{"id":94,"date":"2012-05-21T23:14:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T23:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyoteblog.posterous.com\/91143783"},"modified":"2017-07-14T18:24:04","modified_gmt":"2017-07-15T01:24:04","slug":"91143783","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2012\/05\/91143783\/","title":{"rendered":"what’s most important about software experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the mid 1990s, when I found myself jobless and was temping, my agency sent me to fill in for an executive administrative assistant that was going on vacation for two weeks. I read over the job description, and it said I needed to know Microsoft Powerpoint. I looked at the recruiter and said, “Oh, I haven’t used this much. I’ve used Aldus Persuasion<\/a> for slide show presentations.” She shook her head and said, “Same thing. You know that, you’ll do fine with PowerPoint.” I went to the job terrified they’d boot me as soon as they figured out that I didn’t know Powerpoint. But the recruiter was right: it was most important that I knew how to lay out a slide show presentation properly; I figured out PowerPoint in just a few minutes, and put together slide show presentations for two weeks per the company’s specifications.<\/p>\n

I’ve taken one software class in my life: it was for a new version of Aldus Pagemaker (oh, how I loved Aldus products<\/a> back in the 1990s!). The class was all about how you did things differently in this version versus the last version – but it didn’t teach me anything about design. And during that hour-long class, I realized I could have figured everything out about the upgrade on my own – a book about the upgrade would have been cheaper, and always there, ready for reference.<\/p>\n

I bring this up because of a discussion on an online community where someone said they were from a nonprofit that didn’t have the money to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office, a very old version of which they used to train their clients regarding how to prepare r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, write formal correspondence, create simple business documents, etc. I responded that a great alternative for this nonprofit was OpenOffice<\/a> or LibreOffice<\/a>, both of which are free, both of which provide very powerful word processing, slide show\/presentation, spreadsheet and database software, both of which are frequently updated, etc. I use OpenOffice myself<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Other people thought that the advice was outrageous, that if this nonprofit were to use anything but Microsoft, it would handicap their clients. But I stand by my advice: what’s important is not to teach someone how to use Microsoft Word or Microsoft anything. What’s important is for people to understand all that office software can do<\/strong>, such as in a document:<\/p>\n