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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?
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.
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?
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.
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?"
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.
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!
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