Slashdot Mirror
Want a Job At Google? Better Know Microsoft Office!
theodp writes "After recent Slashdot discussions on Google's quest to unseat Microsoft Office in business and whether Google Docs and MS-Word are an even matchup, let's complete the trilogy by bringing up the inconvenient truth that numerous Google job postings state that candidates with Microsoft Office expertise are 'preferred' to those lacking these skills. 'For example,' notes GeekWire, 'when hiring an executive compensation analyst to support Google's board, the company will give preference to candidates who are 'proficient with Microsoft Excel."' Parents and kids at schools that have gone or are going Google are reassured that, 'it is more important to teach technology skills than specific programs' and that 'Google itself uses Google Apps to run its multi-billion dollar company.' Which, for the most part, is true. Just don't count on getting certain Google jobs with that attitude, kids!"
trol?
Is this a serious Google branding issue? I can kinda understand the confusion, just as I can the whole "Google Voice is trying to compete with Vonage!" crap - that's a voicemail and forwarding service on steriods service people, not a VoIP service (Google Talk is the VoIP service.) Though that said, if you don't actually use a product enough to know what it is, why mention it?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The company I work for uses Google Docs extensively; in fact, we use it so much I wrote SAS scripts to interface with the API so we can easily share datasets in and out of Google Docs. While it's powerful for collaborative work over the Internet, especially with remote resources housed all over the world, it's no replacement for Office.
It doesn't have all the powerful tools Office does, it doesn't format documents the same as Office does (especially importing and exporting--and yes, I realize Office doesn't do all that well version to version), and it doesn't work all that well offline (if at all).
So it's no wonder a corporation dealing with other corporations would require Office knowledge. This is a non-story.
This sounds evil ....
Google can push their own platform all they want internally, but they can't control the format of documents they receive. I've resorted to installing LibreOffice on my personal system to edit/collaborate/modify Office documents before sending them back. Doesn't work so well in Google Docs.
ms office sucks people who don't know how to use it.
People who don't know how to click on a menu bar and select an on-line help option aren't ready to get paid to use a computer yet.
As opposed to a employee relations person, you understand.
The weasels want people with 5 years experience with Java in 1995, and then wonder why no-one but James Gosling applies.
Send the posting to Larry Page's office with a subject line like "Public relations blunder".
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I would have assumed that if they had to use any Office Suite, that they would have chosen LibreOffice over MS Office! My question to Google, is Why Not???
Just look at all of the stories this shill has posted on their site.
Google docs is good if you stay on the web but if you want to work with other big companies using Office then you're just better off with office. Google can't compete for now in what most managerial types want out of the office software.
I'm curious when it became in fashion celebrate those that choose to deliberatly not learn something (sometimes out of spite) and counsel other folks to do the same? Sure Google should be dog-fooding their own product, but not everyone needs to put on the Goggles (aka drinking the koolaid).
Sure, for something like "intro-to-computers" it may not exactly matter which word processor you use. But as some point reality will kick in. Of course time is finite and you can't learn everything, but Microsoft office is the standard bearer, so if you are going to fill your skills bag with some items, a quick reality check might confirm that being proficient with Microsoft office would be a good thing to learn if there is a chance that you might need to use it in a corporate environment. That's the difference between vocational training and a generic education.
Also on the hiring front, it might be prudent to choose to employ people (say as an executive compensation analyst) who are somewhat in tune with the real world vs out on their own crusade, dontchathink? Okay, maybe that was a bad example occupation to illustrate needing to be in tune with real-world, come to think of it ;^P
In whose workplace? Didn't you see the story yesterday about all the companies using Google docs? And a carpenter need not know any word processor in his workplace at all.
The delicious irony is Google using MS Office after yesterday's story.
Free Martian Whores!
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages, then it is you who is the "idiot".
An article showed up yesterday talking about Google's plans for Docs on the enterprise and I guess someone got upset because that's 2 articles so far today of complete non news praising the wonders of MS Office.
Better link.
Google should by a startup trying to clone MS Office - a new one comes along every few years. Then meld it with the cloud features of Google Docs. Not saying this is likely to be successful, but it is much more likely than a feature-by-feature competitor to MS Office (basically '80s technology) coming out of a Googleplex.
To me the story isn't so much about how "Those bastards at Google aren't even pushing their own product!" it's a story about how even Google can't really expect people to have skills in any other office product other than MS Office. Face it, outside of a select people in IT, and a few people who don't want to pay for office, it's a MS Office world. The story is really about how nobody can escape the power of the Microsoft monopoly on Office products.
Imagine if we lived in a world where for a job that involves driving, and GM had to put in the job requirements "Excellent experience driving Ford Vehicles".
