this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Your manager, that most likely started his career as a tech person as most tech manager do, likely uses Office a lot and he certainly isn't a data-entry drone. One day as you progress in your career you'll too.
PS: whoever doesn't understand this comment and downvote right away should really think about their life. If one doesn't understand that a manager does need to be proficient in MS Office then you'll never get there / have a very hard time.
There's nothing that anyone can do in 2024 in the MS Office suite of applications specifically that I can't find a third party or cloud equivalent of to do the exact same thing.
This isn't true. It might be close to true for a lot of situations, but not true at all. And the issue here isn't that there isn't an alternative, those students can learn LibreOffice and do almost everything they need with it, however once they get into a job and the company uses MS Office they won't be be able to pick the work right away and be as productive as their peers will be. Imagine one of those students tried to apply for a backoffice job at a bank, they'll most likely test the person's Office skills and the student may not be able to compete the assessment and have an inferior grade to another one who always had MS Office at his school.
I'm all for FOSS but we must be very responsible when it comes to what we expose young people to and how that may impact their careers on the long run. They should have exposure to Linux, LibreOffice and have a basic understanding of them but they shouldn't be robbed of valuable jobs skills that may make a difference just because.
Most young people are unfamiliar with Office. Once the older generation retires Office is probably going to be dead.
No it won't. What you see is that younger generation (millennials that actually know a bit of Office) getting slandered as soon as they're promoted and required to use those tools. They eventually learn them and are productive but it takes more time than it should. Precisely because of what you said is the reason why those generations should be exposed to said software - after all some of them will be managers, layers and other types of professionals that will keep using those tools.
What will they use Word and Excel for that can't be replaced by docs and calc? We already have automated time tracking software.
Telemetry.
VBA scripts. I have a friend who works in the radio/telcom industry...but ends up doing a bunch of other stuff. This friend makes extensive use of VBA scripts to get the job done. You can't do that on the web version, and you can't do it in Calc.
Word is just for document interchange. Other businesses and clients use Word documents, and they don't display reliably correctly in any other program but Word.
VBA scripts are notorious for being security weaknesses but I guess they are still used in some places
My friend's response:
🤷♀️
Oh, so you should suck up to Microsoft being incompatible with their own standard because they're incompatible with their own stabdard? Is that basically what you're saying? And also, you can use odt in Microsoft Word, which is interoperable with LibreOffice and Google Docs
I don't use Microsoft Office, but I use Adobe. If the people I collaborate with or I work for use Adobe and need to edit my files, I'm not going to give them something done in Scribus instead of inDesign. That would be doing a bad job and also limiting their choices significantly with who they can go with in the future to edit their files. Same principle applies to Microsoft Office.
Mostly because if you’re working on a MS centric company and you’ve a lot of integration with other MS tools people then need Word and Excel. Besides, Zoom is the biggest piece of shit communication software out there, MS Teams is way way better both in call quality and in screen sharing. Zoom doesn’t even come close to MS Teams on that last one. Once you’ve documentation with dynamic references to other people, meetings, excel sharing data to and from sharepoint and sometimes NAV then it gets really hard to use docs. Besides calc can’t still do some advanced formula features.
Since when does a manager need office? This isn't 1998
Not to mention most of the younger generation grew up with Chromebooks.
Useless manager detected
You are already drowning in downvotes. Certainly managers are going to have to use office software. I do not think that using Microsoft Offce in school makes it any more likely that you will become a manager.
Most managers are really not that great at using Ofice and, what they know, they learned on the job. Learning to use PowerPoint is more about leaning how to present and communicate in general. A course on the software is not going to teach that and knowing how to use LibreOffice Impress gives you more than enough expertise. In terms of presentation, the marketing department typically dictates the look and feel. You just need to populate a template. None of the executives I know use anything advanced out of Microsoft Word. If you can “track changes”, you can collaborate on documents. Really the only application that managers are likely to have any specialist knowledge around is Excel. I will admit that knowing Excel specifically vs other spreadsheet applications is useful. Being able to do a VLOOKUP, a pivot table, or even just proper multi-sheet formulas is useful. Even just being able to format effectively can make a difference in how professionally you come across. Honestly though, the Internet is littered with $19 Excel courses. Take one.
So what? I'm not a politician running a politically correct popularity contest and saying what people want to hear to win votes. I'm just stating what is omitted from the article and what is a fact as you eventually got there:
Yes, and will a gen-Z take them? Isn't just easier to gradually expose them to those tools so they learn naturally without the pressure of getting to some job?