Want a Job At Google? Better Know Microsoft Office! 243
theodp writes "After recent Slashdot discussions on Google's quest to unseat Microsoft Office in business and whether Google Docs and MS-Word are an even matchup, let's complete the trilogy by bringing up the inconvenient truth that numerous Google job postings state that candidates with Microsoft Office expertise are 'preferred' to those lacking these skills. 'For example,' notes GeekWire, 'when hiring an executive compensation analyst to support Google's board, the company will give preference to candidates who are 'proficient with Microsoft Excel."' Parents and kids at schools that have gone or are going Google are reassured that, 'it is more important to teach technology skills than specific programs' and that 'Google itself uses Google Apps to run its multi-billion dollar company.' Which, for the most part, is true. Just don't count on getting certain Google jobs with that attitude, kids!"
can we mod summary as (Score:5, Insightful)
trol?
Re:can we mod summary as (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think there's something in the FAQ about this...
"Don't grouse about the good old days, when the folks running the site cared about the site. We don't care, we just want you to read, and click the ads. We want revenue. If the revenue dies, we'll just shut down the site."
And from the bottom of the page (scroll down)
Funny, they can show the copyright symbol corr
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not at all, it typifies the downward spiral in the Google hiring process as quality of management declines. It's a danger sign for an internet tech company to require a skill in any specific software product rather than interpersonal skills, reasoning, etc.
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Mod requirements as stupid HR joke (Score:3)
Re:can we mod summary as (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah god forbid they ask you to know an application that 100% of the world can accept. If you do business with anyone, they likely use MS office.
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Are these "tech" jobs though? "Excecutive compenstation analyst" doesn't sound technical (or a full time position to be honest). When you're talking about upper/middle management and their support team, technical skills aren't necessarily high on the list of things you want. Of course they want people to know Office for management and analyst positions, who doesn't? While it may seem from the outside that most companies would want everyone to eat their own dogfood, in practice this only applies to actua
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The downwards spiral comes when business people take over technical people in a company. Sometimes they are inside from the beginning. So a company does a downwards spiral till it becomes a corporation (yes I assume different parameters for success than the business people), gets bought or goes bankrupt. Let's all thank the credit dominated economy.
I think a notable exception was Apple, where Jobs did the business people part while being more attached to the company than these guys usually are.
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No we need to moderate as Stupid.
I can see a very simple reason.
You are hiring a lot of people (Including some non-technical people) These non-technical people who are good at what they do, however they do not necessarily know all the cool alternatives to the systems that they have been using for decades.
You put a job Requirement Asking for Experience with Google Docs or worse Open/Libre Office. You will get a lot of Accountants, Marketers, Sales... Who have no idea what the heck you are talking about and
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That makes about as much sense as a job posting for a truck driver saying Ford F150 preferred, only because the Ford F150 is the most common truck in the world.
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That makes about as much sense as a job posting for a truck driver saying Ford F150 preferred, only because the Ford F150 is the most common truck in the world.
Never heard of it, never seen it. Pretty sure I'm on Earth somewhere.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Is it? I haven't actually used it, but Google's page [google.com] about it makes it sound like it's a cloud-based office suite: "Google Apps is a cloud-based productivity suite that helps you and your team connect and get work done from anywhere on any device." that includes GMail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
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The point they're trying to make, and doing so badly, isn't that "Docs is one of the Google Apps", it's "Docs is fully integrated with Google Apps".
Wut?
On that page, they seem to be saying, "Here's the apps! Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides!" What muddies the water for me is that (on this page) "Docs" only seems to apply to the word processor, not the spreadsheets or anything else. I want to say that they were called Docs, collectively, when introduced, and Docs started to apply to the word processor only when Drive was introduced, but I really don't know for sure. I think GGP is on the right track: it's a branding issue.
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there's no docs, it's just "drive" now. BUT, "docs" was/is the textual documents which among spreadsheets and some other shit are all part of "apps".
if that's confusing, well, it damn well should be! but that's the state of the flux. when I go to docs.google.com with my corporate mail/google account(that we have tied to "apps") it takes me to google drive, not docs.
