The Natural Philosopher wrote
Adrian C wrote
Clive George wrote
Bernard Peek wrote
Dave Liquorice wrote
jgharston wrote

Word and Excel do need to be taught,

No, word processing and spreadsheets. You don't teach somebody
to drive a Ford Focus, you teach them how to drive a car.

True enough, but AFAIK there is no "generic" word processor or
spreadsheet out there so you have to choose something and,
although it pains me to say it, Word and Excel are the defacto
standards out there.

Some schools are using Open/Libre Office for word-processing and
spreadsheets, but there is still no usable alternative to MS Access.

Does "no usable alternative" include MS Access itself?

I've been doing databasy-stuff professionally for over 20 years now and have still never had to touch access :-)

What should be taught is bare naked SQL, stored procedures, triggers
and connection strings...

Access is a front end forms and VB thing that should have been killed
off a long time ago or absorbed into something else. Excel I think.

Mis-spent 10 years of my life on that junk.

I once spent several days trying to get access to do something beyond give me a default view of a flat table.

Then you are a VERY slow learner.

I had MySQL doing useful stuff in under a day,

Ditto.

and couple into a php html form in less than a week.

Meanwhile, my niece has been exposed to Microsoft Publisher at school :-(

Before the Software For Students deals, Publisher was a stupefyingly expensive package to buy for home practice use,
and hence was pirated about widely.

And isn't a patch on Quark anwyay.

Most dont need that for their club newsletter etc.