Why? So kids can be even more unprepared when they enter the world of work, where nobody uses LibreOffice?
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.
Hope LibreOffice Impress improves over the time to catch up with PowerPoint.
I would still like a mechanism in place to prevent use of spreadsheets wherever not suitable.
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.
I fully agree, but why wouldn't you teach these concepts using an implementation that the vast vast majority of children will use in their adult life?
You could teach kids how to use a computer using OpenBSD, it's arguably better than Windows and I'm use a lot of institutions use it. It's just not very useful to the overall majority of kids who do not go into a comp-sci field.
Because it makes it too easy for the teachers to cheat and only teach mindless button clicking.
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.
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.
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 :)
Most people use extremely basic functionality. They can probably learn a slightly different UI in an hour of experimentation.
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.
I think you underestimate just how powerful good enough is in terms of inertia.