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.

Just a quick question?

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?

Re:Just a quick question?

Probably a combination of incompetence and payoffs. Just because you have "IT staff" doesn't mean they really know shit all about software or how to build a workstation/server/etc. Way more people look at an MCSE as "advanced education" than simply using google to find OSS alternatives that work.

And in the end, where are the parents not pushing back?

Of course when I went to high school, teachers only accepted work in plain old "dead tree" format. And were not talking about the 60s or 70s, but the 90s. Sure at home I might have had Wordpad [god bless...] at my disposal, but the teacher wouldn't except work in that format, so I'd have to print it off at home or school.

Why can't kids just render their work in PDF format [and same for the prof], then let the creator worry about what tool they'll use. For science type classes, all you really need is to make sure the student includes all the calculations/observations to prove that they did the work.

Tom

Re:Just a quick question?

Of course when I went to high school, teachers only accepted work in plain old "dead tree" format. And were not talking about the 60s or 70s, but the 90s. Sure at home I might have had Wordpad [god bless...] at my disposal, but the teacher wouldn't except work in that format, so I'd have to print it off at home or school.

Your English teacher didn't do a very good job.

• "Were" is the past plural of "to be". "We're" is the contraction of "we are", which is what you were looking for.
• Parenthetical comments are set off by parentheses (thus "parenthetical"), not brackets.
• "Except", when used as a verb, means "to exclude". "To accept" means "to take or receive". Unless you meant that your teachers wouldn't exclude work in that format, you meant to uses "accept". Using except here actually negates your argument by saying that the teachers would accept work in Wordpad (RTF) format.

Re:Just a quick question?

"Were" is the past plural of "to be". "We're" is the contraction of "we are", which is what you were looking for.

His apostrophe key is broken. Give him a break.

"Except", when used as a verb, means "to exclude". "To accept" means "to take or receive". Unless you meant that your teachers wouldn't exclude work in that format, you meant to uses "accept".

His 'a' key is also broken, and he didn't think /.ers would notice.

And one more thing: 'you meant to uses "accept".'
Meant to uses? WTF? Even the fscking /. grammar nazis can't get this shit right. I'm all for correct spelling and grammar, but man, hypocrisy pisses me off more than anything....

Re:

"God" vs. "god" doesn't really matter, as for all I knew you could've been referencing one of the Greek gods rather than the Christian God

I don't think this could have been grammatically correct without capitalisation. If he had been referring to 'a god' or 'gods' then it could have been taken to mean the general term for a deity but when used as the subject with no indefinite article I ca

Re:

I'm starting to think that "god", as a way of referring to the Judeo-Christian God(whether or not you believe there's any such beast, atheists/agnostics are unlikely to care), has become part of the language, though, at least from a descriptivist model. Ju

Students can't share a PC with their parents

The district suggests they buy a discounted version restricted to educational use. Tough luck if the home PC is for the whole family.

Re:

The district suggests they buy a discounted version restricted to educational use. Tough luck if the home PC is for the whole family.

1. TFA says no such thing
"The letter promoted the fact that parents can buy the software at a group discount"

2. Even if it did, who is going to go from house to house for the purpose of auditing software usage?

Expected from Establishment

It doesn't seem to be altogether unreasonable to recommend that students upgrade. It isn't as though the upgrade is being mandated. The school district is likely just trying to minimize problems.

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.

Re:Expected from Establishment

Even the slightest change can throw some people off

But surely Office 2007 is far more different to previous versions of Office than Open Office is?

I have the opposing problem

I have been for years trying to get people in my district to use Open Office, or cheaper alternatives. But Microsoft has people so convinced that word documents wont open with anything BUT Office that Im about to just give up already.

For what they do in most grades, notepad would be all they needed.

Irresponsible Tax Expenditures

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.

"We standardized on crappy software..."

"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/ [sourceforge.net] 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?

Re:

The compatibility issue is something I've genuinely never experienced.

A few years ago, I had Office XP at home, 2000 at school, and 2003 at work. Taking files between the three was never a problem unless I had done something highly unusual to one of the f

not surprised

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.

This is just hilarious

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.

Re:This is just hilarious

1) No more freaking menus and dialog boxes

Otherwise known as 'break the interface paradigm that people know, which makes it *harder* to use'. Ask anyone who actually knows anything about usability - the easiest interface is the one you know.

2) Better looking documents in less time

Entirely subjective, and lacking in comparisons - the 'than what?' bit.

3) Royalty-free clip art

Which every previous version of Office has had, is entirely useless anyway, and can be found on a thing called the Internet. Heard of it?

4) Enhanced copy-paste functions

Old ones worked fine. Enhanced how? And with what actual benefit?

