Re: Great plan
<rant>
Have I ever used a Microsoft Office product before my new job? Yeah. Word for Windows 2.0. That was in the mid (maybe late) 90s, so about 20 years before I started my current job.
I leave the handling of stupid Word idiocies to others in my team (who hate it just as much as I do), like disappearing chapter numbers, the stupid treatment of captions (why are they not tied to the object, if you move the object the caption stays behind unless you group them), the weird way references work, the supid way standard formats are inherited, etc. I wish I could use another program, but there are some that insist on exactly that - even when documents are text only. A bit like the very widespread idiotic use of html in emails, just to display the company's logo in the signature and change the font to monarco retardo.
And don't get me started on the auto formating of data read from csv-files by Excel. That is complete madness. Or the insistence that ";" should be used as the one and only field separator (without making you jump through hoops).
I have no clue why computer use should be tied that strongly to "Microsoft Office" - it is but a subset of (more or less) useful (at least wide spread) programs. Unless you are too thick to adapt to small changes it matters sweet FA which programs you grow up with - see the discussions on MS moving menue entries around between versions, which I hate but one can deal with that. Or should be able to. I admit I'm stilled ticked off that keyboard shortcuts have changed and are no longer that well communicated in the menues.
"disadvantage in the workplace", my ass. It does not help that in schools the "computer" classes seem to deal with (mostly) MS Office and thus perpetuate your view. In my actual computer science class at school we at least did some programming (Turbo Pascal, PROLOG - very old school teacher -, and I forget what else, I also used some inline assembler in TP). We focused more on algorithms than on using the programs (because most things you can figure out yourself, Word for Windows and Libreoffice and others are not that bad and have come a long way since the 90s).
And no, I do not think I am of more than average intelligence. But I can adapt to different environments and computer programs, because I was exposed to a variety of different things.
What I do (fully) agree with is exposing the kid to a wide range of OS and software, and having an informed opinion.
</rant>
Ok, sorry, I jumped on the first half of the last paragraph, which is not fair at all, because the rest of the post actually makes sense: 1st paragraph: yes. 2nd: yeah, can adapt to changes, see my rant. 3rd: 1st half makes me explode. 2nd half is just right.
Have an actual upvote...