7 ms·

I'd have to disagree here. Teaching kids how to use Word and Excel will help them for the majority of office jobs out there.

by dx034 4y ago

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Plenty of open source options that will teach them 90% of what most people will need to know. Taxpayer money should not be going to these corporations.
- eptcyka 4y ago
  People won't learn the underlying principles, they will rigidly learn the menu structure of the tool at hand. As such, their time will be wasted learning LibreOffice instead of getting a grip on the latest ribbongate spectacle from MS.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Nothing really compares to Excel. (Nothing really compares to Excel in some of its most terrible bugs either).
  - highwaylights 4y ago
    That’s true in the same way that it’s true of Visual Studio, but how many people really need all that functionality in their job? I’m sure there are some genuine Excel experts out there doing important work but I’ve got to assume most of what’s being done is formulas, charts and pivot tables.
  - Aerroon 4y ago
    What does Excel do that something like LibreOffice Calc does not? I'm genuinely curious because I've not run into any issues with the latter that the former would've solved so far.
    - jodrellblank 4y ago
      Excel has FlashExtract and FlashFill[1] Excel has COM automation going back to the old days; from many programming languages on Windows you can instantiate "Excel.Application" and then script it as if you were using the GUI - and have the GUI visible and showing you what is happening. Add workbooks, worksheets, select ranges, copy/paste, enter formulae and get their results, apply formatting, etc. Because it plugs into Windows' COM system, you don't need to download an Office SDK or Excel-specific library for your language to use it, any language which can talk to COM can do it, including VBScript, PowerShell, Python with PyWin32, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, etc. If you save an Excel document on a SharePoint (Office365) site, then multiple people can open it. When they do that, it's a multiplayer spreadsheet - you see who else has the document open, which cell(s) they are looking at, changes betewen all people are propagated in approximately realtime. If you save an Excel document on an (Office365) site then Office365 has visibility into it, which means if someone else opens it, @tags you in a comment on a cell, Office365 will pick that up and email it to you for your attention. Excel documents saved on O365 can be opened in a web browser, in a JavaScript version of Excel which has fewer features but can still join in with the above. Excel documents saved on O365 are visible in the MSGraph API, for scripting with REST endpoints[2] People who have been working in Silicon Valley, for FAANG companies, as software developers, pushing us all to the cloud for ten to twenty years, still thinking that Excel vs LibreOffice is a matter of a desktop program showing a grid you can put some numbers in and do sum or average, and whether you can bold or align the text, are experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance. Your CRUD app can now be a spreadsheet someone in HR opens, enters an employee code, and a script against the MSGraph API which offboards them, and if it hasn't worked the HR person can @ you in a comment. There goes all your custom CRUD UI, database backend, network connectivity, compiling, deployment, authorization, there's your "no code" or "low code" Excel as frontend for a small business. Want to script a report for HR to look at? Thinking of downloading a JDK and PDF library for Java and asking for SMTP relay settings? Script MSGraph to make an Excel spreadsheet directly in a folder HR can see. A poor solution for a big business, a quick and relatively easy solution for a small business with an admin and a PowerShell script. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830 [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?view=graph-rest-1.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?v...
- dx034 4y ago
  Maybe what you need to know, but not how to use the programs. I was very anti Microsoft in my school days but had to learn Excel and Word in school. It helped me so much in my first job.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    If you had learned OpenOffice calc or write, would that have made much of a difference? Takes a few hours to move 80% from one to the other. Maybe if very specific functions it may take a few minutes more.
