a dominant brand in the market it doesn't do anyone any good to be stuck knowing only a single system. We mock comp-sci courses that teach only Java...
Perhaps you'd like the school to teach a broader curriculum so that your child isn't turned down for a job at a mac-centric firm.
But then, I advocate making kids learn math instead of teaching calculator skills from a young age. Of course, once in the casio-dominated world of business calculators my secularly trained students would be unable to fend for themselves and would probably die. Alas.
Oh no! They have the latest version - the one that came out since she finished school. She packs her bag and leaves.
You should, however, get Firefox with aspell to correct your spelling errors before posting.
Why UNIX?
Since when does a school have a right to tell parents what type of software to use? If you're e-mailing papers, that's understandable, but I'm sure there's plenty of free software out there that'll help convert your files. Why should a parent have to spend more than a hundred dollars at the whim of a high school?
There's a free tool that allows you to open docx and other Office 2007 formats in earlier versions of Office. I'm not sure but I think it downloads automatically via Office/Microsoft Update.
If anyone is going to use more advanced functions of Word it's high school students. They write reports, give presentations, compose photo collages, make handouts, and other creative work. You can do a lot of that with Wordpad, I guess, but would you want to? Would that prepare students for the realities of the working world?
That being said, I don't know if I agree with advising students to purchase specific software when there are alternatives. Students should be free to use whatever software they wish as long as the end product is suitable to be graded by overworked teachers with no time to learn new applications.
Indeed, it'd be nice if Microsoft granted the school permission to run one internet-enabled virtual Office session per student and teacher. That was students could do their homework in a web browser a-la Google Docs instead of having to foot the bill for software they'll likely never use outside of school.
Actually, StarOffice costs $75, I think- so 85 for MS Office 2007 (for those of you who have not used it, it's an amazing product) is actually quite a steal.
What you're getting for free is just the bones of a comparable office product. Students can do far more with the more professional Microsoft suite- plus, I don't know if any of you have tried to get a clerical job with OOo on your resume- they don't bite.
Plus... GO BULLDOGS! Wooo!
As opposed to what? You mean when I did WP in HS, when it was press Apple-B to start bold, type the sentence and Apple-B to close it?
How do you teach using a computer without actually teaching the individual program you're using? FWIW, I learned WP on Apple IIs and later PCs with Word Perfect (DOS).
What flavor was this mornings kool aid?
I would like to know what evidence or proof you have to the "inevitable" catching up of open source to MS on the front of OS and Office apps.
I really would. Yes, there has been a trend towards more market acceptance of OS, that is great, but saying it's going to win because it's picked up to a larger sized minority doesn't prove that.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I recommend office 2007 over open office; it's just that much better. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are quite good. Also, the education edition installs on 3 computers and costs about $120 shipped from Amazon; or $40 per computer which is not bad. If anything the schools should offer Linux Server cert, not that crappy desktop stuff, alongside of the Cisco, Oracle, and MS certs they offer now.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
I had a son go into kindergarten at the same school district last year. One of the required school supplies was a TI four function calculator. It had to be one particular model. It cost about $12. Remember this was for my kindergartner, why should he be using a calculator anyway? The teacher he had was wonderful. He never used the calculator, thank goodness, he can add small numbers.
There was an earlier post on Slashdot that showed the math inconstancies of 2007 spread sheet. Shouldn't this be taken into consideration. Also I would have to disagree on OO only doing 50% of what 2007 will. I think you need to look at your numbers better.
Sherm
That's hilarious. And a very good test, IMO, for discerning which persons can actually figure out how to *get the JOB done*, vs. those that have merely memorized one program's menus.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
mod parent up!!
Well said.
If you do not leanr the basics, why even bother learning pro tools?
Peace!
No, by outside the Geek community, I mean the community that would use the term 'nazi' as a general purpose word meaning a person who is obsessed with unimportant details.
In many parts of the world, like Eastern Europe and Israel, the term 'nazi' is a loaded word and one not to be used lightly. It very specifically refers to those who murdered millions in the 1940s.
To use this word casually to mean someone who annoys you with irrelevant details would be to commit a major social gaffe. It's the kind of thing that could cost your company contracts and embarrass your CEO. It's not a term to be tossed around in the manner that geeks often do when they use 'loaded' words almost as verbal weapons, purposelfully to attempt to shock.
As geeks, we're used to this. But using loaded words unsuspectingly in different communities can have major and unwanted consequences.
It's quite possible that many geeks who use the term 'nazi' to simply mean a person with annoying habits are not aware of how loaded this word can be among some groups. I'm just cautioning them to avoid its usage. Not that geeks ever pay attention to people trying to warn them about avoidable social embarrassment.