The real, non-imagined problems I've had in the past with attempting to get an office to be able to use OO has been with mail merge functions. I haven't tried Mail Merge for with it for several versions, but while OO had some really good functions that were like Crystal Reports it was way, WAY too hard for your normal office person do deal with. They might have a nicer way to do it now... but I had to abandon a changeover I wanted to do because of this. If *I* was doing mail merge I would want the more powerful functionality, but then I like to learn and many of the office-folk don't.
Excel has support for some ridiculous functions including pulling data from lots of database servers and doing BI transformations on it. I've seen what our finance people do with Excel and its pretty cool. its a lot more than graph paper on a computer.
Executives don't get paid a straight salary. they will get a base salary and then bonuses and stock awards based on performance goals and you need a decent program to predict the total compensation based on different events
all those $300 million salaries you read about, those are 99% restricted stock that you can't sell for a decade or so and the $300 million is a maximum value based on the stock price. along with lots of other conditions
Which is fine, until a client sends you a document from MS Office and wants you to send back your changes with change tracking turned on, so that they can see what has changed in the document. If you only use it for internal documents, Google Docs can be fine. However, once you want to communicate with the outside world, you had better have MS office, or things will break down quite quickly.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
They should be asking for CONCEPTS not particular applications. For example "Spreadsheet proficiency" not "Excel proficiency".
I would MUCH rather have someone that understands the concepts of spreadsheets, word processing, and graphics, than someone who understands just a single program. When I hire, I find that people who have never been exposed to anything but Microsoft Office are rather restricted in flexibility and creativity and less able to handle (or try) anything new/different.
Shame on your, Google, for not handling this better. MS-Office is Microsoft's last remaining major stranglehold. Alternatives such as Open/LibreOffice and Google Docs can't compete effectively when even companies associated with such alternatives can't stand behind their own offerings.
Well, you are right and you're wrong. This is actually a problem with Office and Microsoft's own practice. If it was a decent open format and MS didn't try to make their formats like .docx proprietary this wouldn't be a problem. It's easy to blame Google for "not being compatible" (and I've seen this attitude in the wild quite often) but if Microsoft is being secretive (and sometimes can't even get the format right themselves) it isn't a surprise that Google doesn't get it right.
Chill out. He was comparing Google and Microsoft. No need to get your OSS panties in a bunch.
Maybe yes, maybe no. A carpenter as a sub-contractor is going to get his bids via Word documents attached to his e-mail (shudder) and the specs are going to be in Excel. I know of one “carpenter” (a small business or 4 to 5 employees that built custom cabinetry) that used a Word / Excel / Excel / VBA custom jobbie to manager orders, generate estimates, manage workflow, etc. This was back in the 90s.
It not the internal workings – Open Office would have the power – It’s being able to integrate with everybody else. (Darn for Microsoft getting there first and setting the standards.)
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages, then it is you who is the "idiot".
I don't think the problem is so much writing new Macros, but in rewriting all of the tried-and-true macros and formulas that the Finance exec has been using for the past decade. Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform? It only takes a few hours of wasted work to pay for MS Office.
I see google docs as more of a supplement to MS office and a quick changes type software, other than that it's a PITA to work in, if people don't have strong document based needs, or just don't care, or don't want to pay out for MS Office, it can work, but for b2b communication, office is standard. b2c in most cases also. That carpenter is missing out, he could've used office to create business cards, flyers, and labels, keep track of clients, etc... some people never learn though. There's alternatives to MS office, but it's not google docs.
It may show that someone is well rounded regardless of whether it is needed for the specific job itself.
Schools, and by schools I mean middle and high schools, should consider having "technology classes" as sort of a requirement. I say "sort of" because some students may need to opt out. And I say "technology classes" to mean a generic placeholder in one's schedule where one goes to a class based on one's level, but not necessarily graded on an A-F system but rather a "skill level". In other words, start out at typing, then learn about powerpoint type software (the popular one at the time and open source versions), then word, etc. all the way up to wording on computer hardware and software, etc.
I figure I could clean up what I said above, but meh, don't feel like it. I'll leave it at that.
Troll lolo la la la la Troll lolo la. Tis the season to be trolling troll la la la la.
What I suspect is that the submitter confused it with Google Docs.
And where were the editors and fact checkers?
This is either incompetence or let through on purpose to generate hits for this site.
The web is becoming worse than TV - including FOX News.
We're in agreement. I wasn't blaming Google Docs for being less compatible with MS Office, just pointing out that it is. That's a reality that has to be addressed in today's business world. Now, tomorrow's business world...
their own tech over "right tool for the right job." Dedication to any brand (even your own) over using the right tool is a sign of stupidity.
No I am not talking about IE 6.