    - yunohn 4y ago
      Would you prefer we mandate Vim or EMacs for kids? Both are free, so it’s a deliberate choice to be made. And how do you suggest we support this decision and their potential inability to use an IDE in the real world?
      - hulitu 4y ago
        I think ed is more user friendly.
        goldenkey 4y ago
        Just give the rugrats nano and call it a day.
      - dusted 4y ago
        I guess I'm not working in the real world, because I get to use whatever I want as long as I deliver... And so I use VIM.
      - tluyben2 4y ago
        If you grew up with emacs and vim there is not so much chance you cannot use an ide in the real world? I mean: vim/emacs are considered harder to use and going to something easier is, well, easier? I am not really sure what you are saying? Someone who can write elisp macros and have muscle memories for complex actions won’t be bothered with VS or VS code at all. The other way around however…
- sbuk 4y ago
  Google Workspace is free to schools. Therefore it 'costs' significantly less than running the infrastructure to service accounts for several 100's to 1000's of staff and kids using a FOSS solution. Of course, there are other email providers, but they are rarely free. They'll also still need to put security solutions in front of it, or indeed Exchange Online, because the offerings are rudimentary to say the least, but they are more solid out-of-the-box than OSS solutions and provide for a lower overall TCO and cost-to-serve. Pragmatism, where technology decisions and tax-payers money are concerned, should trump ideology every time.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    It's pragmatic to not continue the monopolies that cost the taxpayer money on an ongoing basis. The point is to not pay Microsoft money to promote Microsoft's continued monopoly, which will mean you have to pay them money again next year. Any school paying for closed source software when they could be funding a company to make open source software is doing it wrong. Same with textbooks. 100s of 1000s of schools all paying for something they won't own and will have to pay for again in the future.
  - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
    You bring up a good point, which is other costs beyond financial. Mindshare, attention, and privacy costs also need to be considered and a case can be made that the people should not be funding these costs for corporations. Especially with very little oversight or insight into what they are paying for.
- ls15 4y ago
  And 90% of people probably could continue to use these. Schools should not use the non-free products even if Microsoft provided them for free to them (which they did or do), because it is a Trojan Horse into kid's minds in order to create soft dependencies. People who learned to use one office suite are rarely motivated to learn yet another one.
chronogram 4y ago
It's the other way around, teaching kids how to use Word and Excel will help Microsoft for the majority of office jobs out there, that's why everything MS is free for kids.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Should school really be for job training though? Certainly knowing how to use word processors and spreadsheets is a useful general computing skill, but there's no reason it needs to be MS-specific.
- ryanmercer 4y ago
  Spreadsheets aren't just useful for jobs. Budgets, keep an inventory of digital purchases, making a directory of contact info/birth days/anniversaries, dietary tracking, fitness logs, etc, etc, so on and so forth. Not to mention if they go on to college/university they'll almost certainly have multiple classes where they have to create/manipulate spreadsheets and write a heck of a lot of papers in a word processor.
lrvick 4y ago
Should we teach kids to use TikTok and Facebook so they will be better prepared to help with future office marketing tasks too? This line of thinking is poison and will only amplify the monopolisic power of whatever select companies make the taught-in-schools list. Proprietary technology has no place in educational institutions.
- dx034 4y ago
