Quite the opposite.

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.

A lot of schools have also switched to google docs. Free and easy for kids to use to get the concepts. And much easier for the schools than Libreoffice.

I would not want my child to learn Excel/Calc at all, so that doesn't bother me. :-) While spreadsheets have been very sticky, super-useful for quick calculations, they are often abused for a variety of cases where alternative tools would be better. If I could, I would ban installation of Excel and Calc at my workplace!

Hope LibreOffice Impress improves over the time to catch up with PowerPoint.

digital spreadsheets - without macros - are arguably the simplest form of functional programming you could teach anyone, so i wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.

Spreadsheets are immensely useful. In many situations they are more useful in specific tasks than software designed specifically for those tasks, because their general nature means that they can be used to do things beyond what the creator of the designed software intended.

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.

Sure. For that use-case.

I would still like a mechanism in place to prevent use of spreadsheets wherever not suitable.

> The idea is that children learn concepts, not individual implementations

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.

>why wouldn't you teach these concepts using an implementation that the vast vast majority of children will use in their adult life?

Because it makes it too easy for the teachers to cheat and only teach mindless button clicking.

Actually, Linux became popular in the server world partly because students could toy with it for free.

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 maybe students accustomed to LibreOffice can push the change

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.

> But... why? For 99.9% of students Word is all they need.

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 :)

Are you really equating learning an entire language to learning the basics of an office suite?

Most people use extremely basic functionality. They can probably learn a slightly different UI in an hour of experimentation.

Well, for 99.8% of the world, Writer is as good as Word. And it's 100% cheaper.

Sure, but Word is cheap enough. Writer has to be better than Word to win because price really isn't an issue.

It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be the same. For most people, they pretty much are the same.

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.

> It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be the same.

I think you underestimate just how powerful good enough is in terms of inertia.

I don't think it's the school job to prepare how to use a specific software, but train skills that one can apply to every software.

I agree, but still acknowledge that school has the power to shape habits, nonetheless

Do you really feel that paying to teach someone a particular office suite prepares them for the working world? Anyone who has once learned the basics of computer use and has used an office suite can become accustomed to buttons being in a different menu and different shortcuts rather easily.

Why Office? So that everyone keeps paying the microsoft tax in the future for ever and ever?

Why call it a tax? Do you have a fundamental objection to commercial software?

Every company out there is kind of forcing you to use Office, unless you are in the privileged few. So yes, it has become a tax in practice, since it's expected everywhere - even with government interaction which is particularly insidious.

No, but why lock yourself in when you don’t need to?