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April 18, 2007

rivals

MS Office vs. iWork in New Zealand: feel the smackdown

Posted Apr. 18, ’07, 11:30 AM PT by Kate Marshall
Category | Apple » Rivals

MS_office_badge.jpgSo it seems some teachers and administrators in Wellington, New Zealand are not happy about having to remove Microsoft Office from classroom Macs, due to new contracts between vendors and the Ministry of Education. The schools are no longer licensed to use MS Office and have replaced the suite with Apple’s iWork and the Learning Company’s Kid Pix applications.

The change to iWork (which includes word processor and presentation software but nothing for spreadsheets) was prompted by financial and age-appropriate concerns, according to Ministry spokesman, Douglas Harre. Macs issued to teachers and school administrators will still be able to use MS Office due to a separate license agreement, according to the Computerworld website. Let’s hear from one of the teachers herself:

Dorothy Burt, e-learning leader at Auckland’s Point England primary school, says the removal of Microsoft software from classroom Macs surprises her. “The ministry is constantly saying we should be moving towards connectivity between schools, but they’re taking away from the Mac schools the software that the PC schools are using.”

Burt did add that her classroom uses open-source software like Google Docs and Spreadsheets anyway and only used MS Office because it was there. How flattering.

[Edited 4:27 PM EST to close blockquote—KM]


9 Comments

Maggles said:

As much as I adore Macs, I think that Office should be available in schools, especially for connectivity purposes. It acts as a standard, and it's a good application.

April 18, 2007 11:43 AM
Mark said:

Why spend that sort of money if you are only using it because it is there?

OpenOffice sounds like an excellent solution for them.

April 18, 2007 12:51 PM
Larry V Author Profile Page said:

I find Word and Excel to be pretty good. PowerPoint? Not so much.

April 18, 2007 1:06 PM
Dave said:

Last I checked (I don't have iWork '06), Pages lacks change tracking (I suppose keynote does too, but who really uses change tracking on presentations?). That would seem to be an important feature in schools (it's the only reason I can see to use Word at all).

April 18, 2007 1:07 PM
Nick said:

I don't think this says much, if anything, about Apple-Microsoft rivalry.

iWorks is nice and more Mac-like, but it's not an office suite. Microsoft Office for Mac is the gold-standard for office software on OS X. It's only fair and accurate to make that point (though personally I'd rather not use Microsoft's proprietary formats).

The point is that most of the Macs in New Zealand schools are, apparently, in the primaries. (And doubtless there are few enough there.) Children of that age don't require sophisticated software that's written for adult office workers. It would be a profligate waste of public money to buy them it.

They'd probably have a use for the simple drag-and-drop layout-type functionality you get in Pages (one area where it actually betters Word). They could use that for making newsletters, for example. That's more likely than that they would need an industrial-strength spreadsheet application like Excel that's aimed at accountants and the like.

April 18, 2007 2:44 PM
MacAlex Australia said:

iWork 06 Pages has a quite capable and very elegant spreadsheet behind the table creator. Check the manual (A4 pdf downloadable from Apple Support), pages 183 - 195.
Also, check out NeoOffice 2.1 just released. Even Kiwis get it for nothing.

April 18, 2007 3:45 PM
jayH said:

couldn't they use appleworks? it has all three applications office has... i know it looks ugly but...

and how come their computers came with iWork and mine didn't? or they did they have to buy it? hmmm

April 18, 2007 4:32 PM
Steve W said:

Appleworks is appropriate for elementary and middle school. It costs a lot less than MS Office, too.

Open Office and Google Apps are free, and powerful enough for high school and college.

April 18, 2007 9:24 PM
spiderbat said:

One of the best results school could achieve would be instilling in the minds of pupils the idea that m$ office is NOT the indispensable tool to do anything with a computer. This applies in particular to "word", an over-bloated application that produces, in the hands of the average user, the most revolting examples of bad typography (I don't imply that skilled people can't do better).

There is a single reason in favor of m$ at school: as Bertolt Brecht once wrote (very sarcastically!), life is a pond full of crap, therefore school must teach how to swim in crap.

April 19, 2007 12:46 AM

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