  No, you only need Facebook and TikTok in very few office jobs (and there probably other interfaces than users typically use). Excel is present in pretty much all office jobs. Maybe not all programmer jobs, but apart from some backend coders I haven't seen many people who never had to work with Word or Excel.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    I have had a long career with many office jobs all across the US and never once has anyone taken issue with me using LibreOffice or similar as long as I got my job done and documents were exported in compatible formats. Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible without teaching students products of whatever specific corporation donates the most money or free licenses.
    - ryanmercer 4y ago
      Excel is a far different beast than what Libre Calc offers, and then what Google Sheets offers. It has some formulas that are exclusive (mind you Liber likely has some that Excel no longer has), outside of startups it is effectively the industry standard as well and is used in all kinds of industries and roles. Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is the "standard". You're going to see Excel far more than Sheets in the workplace and I've never seen a job listing mention Libre Calc. I know Excel, I started at a startup 4 months ago using Sheets, the first few weeks I had to 'unlearn' half of what I knew and try and figure out how to do similar in Sheets. If I only knew sheets, I'd probably have been even more lost going to Excel because Microsoft doesn't hold your hand like Sheets does with every formula you start to type. I'm guessing something like Libre Calc is worse than Excel and Sheets in that regard. >Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible Sure, but teaching someone to drive a 4-cylinder automatic driver's ed car doesn't prepare them to say operate a manual tri-axle or a an excavator. Sure they understand steering, acceleration and stopping, but all of the unique mechanics of say Excel are different than random free software.
weberer 4y ago
That's what I was always told growing up. But after 10 years of working office jobs at various companies, I've yet to have to use either.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
However Denmark has a long history of being heavy into MS and being abused by the company, so I would like to see it ditched, which the way Denmark works is once you lose 50%, another 46% will jump on board with what that 50% are doing, so I'm just looking forward to Denmark as a Microsoft free country.
ekianjo 4y ago
You mean vendor lock in is going to reinforce the existing monopoly. Good thinking there to get kids as early as possible
Aerroon 4y ago
Just use LibreOffice Calc or some equivalent. The main things you want them to learn is to use formulas, charts and filters anyway. LibreOffice Calc does all of that in a pretty similar way to what Excel does. I'm actually not even sure what I would gain by switching to actual Excel.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I used to know excel pretty well but spent the last 8? Years using Google spread sheets. Excel is really difficult to use now. I don’t imagine moving from libreoffice calc to excel would be easy.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ls15 4y ago
It will also ensure that competitors in that space have a hard time, because people are now conditioned to use these exact products instead of alternatives. Nothing is harder to break than habits.
II2II 4y ago
There is a difference between teaching students how to use a product and teaching students through the use of a product. The latter intentionally teaches them transferrable skills. The former does not, and runs the risk that any change in the product (nevermind using a different product) will leave the student without the necessary skills to adapt. The approaches to teaching can vary quite wildly. My mother was doing some resume padding when I was in middle school, so I got to compare what they were teaching with what my school was teaching. They were teaching rote skills with a separate book directed towards each product, which is to say Word had a book full of screenshots illustrating procedures and WordPerfect had its own book full of screenshots illustrating procedures. They were not laying down the foundations for transferrable skills, nor did they expect students to pick it up. In contrast, my middle school was using obsolete computers and had no expectation the software would be used in business. The emphasis was directed towards laying out and formatting documents instead, which had a much longer lasting impact.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
If we teach them tools that aren't awful, then offices can use those instead.

