6 ms·

A company paying millions for Microsoft Office would probably get better value if they paid some LibreOffice developers to fix the issues. Or just switched to

by ape4 7y ago

A company paying millions for Microsoft Office would probably get better value if they paid some LibreOffice developers to fix the issues. Or just switched to use ODF format.

phkahler 7y ago
The challenge with switching is all the custom VBA code and Excel stuff people have come to rely on.
- olyjohn 7y ago
  I'd just like to know why companies who have Macs still buy MS Office as well... because it's compatibility with Windows Office is about as good as LibreOffice.
exhilaration 7y ago
The problem is that we have to share documents with other companies, and all those companies send us Office files.
arkades 7y ago
Would they? For personal use, I don’t care which tool I’m using - my use cases are simple enough it just doesn’t matter. When I worked in almostMegaCorp, though, I had the freedom to push through whatever tools I wanted. With the exception of adding R and Python to my machine, the Office provided everything I needed and did so better than the competition. I don’t care, in that context, about pricing, competition, OS ideaology, etc. Setting up an in-house software division to throw bug fixes at OpenOffice to try and transition to a tool that is equal to or inferior for almost all of our actual uses? Jfc why?!
Bombthecat 7y ago
Munich tried that and failed. To many plug-ins, addins, macros etc etc etc...
- fghtr 7y ago
  There were no technical problems, only political ones AFAIK.
  - xnyan 7y ago
    You can pry excel from my cold dead hands. I try to use LO regularly but it can't even come close to meeting my needs, for example handling very large tables. The only response I get from LO boosters is "You're using it wrong. Teach sql to all of your front line office workers, or don't do what you want to do." meanwhile excel does what I want it do do.
- weinzierl 7y ago
  It didn't fail, it was a political decision to keep Microsoft's Germany headquarter in Munich.
- sleepless 7y ago
  MS made a deal, to keep german headquarters in Munich. The price for that was to kill Limux. Sad story actually and doesn't put the responsible politicians in the best light. But in Bavaria the political party CSU is known to be susceptible to ideas from the industrial lobby. Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude who was mayor when LiMux was introduced (german): https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917.html https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...
  - weinzierl 7y ago
    > Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude[...] This is a really interesting interview, unfortunately it is only available in German so I translated (with the help of deepl) the part about the situation right after the switch. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Linux-Magazin: How big was the pressure afterwards? [...] Christian Ude: The most intense thing I personally experienced was a visit from Steve Ballmer, after all Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing holiday in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first of all praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was making a catastrophic decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to a taxpayer. Funnily enough, he constantly made new financial offers during the conversation, he talked about what Microsoft would add for free, for the school department for example. On and on he reduced the price, one million and a another million and a another million and a dozen million cheaper than before. This is how important Munich - which is internationally perceived as an IT center - was to Microsoft as a symbol. Would [Munich] walk a new path or repentantly return into Microsoft's lap? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 per cent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just make a price comparison, this was not important to us. Linux-Magazin: Bill Gates also came to visit? Christian Ude: He was in Munich because of a presentation of the "House of the Future", which inspired him insanely. With it, you could determine from your car how high the room temperature in each room is and whether the refrigerator should defrost a bit. On his way back to the airport I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I sat together with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van, which was luxuriously equipped inside, but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! That's incomprehensible! Now that I'm not the hard-boiled IT specialist who could stand up to a Bill Gates in every detail, I just said: "Please note, we're all about independence. We don't want to be dependent." Then he said, "That's nonsense, who do you depend on?" "Now that you are here [I can tell you]: From you, of course!" That really made him collapse, and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology".
sh-run 7y ago
I made a slideshow in LibreOffice Impress for my grandfather's funeral last week. We ended up playing it via PowerPoint because of how the chapel's AV system was set up. PowerPoint rendered the images in the ODP poorly, like it jacked the contrast up to 100. Saving the document as a PPTX within LibreOffice and then playing it on PowerPoint fixed the issue. From my naive perspective MS Office seems to have issues with ODF just like LibreOffice has with docx/pptx/xlsx/etc.