I am talking about IE 8. The one browser 90% their customers use and only modern one on XP!
Until then it doesnt matter what Google does. Intranet apps wont run on anything newer. Do any offices run IE 9 yet? Rediculous
Google does not live in the real world.
http://saveie6.com/
I've used LibreOffice/OpenOffice with track changes to work on documents with multiple MS Office users and not had a problem.
Of course, the Google Docs collaboration features are much nicer than the cumbersome "track changes" but it is possible to work with people stuck with MS Office.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
KGB Office sucks in people like YOU for interviews which, were they slightly more extreme, would resemble timeshare sales pitches.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
so what is the harm in putting fake BA / BS on there if you have all the real skills needed and just need to put BA / BS to get past HR?
"Only applicants who do NOT know how to use Microsoft Office will be considered for this position"? Or "Only pilots without valid drivers licenses will be hired at Virgin Express"? If I hire a Spanish translator, I don't disqualify those who also speak English...
Gently reply
Generally, I think Sheets trails Excel by more than "Document" trails Word, but then again, I spend much more time in Excel than I do in Word.
For financial / finance use cases in particular Google "Sheets" isn't a match for Microsoft Excel. A very common formatting approach is to indent rows using narrow columns. In excel, the text overflows to the right, so you end up with an aligned / indented view of things (which you can also then make collapsible). In Sheets, this doesn't work without lots of extra clicks (merging cells etc).
I think eating your own dogfood is reasonably important if you intend the product to be a core product you offer. Not sure if Google Apps is intended to be that (search is for sure).
And if you get schools to use your product, and then prefer another product for your own jobs the optics really are pretty poor!
OK, so that's the sunk costs issue. "This is what we use, so we gotta keep using it, because this is what we use".
Which is a different problem than "Google Docs not good enough, etc."
Disclaimer, I spent two months in a Google Datacenter and did not see any Microsoft OS or application.
They probably have it somewhere for compatibility, or for administrative tasks (like sending offers to clients or whatever).
so what is the harm in putting fake BA / BS on there if you have all the real skills needed and just need to put BA / BS to get past HR?
Because when you get past the phone screen and HR does a background check, when they discover you've lied about the degree, you're not ever going to get a job there? Regardless of your skills, I can't imagine any hiring manager ignoring your deception - if you're willing to lie to get an interview, how much can they trust you?
If you really think you have the skills for the job and don't think you'll make it past HR, then you'll need to use networking to make sure you get your resume in front of the hiring manager. That's why it's important to never burn bridges, you never know when a former colleague or boss can help you get your foot in the door somewhere else.
If they hire you before discovering the deception, you could be immediately terminated, and depending on what state you're in and what you signed when you filled out the application for employment, they could sue to recover damages.
Competent programming teams will look at MS word on your resume and go,"If this guy thinks Office is something special, he must not know a lot."
Corporate HR on the other hand might have struggled to learn MS Office as it is one of the few applications they ever used. They think putting MS Office on a resume is a badge of honor. So if you don't put MS Word on your resume in some corporate places, they think you're not cut out for the job."What this guy doesn't know Office? He must not know much."
This has bugged me for many years as I have a hard time getting interviews. If someone is a programmer, it should be assumed they know how to use most every piece of software they come into contact with. Yet, a lot of HR departments don't get it. It is hard to tell who is competent and who isn't, so the question you ask is,"Do I put the Microsoft Office on my resume?" I've come to the conclusion,"I don't want to be hired by an incompetent organization, so I'll just leave the Microsoft Office off my resume."
God spoke to me
Its a very common and very widely used piece of software supported and implimented by millions of users allover the entire world and quite common with business's. Why wouldnt you want your employees at a tech and software based company to know how to use it?
This is a fucking stupid "article". Its as dumb as someone saying "HEY! You need to know how to use windows if you want to work for sony"
This is news? Office is a staple, it's like knowing how to type by now. Slow news day? You need to manufacture nonsense like this. Get the fuck outta here with this.
So you have upgraded your model T ford? Think of the lawns!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Shit, really? I could have been getting blowjobs from ms office all this time, if I had just feigned ignorance?
Talk about a perk!
Nuff written.
Nuff calculated.
Nuff presented.
Nuff said.
"Competent programming teams will look at MS word on your resume and go,"If this guy thinks Office is something special, he must not know a lot.""
NO.
Whoosh?
I've never had trouble getting an interview without Word on my resume. You might consider that something else on your resume is giving you trouble. Find that thing, and change it. Because it isn't Word (on or off).
