this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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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.