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School District To Parents — Buy Office 2007
WS Nick writes "Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending that parents of high school students upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007. Why not use one of the free alternatives and relieve parents of some of the financial burden they face to buy all the stuff for their children the school requires?" A comment from a reader points out how easy it is to interoperate with Office 2007 from earlier versions.
Why is it that so many school districts are so quick to buy expensive Micro$soft software when free (and sometimes better) alternatives exist, then turn around and complain about not having enough money?
The district suggests they buy a discounted version restricted to educational use. Tough luck if the home PC is for the whole family.
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.
For what they do in most grades, notepad would be all they needed.
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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.
"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?
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.
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.
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"
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.
>>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 ----
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
I recall using it quite a bit in Physics classes for lab results.
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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
I kind of agree with what you're saying, even thought it sounds a bit trollish. OpenOffice doesn't have the sheer number of included templates, clipart, special fonts, etc, that people love using so much. People don't want to mess around with things to do something that Word lets you do by just clicking on the initial stuff. And as much as I dislike 2007, I gotta hand it to them for reworking the interface so much. I guess there's still a bit of innovation left in 'em. On the other hand, Microsoft Office is the only suite that can afford innovation. Anything else that wants to pick up market share ends up (with good reason) copying everything Office can do. Sometimes, you can't afford to innovate until you have a market share that actually has integers left of the decimal point.
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?"
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
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
When I was an HS, WordPerfect was the "unalterable-never-ever-change-"Business Standard". I feel soooo fortunate that I'm well schooled in the "Business Standard".
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
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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
if it is Florida State University, Go Noles!
Screw FSU, Go Gators!
(I have no problem losing karma over that, it was worth it.)
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).
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!
Go Go Gadget Copter!
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
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?