7 ms·
Wish they would use this in schools instead of getting kids accustomed to MS office.
by snowpanda 9y ago
Wish they would use this in schools instead of getting kids accustomed to MS office.
- orf 9y agoWhy? So kids can be even more unprepared when they enter the world of work, where nobody uses LibreOffice?
- Findus23 9y agoI don't think it's the school job to prepare how to use a specific software, but train skills that one can apply to every software.
- thibaultamartin 9y agoI agree, but still acknowledge that school has the power to shape habits, nonetheless
- thibaultamartin 9y agoActually, Linux became popular in the server world partly because students could toy with it for free. Sure, MS Office has a large user base in the professionnal world, but maybe students accustomed to LibreOffice can push the change. Still, I do agree with the comments stating how important the overall UX/UI of LibreOffice needs to be improved.
- orf 9y ago> but maybe students accustomed to LibreOffice can push the change But... why? For 99.9% of students Word is all they need. There are not many compelling reasons to not teach the software people will actually use in the real world. I mean, why not eschew the English language in schools and teach kids Swahili? Maybe students accustomed to Swahili can push the change. Or maybe not.
- thibaultamartin 9y ago> But... why? For 99.9% of students Word is all they need. MS Office is especially better than LibreOffice with Excel and PowerPoint. If all you use is Word, then the licence you have to pay to use it might not be worth the difference with Writer. > There are not many compelling reasons to not teach the software people will actually use in the real world. Well, I do use MS Office in "the real world", and LibreOffice at home. When I landed in my company, we got a mandatory session of "advanced" Excel and Powerpoint usage, because that's inexpensive for the company to spend a day or two to make sure we can use the tools adequately rather than betting high school taught us. Not everyone uses MS Office in "the real world", nor in "the business world". Most of the document we receive and send is in PDF format. > I mean, why not eschew the English language in schools and teach kids Swahili? Maybe students accustomed to Swahili can push the change. Or maybe not. Come on, I'm quite positive we can both be smarter than that :)
- michaelmrose 9y agoAre you really equating learning an entire language to learning the basics of an office suite? Most people use extremely basic functionality. They can probably learn a slightly different UI in an hour of experimentation.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoWell, for 99.8% of the world, Writer is as good as Word. And it's 100% cheaper.
- criddell 9y agoSure, but Word is cheap enough. Writer has to be better than Word to win because price really isn't an issue.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoIt doesn't have to be better, it just has to be the same. For most people, they pretty much are the same. Ideally they would switch around every few months, so they can raise users who actually know the general principles behind their tools and don't get completely lost by minor interface changes.
- dotancohen 9y agoQuite the opposite. The idea is that children learn concepts, not individual implementations. And since Writer is arguable better than MS Word I see lots of institutions moving to LibreOffice. Note, however, that Excel is better than Calc for anything non-trivial, and Powerpoint just blows the LibreOffice counterpart away completely. Praise to Writer is _not_ praise to the whole LibreOffice suite.
- alok-g 9y agoI would not want my child to learn Excel/Calc at all, so that doesn't bother me. :-) While spreadsheets have been very sticky, super-useful for quick calculations, they are often abused for a variety of cases where alternative tools would be better. If I could, I would ban installation of Excel and Calc at my workplace! Hope LibreOffice Impress improves over the time to catch up with PowerPoint.
- baq 9y agodigital spreadsheets - without macros - are arguably the simplest form of functional programming you could teach anyone, so i wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.
- alok-g 9y agoSure. For that use-case. I would still like a mechanism in place to prevent use of spreadsheets wherever not suitable.
- addicted 9y agoSpreadsheets are immensely useful. In many situations they are more useful in specific tasks than software designed specifically for those tasks, because their general nature means that they can be used to do things beyond what the creator of the designed software intended. People don’t use Excel for everything because they are masochists. Excel very often really is the best solution available for a very wide variety of uses.
- orf 9y ago
- michaelmrose 9y agoDo you really feel that paying to teach someone a particular office suite prepares them for the working world? Anyone who has once learned the basics of computer use and has used an office suite can become accustomed to buttons being in a different menu and different shortcuts rather easily.
- ekianjo 9y agoWhy Office? So that everyone keeps paying the microsoft tax in the future for ever and ever?
- criddell 9y agoWhy call it a tax? Do you have a fundamental objection to commercial software?
- mixmastamyk 9y agoNo, but why lock yourself in when you don’t need to?
- ekianjo 9y agoEvery company out there is kind of forcing you to use Office, unless you are in the privileged few. So yes, it has become a tax in practice, since it's expected everywhere - even with government interaction which is particularly insidious.
- alok-g 9y agoIndeed. Here in India, I bet most homes are using pirated versions of MS office because of this. I am happy to see Ribbon UI improvements just so that my son (middle school) could still manage at school while using LibreOffice at home.
- j605 9y agoBut MS Office would still give your son scary warnings when he tries to open a ODF file in school.
- alok-g 9y agoThanks for bringing this up. I'll watch out for it. :-) As of now, he has to pass exams that use printed screenshots in quizzes! :-)
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago...as it would with older MS Office files. Why do people always try to frame this as some anticompetitive conspiracy?
- michaelmrose 9y agoPresumably because of the party involved. We are talking about the Microsoft here. Its like asking why people are trying to paint Roman Polanski as a pervert.
- addicted 9y agoNo it would be like suggesting that Polanski directed the Pianist so that he could sleep with the children cast in the movie. MS is a convicted monopoly abuser. But that doesn’t mean every action of theirs is an abuse of their monopoly (further being publicly convicted and penalized for it, odds are they are less likely to do things that abuse their monopoly position).
- 9y ago
- Johnnynator 9y agoWe have both in our school (Bavaria, Germany) MS Office and Libre Office. You are free to use what you want but you get thought Libre Office (or Open Office ~7y ago).
- JorgeGT 9y agoHere in my region in Spain (~5M people), all school computers come with a custom Linux distro, and only for some professional education courses they have Windows (for "real world" specialized software with no Linux alternative).
- criddell 9y agoMy kids mostly use Google Docs.
- tannhaeuser 9y agoI'm puzzled why kids have to do paper work using office suites and powerpoint presentations. For me these tools, especially MS Word, are from the 20th century where your intention was to prepare a document for printing out on paper, something I very rarely do in this decade. I know my now-17-yo had to learn MSO basics as part of "informatics" in 6th-8th grade, which made me furious as I found it time not spent well, and inappropriate for a high school curriculum.
- megaman22 9y agoWhy? Businesses run on Office docs, spreadsheets, and powerpoints, and conceivably will for the next 30 years, until everybody who came up under the current regime ages out of management positions. At which point the next generation will have been inculcated with Officisms, and so the cycle will repeat, perhaps losing a bit of steam in each cycle. Don't get me wrong, I would love to swap over almost everything that we currently use Word for to just be some combination of Markdown and HTML, but beating my head against the inertia and trying to get people to invest an hour or two of time in learning something they don't already know is demoralizing.