[K12OSN] Open Office

[James P. Kinney III]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 05:36 -0700, Mel Wade wrote:
> On 9/22/06, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com> wrote:
>         Think how useful it would be to be leaving
>         college now with an intimate knowledge of Word Perfect or Word
>         5.0? (Not
>         that there aren't places that still use it.) 
> 
> Agreed.  However, in high school, where I teach, we must also give
> them the skills needed to complete their education using products
> available today. 

So you need to also have WordPerfect and StarOffice and Microsoft Works.

The big point is, word processing is word processing. The tool used to
do it is just a bunch of eye-candy. Right now, I have clients that use
everything from from Microsoft word from 2000 up to Office XP pro 2005.
A new version is due out in a few months. I have lawyers who use nothing
but WordPerfect. I have doctors who use none of the standard stuff since
their environment is all custom built.

But the "word processing" still works the same. You define a page layout
with margins that will fit the printing environment. Then you work with
text and graphics. Left justify, center and right justify are all the
same. So far, what I have seen in business is 90% or greater of all word
processing is less than 3 pages. The remaining portion is huge documents
done by a collaboration of people who didn't learn "word processing" in
school. They learned by doing.

I have a high school student. At that school, they have word processing
classes. My kid doesn't take them. Using the word processor is the easy
part (highlight some text, press a button). The bulk of the issue that
the WP teacher has is not the software tool in use, the kids can't
write. More time spent writing would solve the problem. Thus using a
software tool that is readily available at no cost on every platform
will allow more practice time for the real work - writing.

> 
> -- 
> Mel Wade
> "The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." -
> BF Skinner
> www.melwade.com 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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