5) Diagrams (see Smart Art)

Thanks, but if you're needing real diagramming, then you'll probably find a diagramming tool for less than the price of Office.

6) Equation editor

Also available in competing products, but how often used?

7) PDF writing

Free add-ons everywhere; freely available in OO.o and in any OSX SW.

8) Bulit-in APA/MLA styles

So, one template's worth, probably not useful outwith the USA. Big deal.

9) Track Changes

Has been part of Word since at least version 2.

10) Mail Merge

Has been part of Word since at least version 2.

11) XML format

But not an open, standard XML format.

12) Sharing with others (SharePoint, Groove, etc)

Is that a feature of Word, or one of Sharepoint? Double counting, I think. Besides, the usecase for collaborative authoring in education isn't that prevalent.

13) Live Grammar and Spell Check

Again, an old feature - explain what's better about it.

14) AutoCorrect

Again, an old feature - explain what's better about it.

15) Visual Basic

Again, an old feature - explain what's better about it.

16) DRM (the kind that corporations need to keep their docs secret)

Not necessary in education.

And when/if you can respond to those, please explain the *benefits* resulting - features are for the birds. How does it make my *education* better?

Vote them out

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 )

Re:Vote them out

> 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 )

Interestingly, two of my three kids have had to take State-mandated "computer literacy" classes, where they had to demonstrate proficiency in Excel and Word, and my daughter also took a"graphics" class where they learned to tweak images with Paint and Photoshop. Needless to say, we no longer treat as accurate any pictures she forwards our way...

I have OpenOffice installed on the computer at home, and after getting past some set-up hiccups, no one has ever had homework ("Must be written in Microsoft Word") refused, nor have they lost points. In one case where they were told to turn their work in as a PDF, my son was able to export directly... and without us buying Acrobat as he'd been told he had to do.

That said, my wife just bought Office 2007 because she got it for a steal -- and legally. She is afraid I'll ruin the middle kid's chances for good grades in his senior year because of my intransigience. Go figure.

I'm building up a new system for the 4th grader. It'll have to have a Windoze partition for some of his games, but he's gonna grow up with open source solutions as his norm, not the exception.

Well, crap is the norm in the real world

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.

Re:Well, crap is the norm in the real world

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".

Ugh, it's everywhere

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

Re:

I don't need to. Office 2007 already runs like shit on these computers. First one I loaded it on took 20 seconds to get to the document, choked up every 5 letters written, and all the ribbon buttons responded 1-2 seconds after being pressed. They don't *

The scourge of .docx -- It's under options silly!

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.

Microsoft Tax Revolt

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?

What about non-windows machines at home

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

Not good enough

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.

Re:

What functionality is OO.o lacking that would prevent junior from writing an essay and printing it out to turn in?

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

Repeat after me: Excel is not a database. Excel is not a database. Excel is not a database.

And spreadsheets work fine in OOo.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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.

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...

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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?"

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

My friend uses OOo Calc for her assignments and I believe she is attending FSU. So if it's good enough for them then I imagine it's fine for whatever high school assignment you need.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

if it is Florida State University, Go Noles!

Screw FSU, Go Gators!
(I have no problem losing karma over that, it was worth it.)

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

I recall using it quite a bit in Physics classes for lab results.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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.

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

Only if you define 'excellent' as 'uses flawed methodology' or perhaps 'gives wrong results'.

http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+formula+flaws [google.com]

Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE

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.

Re:

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

Re:Why not?

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.

Re:Why not?

And they'll encounter any variety of things in the corporate world, not just Office. If their skills are good, they'll adjust to whatever they've got put in front of them.

Which will most likely be built on the foundation of MS Office. Search Google for "MS Office integration" and you'll get 80 million hits. Still unconvinced? Open the "Help Wanted" section in your metro Sunday paper.

This is getting ridiculous.

People very rarely use MS Word beyond the functionality that Wordpad offers. And they very rarely use MS Excel as anything but a way to arrange text in columns and rows.

So, not only will these students be able to use different tools; they will also learn very little from it. And when they get jobs in the future, noone will expect them to have learned anything -- because everyone treats MS Word as if it was Wordpad.

It's a mystery why so many organizations are fixated on Microsoft software. But it's a bigger mystery why, when they have that software, they don't use more than a tiny fraction of its capabilities -- less than they ought to in order to use it efficiently!

And we all know that kids can only learn one thing

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.

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.

Re:And we all know that kids can only learn one th

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.

Re:Why not?

>>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?

Re:

guess what - that is what the kids will see in the corporate world by the time they graduate from college.

I'm highly curious--where will the parents buy MS Office 2015?

Some people have made this argument more equolent

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?

Re:

If you think you need this specific version of Office to make good documents then you are illiterate and no software will help.