(What it seems like is they're using "Apps" as a trade name to sell the package of gmail for your domain and the other stuff, so they're using t
Google Docs is no MS Office (Score:5, Interesting)
The company I work for uses Google Docs extensively; in fact, we use it so much I wrote SAS scripts to interface with the API so we can easily share datasets in and out of Google Docs. While it's powerful for collaborative work over the Internet, especially with remote resources housed all over the world, it's no replacement for Office.
It doesn't have all the powerful tools Office does, it doesn't format documents the same as Office does (especially importing and exporting--and yes, I realize Office doesn't do all that well version to version), and it doesn't work all that well offline (if at all).
So it's no wonder a corporation dealing with other corporations would require Office knowledge. This is a non-story.
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No doubt. You have to be able to open all the bad .docx files that the corporate H.R. drones send out so they they will actually import.
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This is a non-story.
Except for that if this were MS posting jobs with experience in Google Docs being a plus we'd have droves of Google fanbois screaming about "eating their own dog food."
Let's face facts, you fanbois scream and shout about so much as a typo in the EULA but if it's someone you favor they could murder baby seals and get away with it as a "non-story." Hypocricy. Pure and simple.
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GD is in fact so much "no MS Office", that I'm even surprised this story is trying to compare them. One could compare LibreOffice and Word. But Google Docs? That's just some sort of full screen blog editor in your browser. Or am I missing something?
I often work on various machines which are not mine, and started to use Google Docs to take notes which I can then access from anywhere. That would be a nice feature, but I can't even do the most basic word-processing thing: define my own paragraph styles for my
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OTOH, most of what people use office for is basic memos and the like, simple spreadsheets, and presentations. I think for a small office buying 10 users for $50 a person instead of 5K for MS office
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I wrote SAS scripts to interface with the [Google Docs] API
"After which I stabbed myself repeatedly in the eyes with a fork because it felt positively wonderful by comparison."
Ever tried editing an Office doc in Google Docs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, you are right and you're wrong. This is actually a problem with Office and Microsoft's own practice. If it was a decent open format and MS didn't try to make their formats like .docx proprietary this wouldn't be a problem. It's easy to blame Google for "not being compatible" (and I've seen this attitude in the wild quite often) but if Microsoft is being secretive (and sometimes can't even get the format right themselves) it isn't a surprise that Google doesn't get it right.
You're talking to a Human Resources weasel (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to a employee relations person, you understand.
The weasels want people with 5 years experience with Java in 1995, and then wonder why no-one but James Gosling applies.
Send the posting to Larry Page's office with a subject line like "Public relations blunder".
--dave
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Reminds me of the time when I was younger that I applied for a senior engineer position. Granted, I wasn't really what you might call senior at the time, but the guy they ended up hiring was only senior in the sense that he could have joined the AARP.
Now, I have nothing against people who have been working for awhile, but this was in 1999, where his experience with internet technologies was probably about the same (or worse) than mine was, despite his 20 years or more in "technology". That was the funny t
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Knowing how the business works and understanding what you're writing is something only experience brings.
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Well in this case, he moved from a company that makes air conditioners to an ISP. It must have been something like what you said, because the guy wasn't a complete idiot, but his qualifications in practice were still more than a little dubious.
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And here we are 13 years later and you still don't get that just knowing technology is not the same as knowing how to use technology to fit the businesses needs. Maybe in another 7 you'll finally catch up to what he had over you.
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Reminds me of the time when I was younger that I applied for a senior engineer position. Granted, I wasn't really what you might call senior at the time, but the guy they ended up hiring was only senior in the sense that he could have joined the AARP.
Now, I have nothing against people who have been working for awhile, but this was in 1999, where his experience with internet technologies was probably about the same (or worse) than mine was, despite his 20 years or more in "technology". That was the funny thing about then and now. Today, you could have over a decade in Java programming and it is still in use. In the late nineties or 2000 or so, a recent college grad knew about as much about Java as someone who had been programming in other languages for a decade or more. You could argue that their experience was still useful, but I'd say it was a lot less useful, pound for pound, than senior level programming experience is today. That is, if you're using Java. If you stuck with coding in C/C++, your experience today is probably Godlike, assuming that your arteries haven't started to harden.
