School District To Parents — Buy Office 2007 632
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.
"We standardized on crappy software..." (Score:5, Informative)
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:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Students can't share a PC with their parents (Score:3, Informative)
"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?
Re:"We standardized on crappy software..." (Score:3, Informative)
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 files (ie. embedding something weird or non-standard into a PowerPoint). Even then, only that one bit would show up as a question mark, and the rest of the file would be fine.
Taking files from 2003 to 2000 and back to 2003 would usually even preserve any 2003-specific features that weren't in 2000 wherever it could.
Ditto for the bringing files between the mac and PC editions of Office.
I'm no huge fan of Microsoft, but until 2007, backward compatibility was never an issue at all, and as long as you save your files in 2007 as the 'old' format, it's still fine. It's also weird that I hear this argument most often from proponents of Microsoft...
Point out FAA and DOT have rejected it. (Score:2, Informative)
Basically what they're saying is, "We standardized on crappy software that probably isn't even compatible with its own previous version, so you better buy the newest one too so your kids won't be stupid."
You need to point out the long list of organizations rejecting both Office 2007 and Vista [slashdot.org], particularly the US FAA and DOT. If the school district wants to be in step with government and business, it needs to hold off and consider migrating to gnu/linux.
Re:This is just hilarious (Score:3, Informative)
The new speech recognition engine (bundled with Office 2003 and/or Vista Something) is way better.
The Office 2003 change tracking system is superior to Office 2000 as well.
And I have heard that the Office 2007 GUI is easier to use (I've already learned to use the Office 2003 GUI, so even an upgrade there is meaningless to me). People who don't think that GUI is important is one of the primary reasons (other than compatibility), that I uninstalled OpenOffice. It has been a few years since I looked at OpenOffice, maybe things have improved?
But as a whole, I also find that too many important OSS becomes bloated (I switched from FireFox to Opera for that reason, cue Slashdot holy war #1663). That was a secondary reason behind me uninstalling OpenOffice.
How to Word Process != How to Use Office 2007 (Score:3, Informative)
When I was in school...no, we didn't use clay tablets and styluses, or papyrus, shut up, whippersnapper...we learned how to use a word processor.
It wasn't Microsoft Office. It wasn't even Microsoft Word, the standanone version before there was a monolithic Office. It was Bank Street Writer, on an Apple II. At home, I used something else, on my 386...I actually don't even remember what it was...maybe PFSWrite.
In High School, I was introduced to Word. At the same time, I was using Wordperfect at home. I still managed to type up the 3-5 papers a year that were required to be typed and even got into an argument over a threatened "F" from my sophmore English teacher who refused to believe I could do a "rough draft" of my final paper on the computer as well as I could on actual paper (I eventually wrote out verbatim what I had originally saved as my first draft, she wouldn't take it, but she didn't fail me as she'd threatened, I think she finally realized it was a stupid requirement).
At college, we used both Word and WordPerfect as well, and I also used Abiword in the dorm room on my Linux (Slackware, running kernel 1.0.somethingEarly, installed from floppies) and printed across the campus to the labs where I had a friend working their shift grab my papers off the printer.
The point is...as some poster in here commented...these aren't "Ofice 2007" classes these kids are taking. They're learning to type and use computers in general. Learning and using a different word processing package is mostly trivial if you already know how to use one. That the school district is "strongly suggesting" (as in, "We strongly suggest you buy our protection insurance, we'd hate for something bad to happen to your family's store, ya know?") that families upgrade to MSO2007 indicates that the school ddistrict itself doesn't really understand just why they should and do have and need computers in their schols in the first place.
As another poster said...contact the school board and administration. Explain why they're wrong. If they still don't get it, make sure you vote at the next election, in most places, that's in about 4 months, you have plenty of time to spread the word about how your current board and administration are more interested in spending their hard-won budgets on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Microsoft software while cutting programs in your students' curriculums.
Re:And we all know that kids can only learn one th (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, the testers didn't. Pagemaker is a desktop publisher, not a word processor. They might as well have told them to write in Eudora, it's close enough.
And yes, I get the point they were trying to make.
Re:Well, crap is the norm in the real world (Score:2, Informative)
Technosexual? That is the problem, too many years of "click on file" -> "click on open" -> "click on browse" -> etc. -> etc. -> etc. "computer training." It's like trying to learn Calculus by memorizing key strokes on a TI89 calculator. If you can't do math on ANY calculator (or pen and paper), please do the world a favor, and don't try to engineer any bridges. Schools should be teaching 'Word Processing,' 'Spreadsheets,' 'Photo Editing,' etc...not 'MS Word,' 'MS Excel,' 'Adobe Photoshop.' People wouldn't be so scared of new/different software if they had a clue as to why they were clicking on "file" -> "open" -> "browse," etc.
