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.