Not the best example. In 1999, Java was still mostly a C/C++ sibling language to the point that the SCJP questions tended to primarily focus on catching people who answered with C/C++ answers to Java-specific features. The main differences had to to with things like the standard class library and the interface contract form.
It really wasn't until after 2000 that Java began to develop its own personality, fleshing out the programming-by-interface, Inversion of Control, logging, Junit testing and the various
truth hurts (Score:3)
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Most managerial types haven't heard of anything else. *That's* the real problem. Google Docs is probably good for any non-advanced thing you want to do, but the managers are now too young to remember Lotus and Wordperfect, plus they tend to think being "computer savvy" means you can copy a file to a flash drive. And they don't want to learn anything new... and "Open Source" is bad because they can't "hold someone's feet to the fire," (an idiotic idea because NO company, no matter how large, is going to h
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I think if your managers are using torture metaphors, it's time to change positions.
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Unfortunately Google Docs is about as "powerful" as MS Write is. Many people know about MS Write but don't use it, preferring Word instead.
I'm a Google fan as much as most but Docs is *very* simplistic. It needs a ton of work to compete well.
reality check (Score:3)
I'm curious when it became in fashion celebrate those that choose to deliberatly not learn something (sometimes out of spite) and counsel other folks to do the same? Sure Google should be dog-fooding their own product, but not everyone needs to put on the Goggles (aka drinking the koolaid).
Sure, for something like "intro-to-computers" it may not exactly matter which word processor you use. But as some point reality will kick in. Of course time is finite and you can't learn everything, but Microsoft office is the standard bearer, so if you are going to fill your skills bag with some items, a quick reality check might confirm that being proficient with Microsoft office would be a good thing to learn if there is a chance that you might need to use it in a corporate environment. That's the difference between vocational training and a generic education.
Also on the hiring front, it might be prudent to choose to employ people (say as an executive compensation analyst) who are somewhat in tune with the real world vs out on their own crusade, dontchathink? Okay, maybe that was a bad example occupation to illustrate needing to be in tune with real-world, come to think of it ;^P
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Personally, I use Open Office and I don't see the point in spending money on Microsoft Office. The vast majority of the population uses maybe 20% of its functionality.
Also, if you did need to learn Excel or Word for your job and you consider that a big deal in the slightest...I weep for you (or the idiot in HR).
Re:reality check (Score:4, Informative)
Personally, I use Open Office and I don't see the point in spending money on Microsoft Office. The vast majority of the population uses maybe 20% of its functionality.
Also, if you did need to learn Excel or Word for your job and you consider that a big deal in the slightest...I weep for you (or the idiot in HR).
I think it's more of a problem when you're interviewing and you have vast OpenOffice experience and say that you think it wouldn't take long to pick up MS Office, but you're competing against a guy who has vast MS Office experience and can immediately jump in and use the toolset they are already using. Sure, you could learn MS Office, but the other guy already knows and is using it.
It's just like if you're applying for a developer job in a Ruby shop -- you may have years of Perl experience and feel that you could quickly pick up Ruby, but when you're interviewing against a guy that's spent the past 2 years doing nothing but Ruby, you lose.
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If you cant use the help feature, then you are definitely not computer litterate. If you can, then you should be able to switch between office suites several times a day without (much) pain. (But you might not want to).
Actually, most corporate finance types have to get someone else to help them use
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When Open Office has a similarly widespr
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In reality, the few bits of MS Office that Open/Libre Office doesnt to are very obscure, Virtually all experienced users of any of the office products would have to use help for far more widely used features.
Regardless of whether or not that's true, it doesn't help you when you're at a job interview for a job that has MS Office as one of the job requirements when you have vast LibreOffice experience, but the other 5 guys competing for the job have MS Office experience.