It's like a guy from Asia who listens to a lot of hip-hop and has come to believe that the term 'nigger' means 'good' or 'high quality'. He comes to America and starts using the word without any realization of how loaded the term is here. Until someone tells him. That's what I'm trying to do. Just tell people that it's not socially proper to just toss off the word 'nazi'.
No, I didn't bring up the term. Whenever someone corrects a grammar mistake in Slashdot they get called a "grammar nazi". I'm pointing out that this is a wildly inappropriate term to use. Its common usage on Slashdot can lead people into believing that it's a common and and accepted usage to call someone any kind of 'nazi' because of annoying habits.
In the real world, this can lead to incidents of extreme social embarrassment in certain groups. Its usage on Slashdot should stop.
You almost cast into doubt my entire belief system! ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Many ways to do so. I've learnt SQL in dbase, but also about the basic theory of databases - now I'm using exactly that in MySQL. And I think switching to e.g. PostgreSQL will be relatively painless. I know what the general possibilities are, and for the details I just rtfm. Of course I'm not using them very super in-depth, but when I want to do something that I don't know how to, I rtfm, google, and find my way around by trying. In case of word processors, you can learn about page lay-out, indexes, footnotes, etc - without necessarily binding this to a single word processor software. You have to learn what the general possibilities ARE. The most important thing is to learn about SAVE and UNDO, and for the rest a strong stimulation in searching the manual and menus, as opposed to plain spoon-feeding "press Apple-B for bold text". The same for spreadsheets: what are they useful for, what can you do with them, etc. This again can be tought completely without actually sitting at the computer, for teaching NOT sitting at the computer will in my experience work much better as the students are not distracted. There can be tought that there is a lot of software around, and often more than one program for a specific tasl. The global differences between Unix (Linux), Windows and Apple. Wouter.
but not the way Microsoft does it.
In this case, we're taunting Microsoft for putting too many features in MSOffice.
The stupic ribbon is a (very poor) attempt to fix a set of menus that had become overburdened by the poorly planned out set of features.
Shoot. for what I do, MSOffice might as well be the hodge-podge of separate apps you suggest is the open/free alternative.
In Claris/Appleworks, I could build a single document that solves some teaching materials needs I have. It's still a little clumsy, but the MSOffice approach is to have two separate documents. I have to open a spreadsheet, sort it, copy/paste into the document that is the template for the worksheet, then print two worksheets at a time. To approach what I can do in Claris/Appleworks, I have to resort to programming. (No, OLE, or whatever they call it these days, does not solve anything with this one.)
I'm not going to bother explaining how it goes with programming, except to note that the old Macintosh System 7, programmed in C, was easier to do this in than VB, and the resultant app was easier to use than what I could build in VB. (VB could approach the useability of the document I created in Claris/Appleworks., But that's about it.)
Microsoft $oftware just plain eat$ your lunch and your $pare time and doesn't give you anything of real value in return.
joudanzuki
Unfortunately, most text markup programs don't function very well as word processors so people still need Word or it's clones to do the text creation and then must move the text to a layout tool
:))
Hm, I'm using LaTeX a lot. I do not have any problems with the text creation. I just use the editor of my choice. (No, I won't dwell on which exactly.
Since I'm not familar with LaTex - is the editor part of it or do you use a different editor and then do the layout? If it is the later then you basically are confirming my point.
Since when is Word a powerful text editor? I understand Word might be easier to use for the average person to quickly write a letter and such. Then again, maybe not even that -- possibly many people simply don't know about alternatives. Often you don't need any fancy formatting at all and can stick to plain text. In any case I would not recommend Word (or any other word processor for that matter) for writing a complex document.
Never said Word as a better editor - but it is the most common one and functions fine for most work (as do many alternatives); and it has it flaws and frustrations as does nay similar program. My point is that it is not really designed to do serious page layout but many people use it for just that; which results in frustration but rarely the effort to learn a new tool designed for the job. My guess is that since many people only rarely do page layout they simply find it cheaper, in terms of time and money, to live with the limitations of their current toool; which they know and often have work arounds, then spend teh time required to become profieicient in another that they may use once or twice a year with the attendent learning (and relearning) curve.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It's not OO.o, but try BasKet. It's a KDE note taking application which supports various useful type of data; for example text, images (captured from the screen, imported or drawn), files, URLS, even colours. It also allows you to make TODO lists with checkboxes, etc., etc. Development is quite fast and there should be a Windows port probably sometime this year.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.