I'd have to disagree here. Teaching kids how to use Word and Excel will help them for the majority of office jobs out there.

by dx034 4y ago

I'd have to disagree here. Teaching kids how to use Word and Excel will help them for the majority of office jobs out there.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

Plenty of open source options that will teach them 90% of what most people will need to know. Taxpayer money should not be going to these corporations.

eptcyka 4y ago
People won't learn the underlying principles, they will rigidly learn the menu structure of the tool at hand. As such, their time will be wasted learning LibreOffice instead of getting a grip on the latest ribbongate spectacle from MS.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
Nothing really compares to Excel. (Nothing really compares to Excel in some of its most terrible bugs either).
- highwaylights 4y ago
  That’s true in the same way that it’s true of Visual Studio, but how many people really need all that functionality in their job? I’m sure there are some genuine Excel experts out there doing important work but I’ve got to assume most of what’s being done is formulas, charts and pivot tables.
- Aerroon 4y ago
  What does Excel do that something like LibreOffice Calc does not? I'm genuinely curious because I've not run into any issues with the latter that the former would've solved so far.
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    Excel has FlashExtract and FlashFill[1] Excel has COM automation going back to the old days; from many programming languages on Windows you can instantiate "Excel.Application" and then script it as if you were using the GUI - and have the GUI visible and showing you what is happening. Add workbooks, worksheets, select ranges, copy/paste, enter formulae and get their results, apply formatting, etc. Because it plugs into Windows' COM system, you don't need to download an Office SDK or Excel-specific library for your language to use it, any language which can talk to COM can do it, including VBScript, PowerShell, Python with PyWin32, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, etc. If you save an Excel document on a SharePoint (Office365) site, then multiple people can open it. When they do that, it's a multiplayer spreadsheet - you see who else has the document open, which cell(s) they are looking at, changes betewen all people are propagated in approximately realtime. If you save an Excel document on an (Office365) site then Office365 has visibility into it, which means if someone else opens it, @tags you in a comment on a cell, Office365 will pick that up and email it to you for your attention. Excel documents saved on O365 can be opened in a web browser, in a JavaScript version of Excel which has fewer features but can still join in with the above. Excel documents saved on O365 are visible in the MSGraph API, for scripting with REST endpoints[2] People who have been working in Silicon Valley, for FAANG companies, as software developers, pushing us all to the cloud for ten to twenty years, still thinking that Excel vs LibreOffice is a matter of a desktop program showing a grid you can put some numbers in and do sum or average, and whether you can bold or align the text, are experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance. Your CRUD app can now be a spreadsheet someone in HR opens, enters an employee code, and a script against the MSGraph API which offboards them, and if it hasn't worked the HR person can @ you in a comment. There goes all your custom CRUD UI, database backend, network connectivity, compiling, deployment, authorization, there's your "no code" or "low code" Excel as frontend for a small business. Want to script a report for HR to look at? Thinking of downloading a JDK and PDF library for Java and asking for SMTP relay settings? Script MSGraph to make an Excel spreadsheet directly in a folder HR can see. A poor solution for a big business, a quick and relatively easy solution for a small business with an admin and a PowerShell script. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830 [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?view=graph-rest-1.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?v...
dx034 4y ago
Maybe what you need to know, but not how to use the programs. I was very anti Microsoft in my school days but had to learn Excel and Word in school. It helped me so much in my first job.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  If you had learned OpenOffice calc or write, would that have made much of a difference? Takes a few hours to move 80% from one to the other. Maybe if very specific functions it may take a few minutes more.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    Would you prefer we mandate Vim or EMacs for kids? Both are free, so it’s a deliberate choice to be made. And how do you suggest we support this decision and their potential inability to use an IDE in the real world?
    - hulitu 4y ago
      I think ed is more user friendly.
      - goldenkey 4y ago
        Just give the rugrats nano and call it a day.
    - dusted 4y ago
      I guess I'm not working in the real world, because I get to use whatever I want as long as I deliver... And so I use VIM.
    - tluyben2 4y ago
      If you grew up with emacs and vim there is not so much chance you cannot use an ide in the real world? I mean: vim/emacs are considered harder to use and going to something easier is, well, easier? I am not really sure what you are saying? Someone who can write elisp macros and have muscle memories for complex actions won’t be bothered with VS or VS code at all. The other way around however…
sbuk 4y ago
Google Workspace is free to schools. Therefore it 'costs' significantly less than running the infrastructure to service accounts for several 100's to 1000's of staff and kids using a FOSS solution. Of course, there are other email providers, but they are rarely free. They'll also still need to put security solutions in front of it, or indeed Exchange Online, because the offerings are rudimentary to say the least, but they are more solid out-of-the-box than OSS solutions and provide for a lower overall TCO and cost-to-serve. Pragmatism, where technology decisions and tax-payers money are concerned, should trump ideology every time.
- mavhc 4y ago
  It's pragmatic to not continue the monopolies that cost the taxpayer money on an ongoing basis. The point is to not pay Microsoft money to promote Microsoft's continued monopoly, which will mean you have to pay them money again next year. Any school paying for closed source software when they could be funding a company to make open source software is doing it wrong. Same with textbooks. 100s of 1000s of schools all paying for something they won't own and will have to pay for again in the future.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  You bring up a good point, which is other costs beyond financial. Mindshare, attention, and privacy costs also need to be considered and a case can be made that the people should not be funding these costs for corporations. Especially with very little oversight or insight into what they are paying for.
ls15 4y ago
And 90% of people probably could continue to use these. Schools should not use the non-free products even if Microsoft provided them for free to them (which they did or do), because it is a Trojan Horse into kid's minds in order to create soft dependencies. People who learned to use one office suite are rarely motivated to learn yet another one.

chronogram 4y ago

It's the other way around, teaching kids how to use Word and Excel will help Microsoft for the majority of office jobs out there, that's why everything MS is free for kids.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Should school really be for job training though? Certainly knowing how to use word processors and spreadsheets is a useful general computing skill, but there's no reason it needs to be MS-specific.

