[kenjackson]

There’s actually a far better reason they don’t retrain. There aren’t better tools. Or the tools are basically carbon copies (Google Docs and Sheets).

Show me a product that provides so much more value for my team than Excel that it would be worth a retrain.

[Falkon1313]

My first office software was WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS. Then Lotus Smartsuite, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, now LibreOffice, with occasional bits of Google Docs. I never had to be retrained.

Here's the thing, for 90% of use cases, those are all effectively equivalent. You really shouldn't need any retraining whatsoever. A spreadsheet's a spreadsheet, and a word processor is a word processor. You type the text in the box and then hit print or whatever. Nothing new to learn.

Now admittedly, there are some power user features which are different, which is why I said they're only 90% equivalent. But most people don't use those anyway. Yet they will intensely oppose using a different but 90% equivalent thing because they haven't spent years being trained to use it - even though it's almost exactly the same thing they're using.

It's just a weird and bizarre mental hangup that seems to be natural to many humans.

If you're in tech, you will see the same thing with programming languages, frameworks, applications, etc. And it's on both sides, not just the users, but also the people hiring them too. "Oh, you've only worked with WordPress, you haven't been trained in Drupal?" "Oh, that's PHP, I only work in Python." "Well we're looking for a Ruby developer, not a C# developer." "That's React, I only know Vue.js"

It's mostly all general-purpose programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. Sure some details are different. There's a bit of a learning curve. But if you are actually capable with one, then picking up another nearly equivalent alternative should not be viewed as some impossibly complex thing that will take years of retraining.

[ori_prior]

You are both right and wrong. It depends on the intelligence of the person you are dealing with.

There is a thing called "intelligence". There are several definitions of it, the one I'd like to use here is "the ability to infer general principles and common workings from small isolated samples and apply those principles and workings".

So if you are sufficiently intelligent, you can infer, from observing a few (or even one) doorhandle being pushed, that his is the general way to open doors. You can then apply this principle maybe even to different doors, windows, rotating knobs, etc. The fewer samples you need to learn and the broader your application range after learning, the more intelligent you are. In the stupidest case, one only learns to open one specific kind of door in one specific way, like a cat might.

You are writing from the point of view of someone sufficiently intelligent to derive the working principles of software and apply it to other software packages that generally serve the same purpose. However, there are people who are not intelligent enough to do that. Those people do get by by just following instructions, learning by rote which buttons to click for which purpose. Those people are the "door opening cats" of the office application world.

Less intelligent people like those do exist (50% do have an IQ<100 after all...), they do get jobs and they can be successful within limits. Just as Stackoverflow/ChatGPT-copy&paste-programmers do get by somehow.

Which is why I'm also a fan of intelligence-test-type job application processes. The ability to learn, for higher-level jobs, is far more important than preexisting knowledge. And intelligence is the best known predictor for the ability to learn.

[max51]

Mathcad is the only thing that comes to mind. It is very unique and a massive productivity boost for engineering calcs.

[inetknght]

> There aren’t better tools. Or the tools are basically carbon copies

LibreOffice, free open source software. Just as good as Excel and... free.

[teamonkey]

LibreOffice is a perfectly functional spreadsheet for basic spreadsheet tasks. It is, however, not in the same league as Excel for more advanced spreadsheet tasks. Sometimes as a user you just want to be able to use the software that works better, you know?

[gitaarik]

Yeah, that is the trade-off; if you keep using the proietary software that you're familiar with, you don't have to relearn, but you'll be more dependent on 1 company. But if you spend some time up-front into learning a free software alternative, you won't be dependent on a single company.

But yeah, for some things there are not yet complete free software alternatives, but the gap is really getting small these days. I think for most common use cases for most people, LibreOffice is more than enough. If you need more advanced features that are only available in the propietary variant, try to find ways to not be dependent on that feature, or find an alternative way to do it with free software. If you are creative, there are usually many ways how you can do your work using free software.

But yeah it does take some dedication to this idea. But what you get back is probably, on the long run, gonna be of more benefit to you for the future than if you would invest it in learning the propietary software. Unless you really have a special love for the propietary software company, and you are sure you want to grow more and more into their ecosystem and have no need to have any personal freedom over the software you use.

[leksak]

Yeah, but for retraining to be worth it then in the future your people have to be better or more productive than they would be with Excel and it'll also impact every new hire you make that needs to do the same retraining. Just as good is not good enough. That the tool is free is rarely a strong enough reason especially if there are licenses around already.