- mattbk1 7y ago
  I'm sorry for your loss. Dealing with technical issues at a funeral sounds terrible.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  This to me is THE quintessential issue surrounding potential adoption of libre office. If formatting & commands remained 100% consistent between the two, I think you'd see a lot more people switch, out of the shear convenience of not having to whip out their wallet. Students would probably be first to adopt because they usually operate on a tight budget to begin with. That would filter out into the business world eventually. But if you can't absolutely rely on it to be totally compatible, then it's a total non-starter. Not worth the risk.
  - davidgerard 7y ago
    I think you're wrong there. Counterpoint: Google Docs. Its OOXML compatibility is for shit. Its adoption is HUGE. Not one person mentions how amazingly shit its OOXML compatibility is, even for quite simple DOCX. Almost nobody in an office uses the fancy bits of Excel. Spreadsheets are mostly used as flat-file data stores. And Office is notoriously incompatible between different versions of itself. In practice, I don't think the file compatibility objection to LibreOffice is real. It's just an excuse. The actual competition is Google Docs, which is a shitty word processor and a shitty spreadsheet and a shitty presentation app, but absolutely brilliant at quick and convenient collaboration. That's why LibreOffice is working super-hard on the web-based online version.
EpicEng 7y ago
Sure, so long as you never have to open a document created by an external entity.
- tombert 7y ago
  I feel like that, with the exception of a few Excel spreadsheets that were getting pretty fancy, I haven't had any real compatibility issues opening up MS Office file in [Open|Libre]Office. Nowadays I usually tell whomever is asking for something in a "Word" format that I don't own a copy of Word, but I can send them a PDF, and they're OK with that, but when I was first getting started as an engineer I used to have to work with recruiters a lot, where they'd ask for my resume in a Word format so that they could insert their ugly logo on the top and break all the formatting. No one ever said anything about my files that were initially made with LibreOffice. In fact, for all the essays I've had to write for school (that I started again semi-recently), I've done them with either Pandoc+Markdown or LibreOffice (depending on how much formatting is required), and no one has said anything about the MS Word export, or me potentially breaking the teachers' templates that they made in word. I'll definitely give it to you for Excel though. For simple stuff LibreOffice's compatibility is fine, but if you do any kind of elaborate Excel function, you're going to have a bad time, and things are going to break.
  - squeaky-clean 7y ago
    I have an issue at my work right now where excel files generated by some Java libraries used by another team do not open in LibreOffice. To share them with members running linux and LO, someone with a real Excel installation has to open it up, and re-save the file, then it is compatible. I think that's what they mean by external entity? I've also personally had problems with openpyxl in python
gpresot 7y ago
MS Office is around 150 USD per year (on Premium Plan, and it comes with 1TB/user of OneDrive: good luck beating that package), I would imagine it would be less for large corporations. This is really not much for a software platform that any white collar employee knows how to use at least at its basic level. Excel and Powerpoint are critical software for most large companies. Budgets, financial analyses, forecasts, quick calcs, presentations on factory shop floors and in board suites rely on them. I am a management consultant so I see a wide range of corporate tools: I have seen large companies use Google as their cloud, email and calendar platforms, dropbox for their shared drives, PowerBI or Tableau, SAP or Oracle or Salesforce for ERP, but not even once I saw a company not relying on Excel and Powerpoint for much of the daily activities. They wouldn't risk getting away from PPT and Excel (and, to a lesser extent, MS Word). The certainty that somebody in another country or organisation will open the file and it will appear as intended is essential to large (and small) companies. Plus there is almost no training needed for new hires, as both student and expert hires will have experience with it. Today MS Office for MacOS is quite good: some functionalities are missing, I think, but what is there is 100% compatible with Win platform - I wouldn't bet on this to be true for LibreOffice. If a company wants to save money on licenses it might be netter off reviewing how often certain software packages are utilised and prune based on this, rather than blanket-switching an almost universal software, used daily and that is not even that expensive.
aidenn0 7y ago
ODF has its own issues. When I'm sharing a spreadsheet between libreoffice and gnumeric I use XLS, because the compatibility is much higher than using an ODF.

