Hacker News Reader

Comment by dx034 | Hacker News Reader

No, you only need Facebook and TikTok in very few office jobs (and there probably other interfaces than users typically use). Excel is present in pretty much all office jobs. Maybe not all programmer jobs, but apart from some backend coders I haven't seen many people who never had to work with Word or Excel.

View on HN

I have had a long career with many office jobs all across the US and never once has anyone taken issue with me using LibreOffice or similar as long as I got my job done and documents were exported in compatible formats.

Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible without teaching students products of whatever specific corporation donates the most money or free licenses.

Excel is a far different beast than what Libre Calc offers, and then what Google Sheets offers. It has some formulas that are exclusive (mind you Liber likely has some that Excel no longer has), outside of startups it is effectively the industry standard as well and is used in all kinds of industries and roles.

Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is the "standard". You're going to see Excel far more than Sheets in the workplace and I've never seen a job listing mention Libre Calc.

I know Excel, I started at a startup 4 months ago using Sheets, the first few weeks I had to 'unlearn' half of what I knew and try and figure out how to do similar in Sheets. If I only knew sheets, I'd probably have been even more lost going to Excel because Microsoft doesn't hold your hand like Sheets does with every formula you start to type. I'm guessing something like Libre Calc is worse than Excel and Sheets in that regard.

>Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible

Sure, but teaching someone to drive a 4-cylinder automatic driver's ed car doesn't prepare them to say operate a manual tri-axle or a an excavator. Sure they understand steering, acceleration and stopping, but all of the unique mechanics of say Excel are different than random free software.

And that's why you only learn to drive an excavator if you get a job that requires it.

Nothing at the level students do spreadsheets is different between spreadsheet programs

My wife is a high school teacher, the stuff those kids are doing now in class is beyond anything I did the first decade I worked in an office. I'm 37, high school education of today in no way resembles the high school experience I had - a subset of kids are even graduating high school and simultaneously completing an associates now.

Fair enough, turns out my student who's just finished a GCSE (age 16) in Computer Science had never used a spreadsheet

Google Sheets also has formulas Excel doesn't (QUERY, IMPORTHTML, IMPORTDATA, etc.), and IIRC it does arrays differently. (I haven't used Excel much, so I'm not entirely sure about that one.)

Not to mention, Microsoft Office has supported the LibreOffice native formats nearly perfectly for almost a decade now, because some governments mandate OpenDocument formats over Microsoft ones. In fact, since at least Office 2013, you can configure Office to use those formats by default.

You must’ve been lucky, because using existing formatted spreadsheets and docs with Libreoffice always has and always will be a hit or miss proposition. It’s not LO’s fault, but you are clearly an outlier.

Teach them LibreOffice. Or better yet, teach them how to learn themselves.

Exactly, my teacher always said:

The hard thing is to find the book (with the information you want) and not reading the book itself (that was before google/inet)

Teach them to read. Or better yet, teach them how to learn themselves.

Pretty sure this is how we wound up where we are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com