Sure, the differences may mostly be a matter of syntax and looking up function in the help file, but unless you have some specific skills needed for the job, why would the employer hire the guy without the experience they are looking for? The sam
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And that 'dont see the point in spending money on Microsoft Office' is part of your problem. While it isn't a $10 software product, the cost is nothing to a company. The most expensive version of Office and Multiple server CALs for adding a user into an MS environment is less than a single weeks salary at minimum wage. If it takes anything more than that to learn something else, its retarded to switch, especially considering you can reuse the license on a new person and still don't have to train.
If your
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So I should spend several hundred dollars per year per person on something I don't really need. Gotcha!
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So I should spend several hundred dollars per year per person on something I don't really need. Gotcha!
Well no, if you don't need it, then don't get it -- but if you can make your employees more productive by spending a few dollars on the office suite that has become a standard, you should probably do that. Your office probably spends more on "free" coffee than the cost of MS Office Suite purchased under a volume license.
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The license cost is paid once, not every year. A volume license is well under $100. Note that the chair that the worker sits on costs more than that. Don't even ask about the Cisco VoIP telephone on the desk - it's $500, and there are no volume licenses on hardware. And don't even go into how much the cube itself costs - a few $K - and what is the cost of the building that you work at (to construct it and to pay property taxes on.) See the light above the cube? $500 to have it installed and wired, and it b
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Fuck the cheap, ugly and secure FOSS solutions.
F/OSS solutions are not accepted by businesses as much as one would hope for one simple reason: they are not as good as commercial offerings. You see, a business is *perfectly willing* to pay money for a tool of the trade. Saving money and getting a substandard tool is not a sufficient enticement, especially after people try and get burned.
Monopoly power. (Score:3, Insightful)
To me the story isn't so much about how "Those bastards at Google aren't even pushing their own product!" it's a story about how even Google can't really expect people to have skills in any other office product other than MS Office. Face it, outside of a select people in IT, and a few people who don't want to pay for office, it's a MS Office world. The story is really about how nobody can escape the power of the Microsoft monopoly on Office products.
Imagine if we lived in a world where for a job that involves driving, and GM had to put in the job requirements "Excellent experience driving Ford Vehicles".
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Microsoft Office wasn't the first and isn't the only office productivity suite. They didn't even use their OS to kick start it, since it came out for Mac 5 years before it came to Windows.
Excel has functions (Score:2)
Excel has support for some ridiculous functions including pulling data from lots of database servers and doing BI transformations on it. I've seen what our finance people do with Excel and its pretty cool. its a lot more than graph paper on a computer.
Executives don't get paid a straight salary. they will get a base salary and then bonuses and stock awards based on performance goals and you need a decent program to predict the total compensation based on different events
all those $300 million salaries you r
Concepts not Apps (Score:2)
They should be asking for CONCEPTS not particular applications. For example "Spreadsheet proficiency" not "Excel proficiency".
I would MUCH rather have someone that understands the concepts of spreadsheets, word processing, and graphics, than someone who understands just a single program. When I hire, I find that people who have never been exposed to anything but Microsoft Office are rather restricted in flexibility and creativity and less able to handle (or try) anything new/different.
Shame on your, Googl
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You're asking an H.R. person to think. That's way too over optimistic.
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You're asking an H.R. person to think. That's way too over optimistic.
It's not so much that the HR screener can't think, but he's got 100 resumes in his inbox and he has to screen them quickly and skillset is a quick way to weed out resumes. HR doesn't have unlimited time to screen resumes and call up each candidate to assess their proficiency with the toolset. If the hiring manager says "We need someone with Excel experience", you're going to end up on the "screened out" pile because there are 30 other resumes in the pile that *do* have Excel experience.
Write your resume cov
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so what is the harm in putting fake BA / BS on there if you have all the real skills needed and just need to put BA / BS to get past HR?
Because when you get past the phone screen and HR does a background check, when they discover you've lied about the degree, you're not ever going to get a job there? Regardless of your skills, I can't imagine any hiring manager ignoring your deception - if you're willing to lie to get an interview, how much can they trust you?