by ape4 7y ago

A company paying millions for Microsoft Office would probably get better value if they paid some LibreOffice developers to fix the issues. Or just switched to use ODF format.

phkahler 7y ago

The challenge with switching is all the custom VBA code and Excel stuff people have come to rely on.

olyjohn 7y ago
I'd just like to know why companies who have Macs still buy MS Office as well... because it's compatibility with Windows Office is about as good as LibreOffice.

exhilaration 7y ago

The problem is that we have to share documents with other companies, and all those companies send us Office files.

arkades 7y ago

Would they? For personal use, I don’t care which tool I’m using - my use cases are simple enough it just doesn’t matter. When I worked in almostMegaCorp, though, I had the freedom to push through whatever tools I wanted. With the exception of adding R and Python to my machine, the Office provided everything I needed and did so better than the competition. I don’t care, in that context, about pricing, competition, OS ideaology, etc. Setting up an in-house software division to throw bug fixes at OpenOffice to try and transition to a tool that is equal to or inferior for almost all of our actual uses? Jfc why?!

Bombthecat 7y ago

Munich tried that and failed. To many plug-ins, addins, macros etc etc etc...

fghtr 7y ago
There were no technical problems, only political ones AFAIK.
- xnyan 7y ago
  You can pry excel from my cold dead hands. I try to use LO regularly but it can't even come close to meeting my needs, for example handling very large tables. The only response I get from LO boosters is "You're using it wrong. Teach sql to all of your front line office workers, or don't do what you want to do." meanwhile excel does what I want it do do.
weinzierl 7y ago
It didn't fail, it was a political decision to keep Microsoft's Germany headquarter in Munich.
sleepless 7y ago
MS made a deal, to keep german headquarters in Munich. The price for that was to kill Limux. Sad story actually and doesn't put the responsible politicians in the best light. But in Bavaria the political party CSU is known to be susceptible to ideas from the industrial lobby. Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude who was mayor when LiMux was introduced (german): https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917.html https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...
- weinzierl 7y ago
  > Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude[...] This is a really interesting interview, unfortunately it is only available in German so I translated (with the help of deepl) the part about the situation right after the switch. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Linux-Magazin: How big was the pressure afterwards? [...] Christian Ude: The most intense thing I personally experienced was a visit from Steve Ballmer, after all Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing holiday in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first of all praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was making a catastrophic decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to a taxpayer. Funnily enough, he constantly made new financial offers during the conversation, he talked about what Microsoft would add for free, for the school department for example. On and on he reduced the price, one million and a another million and a another million and a dozen million cheaper than before. This is how important Munich - which is internationally perceived as an IT center - was to Microsoft as a symbol. Would [Munich] walk a new path or repentantly return into Microsoft's lap? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 per cent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just make a price comparison, this was not important to us. Linux-Magazin: Bill Gates also came to visit? Christian Ude: He was in Munich because of a presentation of the "House of the Future", which inspired him insanely. With it, you could determine from your car how high the room temperature in each room is and whether the refrigerator should defrost a bit. On his way back to the airport I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I sat together with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van, which was luxuriously equipped inside, but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! That's incomprehensible! Now that I'm not the hard-boiled IT specialist who could stand up to a Bill Gates in every detail, I just said: "Please note, we're all about independence. We don't want to be dependent." Then he said, "That's nonsense, who do you depend on?" "Now that you are here [I can tell you]: From you, of course!" That really made him collapse, and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology".

sh-run 7y ago

I made a slideshow in LibreOffice Impress for my grandfather's funeral last week. We ended up playing it via PowerPoint because of how the chapel's AV system was set up. PowerPoint rendered the images in the ODP poorly, like it jacked the contrast up to 100. Saving the document as a PPTX within LibreOffice and then playing it on PowerPoint fixed the issue. From my naive perspective MS Office seems to have issues with ODF just like LibreOffice has with docx/pptx/xlsx/etc.