ryanmercer 4y ago
Spreadsheets aren't just useful for jobs. Budgets, keep an inventory of digital purchases, making a directory of contact info/birth days/anniversaries, dietary tracking, fitness logs, etc, etc, so on and so forth. Not to mention if they go on to college/university they'll almost certainly have multiple classes where they have to create/manipulate spreadsheets and write a heck of a lot of papers in a word processor.

lrvick 4y ago

Should we teach kids to use TikTok and Facebook so they will be better prepared to help with future office marketing tasks too? This line of thinking is poison and will only amplify the monopolisic power of whatever select companies make the taught-in-schools list. Proprietary technology has no place in educational institutions.

dx034 4y ago
No, you only need Facebook and TikTok in very few office jobs (and there probably other interfaces than users typically use). Excel is present in pretty much all office jobs. Maybe not all programmer jobs, but apart from some backend coders I haven't seen many people who never had to work with Word or Excel.
- lrvick 4y ago
  I have had a long career with many office jobs all across the US and never once has anyone taken issue with me using LibreOffice or similar as long as I got my job done and documents were exported in compatible formats. Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible without teaching students products of whatever specific corporation donates the most money or free licenses.
  - ryanmercer 4y ago
    Excel is a far different beast than what Libre Calc offers, and then what Google Sheets offers. It has some formulas that are exclusive (mind you Liber likely has some that Excel no longer has), outside of startups it is effectively the industry standard as well and is used in all kinds of industries and roles. Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is the "standard". You're going to see Excel far more than Sheets in the workplace and I've never seen a job listing mention Libre Calc. I know Excel, I started at a startup 4 months ago using Sheets, the first few weeks I had to 'unlearn' half of what I knew and try and figure out how to do similar in Sheets. If I only knew sheets, I'd probably have been even more lost going to Excel because Microsoft doesn't hold your hand like Sheets does with every formula you start to type. I'm guessing something like Libre Calc is worse than Excel and Sheets in that regard. >Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible Sure, but teaching someone to drive a 4-cylinder automatic driver's ed car doesn't prepare them to say operate a manual tri-axle or a an excavator. Sure they understand steering, acceleration and stopping, but all of the unique mechanics of say Excel are different than random free software.

weberer 4y ago

That's what I was always told growing up. But after 10 years of working office jobs at various companies, I've yet to have to use either.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

However Denmark has a long history of being heavy into MS and being abused by the company, so I would like to see it ditched, which the way Denmark works is once you lose 50%, another 46% will jump on board with what that 50% are doing, so I'm just looking forward to Denmark as a Microsoft free country.

ekianjo 4y ago

You mean vendor lock in is going to reinforce the existing monopoly. Good thinking there to get kids as early as possible

Aerroon 4y ago

Just use LibreOffice Calc or some equivalent. The main things you want them to learn is to use formulas, charts and filters anyway. LibreOffice Calc does all of that in a pretty similar way to what Excel does. I'm actually not even sure what I would gain by switching to actual Excel.

philliphaydon 4y ago
I used to know excel pretty well but spent the last 8? Years using Google spread sheets. Excel is really difficult to use now. I don’t imagine moving from libreoffice calc to excel would be easy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ls15 4y ago

It will also ensure that competitors in that space have a hard time, because people are now conditioned to use these exact products instead of alternatives. Nothing is harder to break than habits.

II2II 4y ago

There is a difference between teaching students how to use a product and teaching students through the use of a product. The latter intentionally teaches them transferrable skills. The former does not, and runs the risk that any change in the product (nevermind using a different product) will leave the student without the necessary skills to adapt. The approaches to teaching can vary quite wildly. My mother was doing some resume padding when I was in middle school, so I got to compare what they were teaching with what my school was teaching. They were teaching rote skills with a separate book directed towards each product, which is to say Word had a book full of screenshots illustrating procedures and WordPerfect had its own book full of screenshots illustrating procedures. They were not laying down the foundations for transferrable skills, nor did they expect students to pick it up. In contrast, my middle school was using obsolete computers and had no expectation the software would be used in business. The emphasis was directed towards laying out and formatting documents instead, which had a much longer lasting impact.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

If we teach them tools that aren't awful, then offices can use those instead.