If you really think you have the skills for the job and don't think you'll make it past HR, then you'll need to use networking to make sure you get your resume in front of the hiring m
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Alternatives such as Open/LibreOffice and Google Docs can't compete effectively when even companies associated with such alternatives can't stand behind their own offerings.
Realistically, the alternatives you mentioned won't compete in the business world until they are at least as good as Microsoft Office.
I do get where you're coming from. It's good to have employees who understand the theory behind a type of application, rather than just knowing a single application itself, but given the choice between hiring someone who knows Excel and someone who knows spreadsheets (but not Excel), I would hire the Excel specialist (all other things being equal).
In business, time is money
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Interesting. None of the schools my kids go to teaches Word or Excel. They teach english, essay writing, composition, science, etc., It is assumed that they will turn in their work typed, with graphs and tables when appropriate. Nobody bothers teaching them how to do it, as far as I can tell, they mostly just figure it out themselves. And nobody cares what specific software they use.
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What do they call Publisher? That's sort of blue-green.
So it says they don't swear allegiance to ... (Score:3)
Try Instead (Score:2)
Excel truth (Score:2)
Generally, I think Sheets trails Excel by more than "Document" trails Word, but then again, I spend much more time in Excel than I do in Word.
For financial / finance use cases in particular Google "Sheets" isn't a match for Microsoft Excel. A very common formatting approach is to indent rows using narrow columns. In excel, the text overflows to the right, so you end up with an aligned / indented view of things (which you can also then make collapsible). In Sheets, this doesn't work without lots of extra cli
It really is a dillema to put MS word on a resume (Score:5, Interesting)
Corporate HR on the other hand might have struggled to learn MS Office as it is one of the few applications they ever used. They think putting MS Office on a resume is a badge of honor. So if you don't put MS Word on your resume in some corporate places, they think you're not cut out for the job."What this guy doesn't know Office? He must not know much."
This has bugged me for many years as I have a hard time getting interviews. If someone is a programmer, it should be assumed they know how to use most every piece of software they come into contact with. Yet, a lot of HR departments don't get it. It is hard to tell who is competent and who isn't, so the question you ask is,"Do I put the Microsoft Office on my resume?" I've come to the conclusion,"I don't want to be hired by an incompetent organization, so I'll just leave the Microsoft Office off my resume."
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I don't think anyone will hold it against you for knowing something, even something with is not really at the core of what I do to pay the bills (Java dev mostly) but could be required from time to time. Not knowing something however will always be a problem so I do put office on my CV in small writing, near the end.
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You don't know many other programmers, do you?
Know your enemy (Score:2)
Nuff written.
Nuff calculated.
Nuff presented.
Nuff said.
Google managers have the freedom to use MS! (Score:2)
I just hope Google will talk to these managers and understand why they are not eating their own dog food and improve Google docs.
Eat your own Dog Food. (Score:2)
The true test of any software firm is if they use their own software internally. Intuit, for example, had better damn-well use quickbooks for their accounting or else, why would I really want to buy their product, if they themselves don't even use it?
Microsoft, to their credit, uses Windows and Office internally, and their entire corporate culture revolves around using their own stuff. Windows8 phones and tablets are making the rounds and employees are evangelizing their own products outside of the campus.
I
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What's the point here? (Score:2)
Google are building products that compete with Microsoft Office. Hiring people who have experience using Microsoft Office is an advantage.
If they want to convert expert users of competing products, they need to hire expert users.
Simple explanation: gotta know it to match it (Score:2)
How do you make Google Docs equivalent to Office, if you don't have anyone in-house who knows what Office can do? Gotta know it to match it. Some Word users complain that Google doesn't understand their more esoteric needs, such as style templates. If Google devs don't know what those are and how people use them, how can they meet people's wishes? This is a good thing.
Wow, it works! (Score:2)
Want a Job At Google? (Score:3)
No.