I don't think anyone will hold it against you for knowing something, even something with is not really at the core of what I do to pay the bills (Java dev mostly) but could be required from time to time. Not knowing something however will always be a problem so I do put office on my CV in small writing, near the end.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
I am forced to use pptx and I can attest it is quite proper zipped XML (with schema and everything), very much like HTML. Every tag is documented and works in a natural fashion. It is just massively complex as compared to HTML, which is not simple at this stage.
I found that you can create pptx documents by emitting Office Open XML (that is the official term) directly and then zipping to get it back into the pptx format. That is lightning-fast as compared to remote-controling a powerpoint process via COM to achieve the same.
Of course, if somebody ever creates an actually threatening competitor to MS Office, they will use their large cache of patents related to Office Open XML to Go Nuclear on that competitor. That is a very safe bet.
But the technology is dramatically better than the old, binary office format. Which is by now also documented. No experience with that and I would never try to emit that stuff directly from my own code.
But to conclude, XML-based office formats (Open Office has an equivalent standard) are actually rock-solid, nice to use technologies. Form a purely engineering point of view.
From a "legal" POV, all bets are off.
How are you going to create competitive products like Word Processor if you don't know MS Office? You have to know your competitors Software. :)
Hence, Learn Linux.
I would hire a Cobol guy with 20 years of dev experience over a greenhorn with some Java experience for any Java job any time. Of course the Cobol guy would have to show motivation to acquire Java. There is much, much more to developing that just knowing a specific tool. Think of systematic working, systematic debugging, having war stories under belt, intuition, architecture skills.
College grads often focus on the little details and are clueless about the big picture.
Having said that, a proper college degree is certainly worth a lot to me.
You don't know many other programmers, do you?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Maybe the question should be "what the hell is a top finance person doing writing business-critical applications?"
I know exactly what you are getting at, and have seen it many times before; it's a business reality.
But that does not make it right. This kind of stuff rides a horse and cart through ISO, SOX etc.
Let the finance guy write the process and procedure, and the IT people select and implement the appropriate tech support, including security, documentation and audit trail.
A person who is their own lawyer has a fool for a client. A sales, finance, whatever person who is their own programmer...
I just hope Google will talk to these managers and understand why they are not eating their own dog food and improve Google docs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yep. FWIW I'm teaching college and tracked changes plus comments have become a standard way to communicate about student work.
What's surprising about the OP, though, is that I would think any plausible candidate for these jobs would be able to use Word and Excel. You don't have to like them, but they're not exactly hard.
FOSS cannot bribe, that is the major deficiency. M$ products involve lots of money which can be kicked back into the bathroom renovations of M$ customer executives.
My standard approach is to bullet-point the job requirements in the cover letter. MS Office doesn't belong on a programmer's resume (like you said, it should be assumed) but, if the job posting mentions it, just respond to it in the cover letter.
So the crappiness of Windows products work against Google Docs ??
If a corporation considers using Google Docs, they have also the mental strength to consider installing firefox and/or chrome. These are actually rock-solid products as compared to what Microsoft currently delivers. But yeah, heresy in the view of M$. You are like the catholic church and you still rule all those advanced countries such as Spain, Mexico, Paraguay and 25 other countries run by military dictators or on the brink of that.
...China Inc. can first fuck all these corporations and then run away with their decades of R&D data.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/rsa-hacked/
So because RSA was hacked, we shouldn't use Microsoft software?
It's a good thing that no Open source software has ever been hacked.
..but they are continuously phased out. Because PC servers have some serious advantages for all their crappiness. They are cheap, can be set up without the permission of some BOFHs, for starters.
But hell, yeah, from an engineering POV, mainframes have been better in 1990 than what PC servers are today.
The true test of any software firm is if they use their own software internally. Intuit, for example, had better damn-well use quickbooks for their accounting or else, why would I really want to buy their product, if they themselves don't even use it?
Microsoft, to their credit, uses Windows and Office internally, and their entire corporate culture revolves around using their own stuff. Windows8 phones and tablets are making the rounds and employees are evangelizing their own products outside of the campus.
If Google isn't using their own software themselves, then they don't believe it's up to the task, so, ergo, none of us should think it is either.
As Lorne Green said, he liked Alpo so much, he fed it to his own dog.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
..because they can check this easily. Just phone the school/uni/college and verify your claim.
I once invented fake employments because I was out of job for several years and they don't like that like the plague. A friend helped me to pull that off. Worked like a breeze and would be more difficult to detect, as they would have to get social security records to check that.
So, lie wisely and in a targeted manner. Weave lies and truth. Lie sparingly and only if truely necessary. There are lots of self-trained IT experts around who are competent. Sell yourself as one of these.
have a very, very well remembered story about your "inventions". Expect questions and have answers. It must be a Building Of Lies and there are better no empty rooms in that building. Have a nice story for every room and what you did there.
