WordPerfect is still out there? I used to teach that at law firms. Reveal Codes is a feature I’ve really missed in Word.
Are there specific must have features in MS Word that meets some goal of what you want to teach?
Personally I have used Open Office, Libre Office and have not missed any features. And I’m a power user of office tools. Also Google’s online tools are fantastic.
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I’ll look into it more. The thing is, when you look at specific keywords in job descriptions, many employers are looking for proficiency in MS Office and specific Microsoft software.
These keywords are compared through the ATS (automatic tracking system) software that determines whether a candidate gets an interview or not.
I can show you on my LinkedIn Premium account how it calculates where you fall percentagewise against other candidates based entirely on the skills listed on your LinkedIn profile.
Background story: Early in my software training career, a woman came to class in tears. She was late 40s/early 50s and her husband left her for a younger woman. She had been a stay at home mom, and had no job skills. Having this desperate woman in my class has always stuck with me. It’s why I’m so committed to doing this work, using software that can really help people find work. People with jobs csn pay full membership dues. Inviting non-members to take these classes can bring more feet in the door, and more dues in DMS’ bank account.
I’m convinced we’ll earn more than the cost of the investment back.
If you want to be a public school teacher, Google Docs is perfect. If you want a corporate job, it’s not going to help you do that.
Hopefully, by sharing my reasoning, everyone will understand I’m not being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. There are real goals behind the request.
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If you are teaching for user skills beyond DMS, Office is the de facto standard companies use. Very small companies/sole proprietors can be anything due to cost saving, personal preference, hatred of Microsoft, etc. but companies use Office (this was true when I worked internationally - languages are set differently). Office is able to easily integrate between applications: Word/PowerPoint/Publisher document pulls data and charts from Excel. PP - pulls from Word. Hyperlinks to data files etc.
A machine or two that have Abode Acrobat, not AA Reader, would be great. PDF Fillable forms can be created.
For DMS, if stand alone licenses can be bought I’d recommend. These typically would only need updating every 5 years and would reduce license management hassles.
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The last time I was job hunting about 25% of the jobs required you to submit your resume as a word document file. Everywhere but the law firm/title company i worked at in high school has used the Microsoft office suite.
For personal use I have been pretty happy with everything except Libre office. The google online tools are pretty great in case i switch computers or something.
Im not really arguing for or against getting office. I can see not spending money on something that we reasonably have. I also see having actual microsoft office for job seekers. Really i just think its worth evaluating how much value we would get out of it.
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Word Perfect was is my favorite Word Processor, but everywhere I worked in last 25 years was Office based. F4 a big reason I liked, page boundaries and automatic two sided page printing/numbering and print formatting for books and booklets were superb.
Word Perfect is big for Medial and Legal as they created a niche by creating a lot of templates specific to their needs as well as special characters and formatting.
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MS-word? we don’t need no stinking word…
how? groff -mom -Tpdf my-paper-written-on-raspberry-pi.troff > AwesomeDoc.pdf.
Comes free with linux.
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You, personally, don’t need word.
Other people do meed it.
You’re forgetting that this is a static copy; no security updates or updates when new versions come out.
When Microsoft releases 2020 or whatever, we’re stuck with it. This means stuck with it’s security issues, stuck without feature support (if you really want to sell this procurement as training for companies hiring with office experience, they should really have the current versions).
Basically we’re looking at $400 for a year or two of use before we’d have to buy it again.
Office 2019 has security support until 10/14/2025
5 years sounds pretty good to me.
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Perfect, so the security part can be considered $400 every 5/6 years (though they’ve been known to change support cycles, so the next round may be shorter).
The features note stays the same if one is to justify this by office training for jobs, however that is far from predictable. I’d still suggest sticking with keeping libreoffice on the machines simply because office isn’t something that, beyond basic word ability, is common unless you have other complimentary skill sets (like finance/other analysts needing it for pivot tables and macros in excel)
-Jim
I don’t know the last time y’all have seen PowerPoint, but at this point it’s a full-fledged graphics and animation app.
I’d argue the point but that would lessen the jest of my original post. And besides jobs is right again.
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
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I think you misunderstand what I’m getting at; with a static license you don’t get feature updates, which means the ability to teach for a job drops over time to just the basics which exist in other processor suites since besides advanced features they’re fairly on-par.
Employers that actually ask for office proficiency either want just the basics (which can be taught with other things), they want skills tied to other specific job areas we aren’t teaching as much (like statistical analysis, which can still be done in the libreoffice etc suites), or they want the fancy features we’d have to be upgrading our copies of to keep up with.
I’ve made my point. I don’t tell other committees what tools they need or don’t need.
I don’t tell other committees to limit themselves to free tools or tools bought at garage sales or at Harbor Freight. Why not? Aren’t those tools usable?
This is a digital media issue. Full stop. If you’re not teaching in digital media, please stop telling us what tools we need or don’t need.
If you’re not using the tool, fine, but that’s not a good enough reason to tell another committee they can’t have what they need at a reasonable price.
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It is if you’re asking for funding from the BoD (aka “the membership”):
If you’re doing the “bake sale” so you’re spending not-membership money (Digital Media’s Money, or personal/corporate donation, etc.) then you’re right, Digital Media may spend monies already allocated to their committee as they see fit, and may accept donations “at will”, although accountability still comes back to the membership, so having a finger to the wind of member-opinion might be a good thing…
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As a user of the equipment in there, and as a member that contributes to DM, and as a member of this space whose dues will fund a BoD allocation (of which all of us can put in our 2cents), I say it’s not worth the cost.