They gave up on not being evil some time ago. Google's constant trolling of linked-in with the assumption that anyone with a few years of unix knowledge would kill their own children just to work for them is sickening. The way they abuse customers with their adwords pricing setup is sickening. The information they are collecting for the truly wicked people of this world is more than sickening.
It's time slashdot got past the drolling over google stage.
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In whose workplace? Didn't you see the story yesterday about all the companies using Google docs? And a carpenter need not know any word processor in his workplace at all.
The delicious irony is Google using MS Office after yesterday's story.
Re:In the workplace... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the workplace... (Score:4, Funny)
I've used LibreOffice/OpenOffice with track changes to work on documents with multiple MS Office users and not had a problem.
Of course, the Google Docs collaboration features are much nicer than the cumbersome "track changes" but it is possible to work with people stuck with MS Office.
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Which is fine, until a client sends you a document from MS Office and wants you to send back your changes with change tracking turned on, so that they can see what has changed in the document. If you only use it for internal documents, Google Docs can be fine. However, once you want to communicate with the outside world, you had better have MS office, or things will break down quite quickly.
When you want to communicate with an 800-lb. gorilla, you speak the language of the 800-lb. gorilla. If you want to do business with IBM, you use IBM's document formats. If you want to do business with Google, use Google formats. When IBM and Google want to do business with each other, they can either play document tag or agree on a common format.
The one question that nobody's asking here, is "Do they really mean explicitly MS Excel?" Or do they mean Excel as in "Kleenex"? If they're really just asking for
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Or do they mean Excel as in "Kleenex"?
I think the mean Excel as in "Charmin".
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Maybe yes, maybe no. A carpenter as a sub-contractor is going to get his bids via Word documents attached to his e-mail (shudder) and the specs are going to be in Excel. I know of one “carpenter” (a small business or 4 to 5 employees that built custom cabinetry) that used a Word / Excel / Excel / VBA custom jobbie to manager orders, generate estimates, manage workflow, etc. This was back in the 90s.
It not the internal workings – Open Office would have the power – It’s being abl
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Re:this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages [libreoffice.org], then it is you who is the "idiot".
I don't think the problem is so much writing new Macros, but in rewriting all of the tried-and-true macros and formulas that the Finance exec has been using for the past decade. Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform? It only takes a few hours of wasted work to pay for MS Office.
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Maybe the question should be "what the hell is a top finance person doing writing business-critical applications?"
I know exactly what you are getting at, and have seen it many times before; it's a business reality.
But that does not make it right. This kind of stuff rides a horse and cart through ISO, SOX etc.
Let the finance guy write the process and procedure, and the IT people select and implement the appropriate tech support, including security, documentation and audit trail.
A person who is their own law
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Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
Re:this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
And the $100/hour finance guy still has to validate the work and ensure that it's working as expected - he's not going to present numbers to the board of directors based on what some $10/hour kid did. And it's going to take more than "A few hours" - you'd be surprised at some of the corporate finance spreadsheets out there - some are pages upon pages of linked numbers with obscure calculations that have been refined over time. And when he wants to tweak it, he either needs to hire a new $10/hour kid to do the work, or sit down and learn the new system.
Your argument sounds kind of like the CIO that says "Hey, I've been reading a lot about dotNet and I think we ought to port our code over from Java to dotNet - we just need to hire a few $10/hour coders to do it, right? Then we'll be running on this shiny new platform, despite the fact that it was running fine before." The actual coding itself is a small part of the overall project - architecture, design and validation are all much harder.
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The real, non-imagined problems I've had in the past with attempting to get an office to be able to use OO has been with mail merge functions. I haven't tried Mail Merge for with it for several versions, but while OO had some really good functions that were like Crystal Reports it was way, WAY too hard for your normal office person do deal with. They might have a nicer way to do it now... but I had to abandon a changeover I wanted to do because of this. If *I* was doing mail merge I would want the more p
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I would have assumed that if they had to use any Office Suite, that they would have chosen LibreOffice [documentfoundation.org] over MS Office! My question to Google, is Why Not???
Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?