..stolen R&D data ? How do you measure that ?
RSA security got pwned because they had MS Office installed on all their computers. Chicom Intel sent them an Excel sheet with an embedded Flash Movie (yay, that is the insane world of commercial software !). They exploited Flash to get cryptologic data from RSA "Security" and with that data they opened the palace of Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin of F22 and F35 fame.
So, a little convenience and blink-glitz gained and decades of secret R&D data sucked off ?? Sounds like a good deal to me. For China.
..they could easily let a capable consultant write macros in OpenOffice to add these obscure MS Office functions the corporation in question misses. Or let the guy add the stuff to OpenOffice and give it back as a patch of the OpenOffice main source tree.
But hell, that smacks as if there would be no kickbacks to the corporate executives possible. Communism !!
Google are building products that compete with Microsoft Office. Hiring people who have experience using Microsoft Office is an advantage.
If they want to convert expert users of competing products, they need to hire expert users.
How do you make Google Docs equivalent to Office, if you don't have anyone in-house who knows what Office can do? Gotta know it to match it. Some Word users complain that Google doesn't understand their more esoteric needs, such as style templates. If Google devs don't know what those are and how people use them, how can they meet people's wishes? This is a good thing.
I don't disagree with your statement, but I think most IT shops have too many projects to get down to this level.
We know only Office products make you come into the heaven of Saints of Redmond....Chairthrowers.
I use Google Docs/drive to collaborate on documents with other people and edit documents in real time and discuss that by means of a voice conference. Excellent tool to take notes everybody can see and agree. Excellent tool to collaborate on financial figures, excellent to draft a letter together and in realtime with other people. Excellent version tracking. Can download everything and save on my private storage forever. Can export into PDF, MS Office, Open Office.
Yes, it is by no means as polished as MS Office, but for collaboration in cyberspace, there is simply nothing better. Don't do it if you want to plan the next terror attack, though. USG is looking.
Betteridge's law of headlines actually does work! No, I don't! Thanks, Betteridge.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
MySQL is so crappy, Oracle would definitely be an improvement. I don't understand why the didn't try Postgresql, tho
This is terrible PR for Google. It gives room for a lot of trollish headlines, like the summary here on /.
Seriously that said: I'm not exactly sure Larry or Sergey wrote these job postings and I'm not exactly sure the management at the very top of the Google pyramid is going to like that kind of PR.
I expect re-wording of these jobs posting to take place quite quickly : )
. If someone is a programmer, it should be assumed they know how to use most every piece of software they come into contact with.
You know what happens when you assume, right...?
..but can MS Write or MS Word collaborate so nicely ? That is the killing feature and M$ better have something equivalent by February 2013 or their Office franchise will be toast, quite soon.
Which is fine, until a client sends you a document from MS Office and wants you to send back your changes with change tracking turned on, so that they can see what has changed in the document. If you only use it for internal documents, Google Docs can be fine. However, once you want to communicate with the outside world, you had better have MS office, or things will break down quite quickly.
When you want to communicate with an 800-lb. gorilla, you speak the language of the 800-lb. gorilla. If you want to do business with IBM, you use IBM's document formats. If you want to do business with Google, use Google formats. When IBM and Google want to do business with each other, they can either play document tag or agree on a common format.
The one question that nobody's asking here, is "Do they really mean explicitly MS Excel?" Or do they mean Excel as in "Kleenex"? If they're really just asking for spreadsheet proficiency and genericizing a brand name, we're getting all excited over the wrong things.
"We own the market, so you better let use rectal-fuck you, for network effects"
Welcome to the World Of Sado-Masochism. It also involves flying chairs, apparently.
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_chair_at_fing_google.php
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=ballmer%20moneky%20dance&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDwQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwvsboPUjrGc&ei=a9_cUPmtJ-Ly4QStpIGADQ&usg=AFQjCNF6EocsHf3ZvYIZ8Oo7eiwgmuVssg&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.bGE
..in addition to an Insecure As Hell Cisco VoiP phone, they should help Chicom Inc. by also installing a Insecure As Hell Office package ?
Yeah, that would at least be consistent.
Fuck the cheap, ugly and secure FOSS solutions.
I was comparing MS Office to LibreOffice, NOT Google Docs! Read what I wrote.
[let me through, censor]
Google could detail one of their Perl wizards to add all what you say to OpenOffice in no time. Plus they would have rock-solid software from that, not the VBA crapola where you can't even do proper source code versioning. Because it is embedded into the office document.
VBA Programming is the Sirens Of Computing. Very sweet at first, hell forever after a year.
His macros aren't going to work properly in new versions of microsoft office.
