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.
Students can't share a PC with their parents (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
not surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
Its ridiculous to the point of sheer ignorance.
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:5, Interesting)
Computer labs (Score:2, Interesting)
What would be wrong though is if the school recommends a specific product without having it freely available in their computer labs. If the children can't have access to Microsoft's products at school after the teaching hours then there is a problem. Before recommending parents to buy a product I would make sure the kids can have access to a good computer lab.
Vote them out (Score:5, Interesting)
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 )
Ugh, it's everywhere (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Ugh, it's everywhere (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just a quick question? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And we all know that kids can only learn one th (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft Tax Revolt (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Vote them out (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Open Office (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Ugh, it's everywhere (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, I've heard that quite a few folks have taken a liking to the "ribbon." Makes me wonder if you shouldn't be treating your people with a little more respect.
Re:Had a related fight (Score:1, Interesting)
Good to see nothing's changed in Ontario schools since 1992 when I learned this language there. LOL. The reason why for this language is used is obvious (although stupid). "Turing is a Pascal-like programming language developed in 1982 by Ric Holt and James Cordy, then of University of Toronto, Canada". Oh, I own a copy and the manual to go with it. What the hell, it was (uselessly) fun.
You should have pushed more for Java (although I see you tried), since it is Canadian in some ways as well (at least by developer country of origin). Tell them they're not being "Canadian" enough.
Or don't push it, honestly, I've been through that system many years ago (see above!) and it hasn't changed one bit. Actually, I was banned from using the computers at least once in each high school, always for knowing more than the teachers.
Your best bet is to keep the Open Source at home, and let the kids learn powerpoint or whatever is the flavour of the month at school. That way they will learn real skills that can translate to ANY software, rather than the usual idiot skills of "Click here and this happens!"
And this is coming from someone educated in what is considered the "highest tech" town of all of Ontario, and sometimes all of Canada, hell, even sometimes the whole world [cordweekly.com]... Kitchener / Waterloo (Don't believe the hype, BTW, unless you want to work at RIM. For the world's smartest city our best public transportation consists of fossil fuel buses and a railway station that bills upwards of $50 a trip, and broadband, while not too tough to get, is only available through cable for about 25% of our core urban population [I worked at a DSL ISP, I remember the calls from people living in the centre of downtown that couldn't get it... it always amazed me]).
Re:Expected from Establishment (Score:4, Interesting)
But surely Office 2007 is far more different to previous versions of Office than Open Office is?
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:2, Interesting)
among our districts genious decree's:
no linux webservers
linux is a social disease
sites about linux or open source are "hacking" and blocked
only the head district tech can get around content filtering ( not even the pricipals can bypass )
all internet for all the schools is routed through the district office
it goes on
WHY! WHY ARE IDIOTS RUNNING THE SCHOOLS? FUCKING THINK OF THE CHILDREN, THEY'RE SMARTER THAN YOU!
and for anyone wondering what school this is, your answer is: Monta Vista, i suggest looking it up on urbandictionary.com
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mo
Re:BECAUSE THERE IS NO FREE ALTERNATIVE (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't agree with your first assertion - everything Word-like programs do is Wrong - rather I think it is that people try to use Word like programs for things it really isn't suited. Such programs are great tools for automating what was once done manually with a type writer - i.e. writing and editing text; essentially they are a modern version of paper tape and Baudot code.
Unfortunately, as features get added people started using the tool for things it wasn't designed to do (and where the developers didn't sit down and learn from the right tools how to properly implement features; the electronic version of using a pair of pliers as a socket set.
Which brings me to your second point - people ought to be marking up their documents in some semantic markup language - with which I agree. Unfortunately, most text markup programs don't function very well as word processors so people still need Word or it's clones to do the text creation and then must move the text to a layout tool; as a result most people simply try to do the layout in their word processor and develop a set of kludges and work arounds. For example, to accomplish the OP's text layout and do TOCs you can insert tables and use hidden text to keep the header information from which to build the TOC, but that, AFAIK, requires unhiding the headers when you update the TOC so you have to carefully, manually break the pages or risk the page numbers being in error do to the now unhidden text re-wrapping the real text.
Then again, we do our page layout in PowerPoint via notes pages - talk about a stupid solution.
Which gets to my argument - this is where OSS development misses an opportunity - instead of building a free copy (sort of) of Office - develop a whole new and better way of doing it. Unfortunately I doubt that will happen because it would require a consistent vision and someone to enforce that; which is not the way most OSS communities want to work.
No, no, no... (Score:3, Interesting)
Kids (even in high school) often do not realize that one program will not necessarily open files from another. We see this ALL THE TIME in our high schools here in Pasco County, FL. Kids buy some piece of crap PC that comes with WordPerfect and then bring their files in on floppy disks in WordPerfect format and wonder why Office won't open it. We need two things:
1. Students need to learn that applications use proprietary formats and they're not interchangeable - you CAN save as text or rtf but you'll lose formatting, and
2. We, as a country (and as a planet, for that matter,) are really being hurt because we don't have one universal document file format type that all word processors can read and write. We USED to - it was called "text" or ".txt" as Windows users are wont to call it.
Telling kids they "ought" to fork out $150 for Microsoft software is irresponsible. We are a Mac based school district and as soon as OpenOffice runs native on OS X, I will be recommending it to ALL of our schools K-12, not as a replacement for Office, but as an alternative to Office. Then kids can, if they want, run the same suite at home and at school, for free.
latex (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see what the problem is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Speaking from experience, earlier versions of Office used to be just about as unreliable as OpenOffice. I, too, used to use OpenOffice, but mostly because it could export to PDF. Office 2007, however, is much much more reliable and I have never lost my work. OpenOffice still has issues with data loss.
Also, kids don't know that they have to save to Office 2007 format from OpenOffice. They'll save in the default OpenOffice format, and get yelled at by their instructors for not having the right version. They'll also get yelled at because of formatting issues. Whenever I converted between OpenOffice and Office 2003 I always had to edit my paper.
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about it though -- let's say that first thing Monday morning the OMB in conjunction with the National Archives and Records Service make an announcement that, henceforth, the Government will use only an ISO standardized open format to exchange documents. Assume also that they have the balls to make it stick. From the get-go, all 50 states and all government contractors have to switch to software supporting this open standard. From that point forward, it's a done deal as the rest of the economic food chain adopts the new software so that they can continue to communicate with the various federal state and local governments, contractors, subcontractors, etc.
It won't happen, but that's the only way to force the issue -- not up from the school level.