Google already has an office suite that does a lot of what MS Office does (i.e. Google Docs), why would they add in another office suite that gets them 90% of the way to MS Office functionality when they can just use MS Office and get 100% of what they are looking for.
I'm sure LibreOffice does some things that MS Office can't do, but few people are using those things, but people expect their Office Suite to work like MS Office - at my last job, I coul
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"Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?"
I keep hearing this, but I never see a list of the "10%" that MS Office can do that Libreoffice cannot. Plus, how many items on this 10% list are actually used by 90% of the MS Office users, including Google employees???
Show me the list!
Re: (Score:3)
"Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?"
I keep hearing this, but I never see a list of the "10%" that MS Office can do that Libreoffice cannot. Plus, how many items on this 10% list are actually used by 90% of the MS Office users, including Google employees???
Show me the list!
Here are a few examples of financial functions in MS Office that aren't in Google Docs:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-functions-by-category-HP010079186.aspx?CTT=3#BMfinancial_functions [microsoft.com]
https://support.google.com/drive/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=25273&page=table.cs&tab=1240288 [google.com]
AMORDEGRC()
AMORLINC()
ISPMT()
OSSFPRICE()
ODDFYIELD()
ODDLPRICE()
ODDLYIELD()
VDB()
YIELDMAT()
I didn't look to see if Google has the same functionality in a different function, nor do I know enough about the funct
Re: (Score:2)
This story attracts the usual solipsistic ignorance of IT drones about what other people actually do. Excel is simply more advanced than Google Spreadsheets. For many casual spreadsheet users, that doesn't matter. But accounting and finance (especially for firms doing business internationally) requires a lot more than figuring out sums and averages.
Re: (Score:2)
For example, in MS, I could set it up so that when I typed "rrr " it would replace it with "REBECCA" centered on the page, followed by two newlines, then set the format for single-spaced Times New Roman with 1.5" margins left and right. It could keep that format until I started a paragraph with "st[tab]" at which point it would skip down another newline and give me italicized text with .5" margins for the next paragraph, then automat
Re: (Score:2)
I was comparing MS Office to LibreOffice, NOT Google Docs! Read what I wrote.
Or, you know, you could compare yourself. As an Libreoffice user you should have the documentation at your fingertips.
I grabbed one at random, and it looks like OSSFPRICE() is not in LIbreOffice.
Re: (Score:2)
'show me the list' Awesome. This is why LibreOffice is still a 'doesn't matter'.
This attitude is what keeps you wondering why it hasn't taken over the world.
Get out of your basement, work in the real world with real companies exchanging documents with other companies, editing on both sides and then get back to me.
Its the same reason EVERYONE uses the SAME version of various Adobe products.
Re: (Score:2)
...China Inc. can first fuck all these corporations and then run away with their decades of R&D data.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/rsa-hacked/ [wired.com]
So because RSA was hacked, we shouldn't use Microsoft software?
It's a good thing that no Open source [darkreading.com] software [eweek.com] has ever been hacked [zdnet.com].
Re: (Score:2)
wrong, if they only specify one office product that is NOT a sign of seeking well rounded person. Even less that it's a Microsoft one, any moron off the streets can lay claim to using it.
Re: (Score:2)
The shills and various other MS mouthpieces are getting skittish.
Betting pool is open as to when the likes of Ed Bott starts bad-mouthing it in a big way...
Re: (Score:2)
In a Google datacenter ... so you were a rack monkey and you think thats representative of their staff?
While I also know they don't generally use non-Google products throughout the company, trying to pretend you know what they use based on when you had a job that will soon be replaced by a robot and did practically nothing other than manual labor is kind of silly.
Re: (Score:3)
I used to work as an engineer at Google. I did not work in a data center, but I did interact enough with the people working there to know that they are much more intelligent than a robot. If somebody had come to our team with a robot telling us, this robot can do the same work as a person in the data center at a fifth the price of a person, we would have responded: "Go away, we don't want your robot."
I worked at Google for multiple years, a
Re: (Score:2)
None of their customers should be using XP in 16 months.