It got so bad in one job, we had to virtualize the boss's win2000 machine and run it ontop of windows 7 in order for it to work on modern hardware (the old one was 13 years old and started to suffer disk failure) as he had alot of special software he needed that would not work on modern windows.
I am afraid as time goes on, VMs filled full of outdated junk will become the norm, as folks who make lots of money will refuse to change, and will require lots of hand holding to keep their creaking pieces of crap running.
By words, letters or whole assortments of stink ?
"Users are so accustomed to using M$ software, it would be undue hardness to make them switch to something more sane, more secure". "And now, forget what you know, we have Ribbon and Metro for your own best. Sucker".
Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
So your "customer" was incapable of installing a real browser. You know, as in "rock-solid, open-source, free software browser" ?
I think your "customer" exists only as a Redmond Propaganda ficitio
It's posted by 'timothy', what else were you expecting?
..rat poison ?
Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
And the $100/hour finance guy still has to validate the work and ensure that it's working as expected - he's not going to present numbers to the board of directors based on what some $10/hour kid did. And it's going to take more than "A few hours" - you'd be surprised at some of the corporate finance spreadsheets out there - some are pages upon pages of linked numbers with obscure calculations that have been refined over time. And when he wants to tweak it, he either needs to hire a new $10/hour kid to do the work, or sit down and learn the new system.
Your argument sounds kind of like the CIO that says "Hey, I've been reading a lot about dotNet and I think we ought to port our code over from Java to dotNet - we just need to hire a few $10/hour coders to do it, right? Then we'll be running on this shiny new platform, despite the fact that it was running fine before." The actual coding itself is a small part of the overall project - architecture, design and validation are all much harder.
all I hear from acquaintances and news are companies left and right moving to Google docs. I use it for private collaboration and it works quite well. I don't write huge volumes on it, though. If I did, I would use LaTex and never, ever MS Word.
Google Spreadsheet will export to xls and xlsx nicely, thank you.
The Excel GUI for selecting the data for graphs is simply royally fucked up. Don't know about the Google equivalent, though.
..it could have worked anally on you, if you ever opened those mails from China !
There is absolutely no proper source-code control with the VBA crapola inside an Excel file. It is more "hope, pray and some backups".
If you really want what you describe, you need to use a proper language such as Perl, Java or Python to perform the calculations and save that in something like SVN or git. Along with testing/validation data and even some test code. Building huge Excel-based programs is a recipe for long-term disaster.
"you can't put blinking glitz on the turd content of your document as easily with OpenOffice". Very bad, indeed. We all know style is vastly more important than any substance. Very M$-ish indeed. Your products are also large pieces of insecure excrement wrapped into some of the sweetest pieces of graphical art ever invented. Only Holy St. Steve could exceed you.
Depends on the job. For a programming or engineering job, putting Office on the resume just screams loudly that you're padding stuff. Even putting "Windows" is a bad idea, even for a Windows programming job (put Win32 or something like that). However for a management position that is not expected to be technical, then it may be worth putting down what computing skills you have.
And therefore having a serious Microsoft bias.
It's a bit of a joke though - once you've used any spreadsheet (including visicalc, lotus, MS works, oocalc, MS excel) the others all do the same thing no matter what ribbons they are wrapped up in.
Saying you want applicants with experience using MS Office is not the same thing as saying you use MS Office. Maybe they have other reasons? For example, someone who knows MS Office may be better suited at knowing how _not_ to design a competing product. ;)
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
If a client is sending you stuff in a format that allows you to alter anything at will and they have an agenda that diverges from your own in any way at all then one of you is doing something wrong.
Other formats allow the necessary annotations without the client easily changing the document text of a technical report from "unsafe to use" to "safe to use".
Inside the same org you can trust people a bit more, but letting outsiders put words in your mouth is asking for trouble.
And the $100/hour finance guy still has to validate the work and ensure that it's working as expected - he's not going to present numbers to the board of directors based on what some $10/hour kid did.
Even though that's probably where the original macros came from?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Past decade? I doubt it. You get that change just about every time the MS software is upgraded too. At one point I had a shelf of books on how to write macros for different versions of MS Access, where the changes between versions even extended to using a completely different language on more than one occasion (VB was basic, became pascal, now it's sort of java) so sometimes not a single line of those old macros would work. All too much stuffing about for toy databases so there's not really so much "legacy" stuff going onto new machines out there since it gets cut off at the knees every few years. It tends to get left on dusty old boxes hidden away in corners running NT4, win98 etc, or in an organised place, replaced entirely by something that works with something current.