There are somethings that aren’t for every member with a random opinion (specialized machinery or legal/FM compliance), but things like this are in the purview of every member to chime in with their opinion.
Full Stop.
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I’ll support you wanting to teach any way I can but it’s too late for me to make an agenda item for this meeting.
Get back at me in 2 - 3 weeks and I’ll do it or alternatively anyone member has the ability to make a board item including you or we can do it together.
On a personal and fully opinionated note. Microsoft is what runs fortune companies. Word is how you make a professional resume with no questioning of indexing, compatibility or if you are going to look like a fool with formatting. Using anything else is like wearing a tuxedo t-shirt. I mean technically it works? Plus god help the people that use Acrobat for resume. Excel is what even finance & board use at the space even though we have opensource and google docs. Its what I use, Its what you basically use till you need a million records in peach tree, very specific job specific software or full blown relational database. PowerPoint is standard even though people who making boring slide decks should be flogged. If I went to a professional MBA resume center and said I want to start uploading google docs for resumes they would have a sit down with you. Onenote is my jam also but its free now. Outlook can die & Adobe kicks the shit out of publisher is all I got on that. Most employers I know in 100,000+ person companies would hire someone that doesnt know office
Also if Makerspace was the reason someone got a job and successful life I would highly suspect they would be one of those golden phantom members that pay their dues even if they live out of state just as basically a donation, thank you and a way to show support. IDK if the place would exist without those types of members. Growing that base is invaluable.
Meetups could attract a ton of people interested in bettering themselves and learning.Plus it helps the local community & seems to fit our mission statement.
Wish I had the balance to help but it was taken away.
How ever I can think of another way. Teach a class every week in digital media and in 2 months we can outfit the room with it. I got topics or subject ideas to get anyone started. Stop by sometime and we can talk about it & make a game plan.
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Microsoft maintains backwards compatibility with the ***x file formats through xml.
Price has gone up $100 because we’ve waited on this.
Security updates will be available for a long ass time, forever in Makerspace years.
The new template are made available online for all
It also is probably the last standalone version ever offered and they’ve started not selling other versions of 2019 already and will be like a golden license to have.
You have to pay $14 on tech soup a month to get Office 365. That’s $140 a year *10 licenses or $1400. Over a 5 year period thats $7000 for something that could be had for $400 now
They are going to support this like a volume license for legacy enterprises.
Also security patches? Office wont bring down the space. But most of the server operating systems running are past mainstream support and I doubt we have volume license extended support contracts. Were running 2012 on jump, active directory & an end of life linux on the fileserver right? Not trying to tear infra apart just saying thats where the real security holes are/will be not 2019 office
We should get some 2019 server & office licenses before the prices go up or are discontinued
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So first, security patches in office suites are the most critical; it’s one of, if not the, most common exploit path into modern organizations. This is Literally my job. I had already conceded that point anyway when it was indicated it had a 5 year lifecycle (I had misread their statement on dropping timelines for extended support starting with 2019 to 2 years as their overall support). Don’t know what you are talking about for our servers, as they are all in support and we patch them. Mainstream support is different than end of life, as extended support has security patches just not feature patches.
As for resumes etc, as someone who handled resumes for companies crazy formatting etc honestly was a common disservice most candidates did to themselves. Anything that makes it harder to read or cluttered is just going to make whomever is reading it ignore it.
LibreOffice etc all have doc export without issues, as does Google Docs and other suites. Until you hit crazy formatting you don’t have an effective difference.
And as for Excel etc, if you’re teaching the class for a job it needs to be in a way that’s useful. That means teaching actual stats classes to make sense of pivot tables and metric data in Excel, otherwise it’s a skill without an application (and if an employer is asking for that skill, it’s typically because there’s a type of data to process and handle). Otherwise it’s a waste of money, as the same functionality and teaching can be had in other things.
(I say below as that person who ran resume evaluation events, who handled resumes at one of their firms, and has written the initial hiring stages for job positions):
In the end, most resumes are processed by machine to pull keywords and that’s how they get to someone’s desk. At that point they don’t care because it has the keywords needed to start a phone call or whatever their next stage is.
As long as the resume is legible and not cluttered, and it opens in word or acrobat, they don’t care. I’m not suggesting sending a resume as an ODT, but no one is going to notice whether that .doc or .pdf file was made in LibreOffice or Word unless you go to that crazy formatting.
The biggest formatting consideration for resumes is what to include and how to present it. We didn’t pick at the use of Ariel vs Times, we didn’t care about the processor used. We looked at things like how their voice presents their skill set when talking about a job position on it, whether they have “filler” skills (listing office on it was often considered filler unless it was actually a data entry position or a finance position with heavy macros)
Most employers only care about knowing the basics, not about knowing all the office-specific features. Can you open, edit, and save a document. Throw in some simplistic formatting. This process is the same across all the different word processor suites. Unless we are teaching the very fancy capabilities with specific goals in mind, I don’t see the value here.
We are not the same as every corporation. We don’t handle business docs every day, and most of our members don’t when at the space. If you actually build a curriculum to teach the advanced stuff in application then great, but otherwise a class on ms office wouldn’t be worthwhile. I think there are more important things DM can try to request budget for first like fleshing out the workstations, Adobe, etc.
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