mattbk1 7y ago
I'm sorry for your loss. Dealing with technical issues at a funeral sounds terrible.
Enginerrrd 7y ago
This to me is THE quintessential issue surrounding potential adoption of libre office. If formatting & commands remained 100% consistent between the two, I think you'd see a lot more people switch, out of the shear convenience of not having to whip out their wallet. Students would probably be first to adopt because they usually operate on a tight budget to begin with. That would filter out into the business world eventually. But if you can't absolutely rely on it to be totally compatible, then it's a total non-starter. Not worth the risk.
- davidgerard 7y ago
  I think you're wrong there. Counterpoint: Google Docs. Its OOXML compatibility is for shit. Its adoption is HUGE. Not one person mentions how amazingly shit its OOXML compatibility is, even for quite simple DOCX. Almost nobody in an office uses the fancy bits of Excel. Spreadsheets are mostly used as flat-file data stores. And Office is notoriously incompatible between different versions of itself. In practice, I don't think the file compatibility objection to LibreOffice is real. It's just an excuse. The actual competition is Google Docs, which is a shitty word processor and a shitty spreadsheet and a shitty presentation app, but absolutely brilliant at quick and convenient collaboration. That's why LibreOffice is working super-hard on the web-based online version.

EpicEng 7y ago

Sure, so long as you never have to open a document created by an external entity.

tombert 7y ago
I feel like that, with the exception of a few Excel spreadsheets that were getting pretty fancy, I haven't had any real compatibility issues opening up MS Office file in [Open|Libre]Office. Nowadays I usually tell whomever is asking for something in a "Word" format that I don't own a copy of Word, but I can send them a PDF, and they're OK with that, but when I was first getting started as an engineer I used to have to work with recruiters a lot, where they'd ask for my resume in a Word format so that they could insert their ugly logo on the top and break all the formatting. No one ever said anything about my files that were initially made with LibreOffice. In fact, for all the essays I've had to write for school (that I started again semi-recently), I've done them with either Pandoc+Markdown or LibreOffice (depending on how much formatting is required), and no one has said anything about the MS Word export, or me potentially breaking the teachers' templates that they made in word. I'll definitely give it to you for Excel though. For simple stuff LibreOffice's compatibility is fine, but if you do any kind of elaborate Excel function, you're going to have a bad time, and things are going to break.
- squeaky-clean 7y ago
  I have an issue at my work right now where excel files generated by some Java libraries used by another team do not open in LibreOffice. To share them with members running linux and LO, someone with a real Excel installation has to open it up, and re-save the file, then it is compatible. I think that's what they mean by external entity? I've also personally had problems with openpyxl in python

gpresot 7y ago

MS Office is around 150 USD per year (on Premium Plan, and it comes with 1TB/user of OneDrive: good luck beating that package), I would imagine it would be less for large corporations. This is really not much for a software platform that any white collar employee knows how to use at least at its basic level. Excel and Powerpoint are critical software for most large companies. Budgets, financial analyses, forecasts, quick calcs, presentations on factory shop floors and in board suites rely on them. I am a management consultant so I see a wide range of corporate tools: I have seen large companies use Google as their cloud, email and calendar platforms, dropbox for their shared drives, PowerBI or Tableau, SAP or Oracle or Salesforce for ERP, but not even once I saw a company not relying on Excel and Powerpoint for much of the daily activities. They wouldn't risk getting away from PPT and Excel (and, to a lesser extent, MS Word). The certainty that somebody in another country or organisation will open the file and it will appear as intended is essential to large (and small) companies. Plus there is almost no training needed for new hires, as both student and expert hires will have experience with it. Today MS Office for MacOS is quite good: some functionalities are missing, I think, but what is there is 100% compatible with Win platform - I wouldn't bet on this to be true for LibreOffice. If a company wants to save money on licenses it might be netter off reviewing how often certain software packages are utilised and prune based on this, rather than blanket-switching an almost universal software, used daily and that is not even that expensive.

aidenn0 7y ago

ODF has its own issues. When I'm sharing a spreadsheet between libreoffice and gnumeric I use XLS, because the compatibility is much higher than using an ODF.