So much for "insightful" - buying the most recent copy of the software is not going to make those old macros work by magic especially since compatibility is deliberately broken every few years. I think hawguy had better learn a bit more about the software he is pretending to tell us about before writing such misleading rubbish. I've still got a machine with MS Office 2000 on it just so it can run a complex set of report generating stuff from an unholy spiderweb of macros strung together. Buying MSOffice2012 is not going to solve that problem or the hypothetical "tried-and-true macros and formulas that the Finance exec has been using for the past decade". If it's all got to be redone anyway it doesn't really matter what platform it gets redone on - although since I've been burnt so many times I'd never recommend any sort of MS scripting environment.
I have worked in HR for the past 15 years and I know that it is fairly common here to have a rant at them so I normally skip the threads that go off on one - but it is nice to see some common sense on it for a change. There is a huge difference between being creative on your CV and lying, if you get caught lying (and about big things like degrees there is a fairly good chance you will) then in my experience you will be out immediately. Many companies use external security checkers to validate key information on the people we are going to offer to - this is not a hidden process as candidates are normally asked to sign up to allow security checks. Certainly in the EU I think there has to be candidate approval but declining to sign for the security check almost certainly means you won't get an offer.
HR tends to screen on the requirements provided by the business, even though they may have a reasonable understanding of the requirements of a role it is the manager who really knows them so if "Excel" is specified then "Excel" will be looked for - some companies even use external agencies to pre-screen applicant CVs and they will probably be much more rule bound than internal HR.
When you tailor a CV for a job application (and tweaking your CV for the specifics of the role really helps) then make sure you hit as many of the requirements as possible, if it mentions "Excel" then when discussing relevant experience be creative and talk about using "Excel and other spreadsheets", refer to experience of "Office" even if it Open / Libre rather than Microsoft. You want to tick as many boxes on the initial scanning of your CV as you can - and initially it will just be a scan, it won't get scrutinised properly till after the first reduction. That may sound harsh, but I have certainly seen times when the number of CVs per job that come in are ridiculous and (when I was in the UK) people on unemployment benefit had to apply for jobs to maintain some of their benefits. We had a guy whose only experience was a fork lift truck driver who would apply for every single job we posted (Marketing Director, IT Support etc) and I am pretty sure it was only because he had to be able to show the unemployment office he was applying for jobs.
Once you get past the selection of CVs that are worth looking at it is much more likely that they will be filtered by someone who:
a) reads through the whole thing rather than scanning it (CV's the size of a small novel probably never make it this far either)
b) has a decent understanding of the job requirements (either the manager or an HR Officer who understands the managers area of the business)
They may (or may not) recognise that you are hedging round some of the requirements but they also get the opportunity to read your experience in detail and weigh up that as well. Again, if you get called to interview you need to be open, if asked, about how much of your experience with spreadhseets is Excel and how much is Lotus 1-2-3 / Calc etc but at that stage you have the opportunity to sell yourself face to face.
I have seen examples of people who lied about qualifications etc but got through the interview and offer stage - when the security checks came back and showed the truth they were simply dismissed (the security checks can take long enough that the offer has been made and accepted in the meantime).
Sorry to jump in here, but they are office suites - a glass typewriter, a spreadsheet, a slideshow, and a toy database. It's not back in the day where you had to list proficiency in three different bits of word processing software to get a government job, it's a situation where they behave almost the same way in the majority of circumstances (even if it's wrapped up in a ribbon). You can, for an example I've seen myself, get a not very bright woman into the office that has been raising a family and hasn't had an office job since 1995 and stick her at a reception desk with openoffice and/or MS office and you could be very confident that she could cope with both (and in the example given she did, though WinXP freaked here out a bit she had no trouble with the office suites). All of this stuff is designed to be easy to use without ever bothering to read a manual.
If the hypothetical person going for a job using MS Office gets to play with a copy of it for a weekend they can get as familiar with that as with the other software because they only need to learn some minor differences.
Comparing it to the difference between programming languages is somewhat ridiculous and makes me wonder if you have some agenda to push that makes you think being deliberately misleading is worth it.
Which is fine, until a client sends you a document from MS Office and wants you to send back your changes with change tracking turned on, so that they can see what has changed in the document.
This gives me an idea: next time I work with a company that sells me something, I will send them a git-based TeX document. Do you thing they will adapt?
It would shocking if the programmers were using office rather than google docs as that would be a non-marketing vouch for which one is better but its probably management side that is using office to maintain the image of professional
It depends on how much you buy from them. If 99.99% of their revenue comes from customers using MS Office, I doubt they're going to adapt to work with your TeX document.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
In general just putting that "you know" something isn't very informative to a hiring manager. Someone who lists that they know JMP, MATLAB, Labview, etc. is less impressive than somebody who describes how they developed Excel macros to automate data analysis of XYZ tool in the lab. If nothing else, the latter case provides for the interview to be more natural and interesting.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
it typifies the downward spiral in the Google hiring process as quality of management declines. It's a danger sign for an internet tech company to require a skill in any specific software product rather than interpersonal skills, reasoning, etc.
