Excel and/or Google Docs?

Microsoft Excel can be used in a variety of different ways, especially when incorporating it into a curriculum at school. Excel can be used to keep track of student grades and attendance.Not only can the teacher use them, but the students can use them for various projects. The class could set up a school-wide fundraiser and keep track of their costs, profits and total money raised for their fundraiser. It can be used to record the daily high and low temperatures each day from the newspaper and the students can graph the highs and lows at the end of the week and compare and contrast them throughout the year. They can also be used in science class. Students can plant a flower and record their observations of how the plant is growing. The spreadsheet could be used to keep sport statistics for a given team over the season. It can be used as a getting to know all of the students in the beginning of the year by a survey and then graphing the results. You can then look at the similarities and differences as a class.
If my school district was thinking about switching to Google docs for their word processing and spreadsheet needs, I would be against it. Google docs can not do as much  neat things as Microsoft Excel. For example, when making a pictograph in Google docs,  you cannot insert pictures. Unless I was unable to figure it out after many, many attempts. Google docs spreadsheet is not as easy to work on to create graphs and/or spreadsheets with information. Google docs can be very confusing. Microsoft Excel has so much more to offer in not only spreadsheets but in word processing as well. Google docs is fine for typing a long paper of things but it takes away the ability to see how many pages you have created. If a teacher wanted to create a flyer, sign or a one page worksheet, it would be difficult in Google docs because they would not see when they have exceeded one page. I would not be able to work in Google docs for an entire school year if Microsoft was not available.