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+formula+flaw
Re:This is just hilarious (Score:2, Informative)
1) No more freaking menus and dialog boxes
2) Better looking documents in less time
3) Royalty-free clip art
4) Enhanced copy-paste functions
5) Diagrams (see Smart Art)
6) Equation editor
7) PDF writing
8) Bulit-in APA/MLA styles
9) Track Changes
10) Mail Merge
11) XML format
12) Sharing with others (SharePoint, Groove, etc)
13) Live Grammar and Spell Check
14) AutoCorrect
15) Visual Basic
16) DRM (the kind that corporations need to keep their docs secret)
And that's just Word.
Please realize that there are many people out there that know the difference between Word and WordPad, and use those features quite often.
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:5, Informative)
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:Screw them! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:3, Informative)
It's under Data Series/Statistics. There's a selection of bars and indicators.
Re:Just a quick question? (Score:2, Informative)
A rock and a hard place (Score:2, Informative)
Open Office is still not entirely stable. In terms of word processingand DTP it seems to be fine, but some of the spreadsheet functions that the kids need to use in projects (like webquery) make it crash. In fact, it crashed when the whole staff were being demonstrated it when the idea came up...
The Database software is no good for teaching; A-level and GCSE projects require the use of Macros, and teh database software does not have these. This means we have had to buy a 100 user license to MS office just so these kids can do their coursework. The alternatives of using Java and the like are unrealistic.
For most people it is a big step: many have used nothing but office, and that means they'll be confused come September when new programs are thrown at them; we're going to have to take some time out to familiarise the kids (and staff) with some of the features and quirks. We also have a huge number of books on spreadsheet and database use that would be defunct, and hundreds of teaching resources that we need to redevelop in our own time.
The reality of it is that making a switch to open office can be something of a nightmare, and I imagine that many organisations won't bother. The savings would take a good while to manifest themselves after the initial confusion/retraining/whatever. We were told last year that come this year there would eb no MS Office, Open Office was on the network and we should use it to keep familiar with it, but of cours nobody wanted to do that so now they're all doubly screwed.
Re:This is just hilarious (Score:3, Informative)
Pad example to nib on since Office 2007 is indeed an excellent software suite (now I can't agree with the force-the-parents-to-buy-it however).
It's full of productivity features and brand new features that make your work better (I know I use it every day). Excel's new "table" management that takes a far more intelligent interface to the way you layout data. Auto-shapes in Word/Powerpoint that takes your simple (one level or nested) butllet list and turns it into complex flow charts with a single click (and you can flip between hundreds of presets and customize and make your own).
The interface makes it easy to discover features you've never known about before.
The new rendering engine is gorgeous with photo realistic 3D, reflections, soft shadows.
The picture processing has been greatly enhanced and you can make your Word documents look really nice for the first time (you probably hated the damn ugly rainbow word art from previous versions. They replaced that with a far more subtle and professionally looking wordart based on the new rendering engine - it's actually USEFUL for the first time!).
That's just my point of view as a word/excel/powerpoint user. I bet the rest of the products also got a decent upgrade.
Re:This is just hilarious (Score:3, Informative)
What it does, what ANY security system does, is makes it harder for people to get in. That's all. And for that, it works quite well.
Example: Bob is working for a company and has a spreadsheet which contains the company's top 1000 customers (or trade secrets, or next big marketing strategy, etc). He's about to leave and go to work for the competitor. He emails his GMail account the sensitive document so he can start using it when he gets to the new place.
The author of the document was smart enough to add DRM to the file. When Bob tries to open it at home, it won't. The next day when Bob returns to the office he tries to copy-and-paste it into a new file, it still can't be opened. When Bob tries to print it onto paper, he finds that he cannot. This is because the original author disabled everything through DRM.
Can Bob still take a screen capture? Sure. Can he commit to memory? Yes. Can he write it all down manually? Yes. But all of these require much more work and are prone to errors.
Re:Great, more anti-school tripe (Score:1, Informative)
Uhhh, no. The schools suck. Really.
I have taught mathematics at universities and community colleges for over a decade. The overwhelming majority of students know virtually nothing about math. For example, on one exam I asked a question about a rectangular swimming pool. One of the students drew a triangle. This happened again in another class a year later.
I mentioned this to my colleagues and was informed that the students also had a poor background in history, science, literature, grammar, art, and so on.
The schools suck.
Re:Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Informative)