Funny, they can show the copyright symbol correctly at the bottom, but you can't copy & paste it into a comment.
double-sided tape , packing tape, masking tape
If it were up to the IT people to write every single business critical application, nothing would ever get done. Let the finance guy write his spreadsheet and should said spreadsheet turn out to be a good investment of time, let the programmers take over and build it into a proper database-driven application.
OK, so that's the sunk costs issue. "This is what we use, so we gotta keep using it, because this is what we use".
No, it's "Switching has costs. The other choice is good enough to use, but not better enough to cover the cost of switching."
IOW, you only need to be "good enough" to get new customers. You need to be "better enough" to steal your competitors' customers.
Now, tomorrow's business world...
Will be just as bad.
No.
They gave up on not being evil some time ago. Google's constant trolling of linked-in with the assumption that anyone with a few years of unix knowledge would kill their own children just to work for them is sickening. The way they abuse customers with their adwords pricing setup is sickening. The information they are collecting for the truly wicked people of this world is more than sickening.
It's time slashdot got past the drolling over google stage.
Paid M$ shill ? A $hill of a corporation driven only by greed, willing to crush business partners any time, willing to use anything which is not 100% illegal ?
Yeah, Google must be worse than that !!
All you need to edit a LaTex document is a text editor such as vi, notepad++, Ultraedit, gedit, emacs or any other of the 500 proper text editors. Do NOT use notepad of Windows though, because that editor is just broken. Will insert invisible characters and the like.
You can use source code revision control or you can use plain copies. You can then use every proper diff tool such as Unix diff, windiff or 30 other proper diff tools to compare document versions. Rock-solid technology as compared to the M$FT crapola Word and Write.
That carpenter is missing out, he could've used office to create business cards, flyers, and labels, keep track of clients, etc
I haven't used Google Docs (and I'm not likely to) but Open/Libre Office will perform those tasks.
Free Martian Whores!
Darn for Microsoft getting there first and setting the standards
But they didn't get there first. Word Perfect was the "standard" for over a decade, but they pretty well suicided (I don't blame MS for their demise).
I will agree that Excel is the best spreadsheet out there. If you need a spreadsheet, Excel is it. But a word processor? They're pretty much all the same in features and how they're used.
Free Martian Whores!
What you are describing is using a spreadsheet as a development environment. For a non-IT person, this is obviously absurd. Even for an licensed engineer it's a little silly.
Why even bother using Windows if you have to do stupid hacks like that?
Where's all the great 3rd party software that's supposed to exist for Windows.
Managing a business with msoffice? Really.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...except there are still the LEGAL requirements to consider and having non-IT guys play cowboy circumvent those controls.
If you let people run amok too much, the regulatory backlash ends up being far worse than whatever regulations you were originally complaining about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Or do they mean Excel as in "Kleenex"?
I think the mean Excel as in "Charmin".
..their talking points supplied by Redmond to be thrown around in forums like this. One of their main memes is "people cannot extract themselves from our clutches because they have created sooo many valuable algorithms on our products. We have them LOCKED IN FOREVER !"
For some people that is actually true - they have willingly enslaved themselves to an all-M$FT ecosystem and they cannot imagine breaking out and breathing fresh air. I read lots of slaves in the south were moderately happy with their owners, because some minimum amount of respect and humanity was given to them. Until the owner died and they were sold off down the river, to a brutal new owner in New Orleans, of course.
The average management drone is simply badly informed about M$FT alternatives and bases his IT decisions on that ignorance. My current PHB (actually, he still has all hair, but already acts like one) told me "imagine you would have to use something nasty such as Qt instead of MFC. Imagine how horrible that would be". Of course Qt is a much more modern and nice technology and MFC is utter crap in terms of nicety, but my PHB is so pre-conceived with his shiny M$FT tools and their cute GUIs, he thinks that is the gold standard.
I agree with you that this is "the way it is" but I really think it's just an example of the monumental waste that goes on in most companies.
A lot of the office programs are wide open for disruption for this reason. As a software engineer I find it fascinating that people willingly put "business critical" code in anything that can't be tested and can't be source controlled. (I'm sure you can do that in VB script if you really put your mind to it. But it's not something that will be done.)
The only reason it's considered economically viable is because all the time and money that is wasted is invisible.
But yeah, today these features are required for corporate use. Hopefully we can fix that for the future.
Maybe it's a sneaky method to weed out fundamentalist "I outright refuse to use X because it isn't FOSS" crowd. Someone who "can" use MS Office is preferable to someone who "won't" use it.