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Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS. LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst
by belter 2y ago
Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS.
LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst,
if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....
- mstipetic 2y agoI’m all for open source but suggesting libre office is perfect is a bit too much for me
- belter 2y agoPerfect for 98% of the things government officials are using Word, Excel and PowerPoint for...
- kristiandupont 2y agoIf you have a spreadsheet with macros that are anything more than the most basic, you can't run it in Calc. It's not that trivial.
- belter 2y agoThe 2% ...And your company logic should not be in the Macros. "The Wall of Shame for the Worst Excel Errors" - https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-the-worst-excel-errors https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...
- kristiandupont 2y agoRight, so your argument is that this is easy, and if it turns out that it's not, we'll just be smug and tell them that they were holding it wrong all along? It sounds like you are picturing in your head that all spreadsheet work is greenfield. Do you have any idea how much Excel code is embedded everywhere? Very often made by people who are no longer around. You can lecture all you want, but this is the situation. I don't like it either.
- belter 2y agoRelax...the weekend almost here... :-) Did not intend to be smug...honestly..not really. :-) In my defense, I have more than 20 years corporate experience in tech AND finance domains, in more than 25 countries. And in the cultural domains of the five different languages I am familiar and whose grammar I regularly brutalize. Can't recognize the problem you are describing, as the mountain that would stop any company from start using LibreOffice. All that logic in Excel sheets is just a serious governance problem... "How an Excel error cost JP Morgan $6 billion" - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eriklidman_how-an-excel-error-cost-jp-morgan-6-billion-activity-7128008511061438464-1kO2 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eriklidman_how-an-excel-error...
- consp 2y agoGood enough for the vast majority. Just not the ones making the decisions. And when it is changed, you have to fight all m$ because it keeps breaking formats and compatibility let alone standardisation with others.
- bayindirh 2y agoLibreOffice works for 99.99% of the cases where Microsoft Office is being used. Moreover, NextCloud offers a free "LibreOffice on the web" capability if you prefer. Oh, BTW. Nextcloud is also nice. Very nice. Edit: Looks like Owncloud guys have arrived (just joking, I like them equally).
- bloopernova 2y agoI got access to a NextCloud instance as part of my Hetzner storage. Setting up access for my wife was easy. Adding "apps" to my nextcloud instance was easy. Sharing storage, playing with a Kanban board, editing documents, it all just works. I'm very impressed with nextcloud, I had no idea it was so good!
- bayindirh 2y agoInstalling it on a bare metal server is equally easy. Not a walk in the park, but half a day at most, with server optimizations and polish. It updates nicely too. I'm managing one for ~4 years now, and it's painless. Nobody calls for me for support either. I think this is, good?
- eitland 2y agoIt is not perfect, but in a number of areas it is significantly better than MS Office, and this has been the case since it was still OpenOffice back in 2005: I'd import collaborative schoolwork into Open Office to fix the mismatch of styles that other students had used[1] and then (to be fair) I'd export it back to Word format and do final formatting in Word to get the exact layouts and page numering options that was demanded from us. Today MS Office is still broken in a number of crazy ways. One of the most annoying ones is that if whoever packages and deploys Office to our computers use localization for the user interface, suddenly all formulas are in some broken local language variant making it next to impossible to search for it. If I know the solution with standard Excel language it is doable to translate it to this broken "Norwegian BASIC" language, it is just really really annoying. A quick and easy solution then is to write it in Libre Office Calc, export it to xls and import it and done. With Libre Office I can also choose if I want cute "Ribbon" menus or easy-to-use menus. List probably goes on, this was just the things from the top of my head. [1]because it felt almost impossible to do in an efficient way in MS Office even if I had significantly more experience with it)
- baq 2y agoLibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.
- bayindirh 2y agoGenuinely curious. Can you elaborate?
- hylaride 2y agoI don't think people realize how much of the world runs off of excel, especially the financial world. Excel still "supports" buggy issues from versions in the 1990s as to not break financial models. IBM mainframes do the same thing with COBOL because modernizing core code means having to notify and test all the downstream users that have their own code to deal with the legacy issues in the current stack. I was once explained by a retired COBOL programmer (who spends his summers contracting for maintenance) how this tangled mess of thousands of banks feeds in all the way to the US central bank to determine interest rates - in some extreme cases, IBM still has to emulate hardware bugs as to not change expected behaviour. This is not something you just migrate away from or fuck around with. There's a reason IBM still sells mainframes that runs code from the 1960s.
- bayindirh 2y agoI know what you mean, but now you're talking about a very niche market. Finance, which uses Excel or spreadsheets since 90s. You can't replace these, I agree. But for other uses of Excel, I can say it can be easily exchanged. This is why I used 99.99% percent, but not more nines. The remaining "three nines" are the niches you're talking about. It's like how we say "Nah, it's a small set of matrices. just 2, 3000x3000, double precision floating point matrices, and a couple of vectors and some multiplication (i.e. in a range of a couple of billions)".
- Lanolderen 2y ago
- sabjut 2y agoI would much rather see a viable alternative to Google Docs with at least an attempt at feature parity. I have yet to see a solution that has a chance at comparison, especially considering performance and features.
- piokoch 2y agoNah, it is not gonna be that simple. Office is not just editing software, that would be fairly easy to replace, Office is a collaboration suite, provides documents storage, provides authorization and authentication that can be integrated with practically anything companies, governments, universities are using. Can we go back to '90 and relay on sending documents by email? Building an alternative, even on the level of Google Docs, which has editing capabilities on the MS Word 2.0 level, is not gonna be simple, although I am surprised that European Union is ready to spend a lot of money on adjusting caps to bottles (this costed billions), but is not able to invest into its own capabilities in terms of IT infrastructure.
- belter 2y agoEasier than it looks.The EU is currently still sending 200 Billion EUR a year in oil and gas imports to Russia per year. A peanuts project of 100 million EUR ( basically one Microsoft Global Customer Contract...) could get something like this or similar going within 24 months: https://www.collaboraonline.com/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/ As long as it would not be managed by EU bureaucrats. Otherwise the tenders would take 18 months....
- belter 2y agoIt seems the Microsoft influencer team [1] is again all over this thread. They must have some alerts... Reminder LibreOffice for most things is better than Office - Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office#Spreadsheet_applications%3A_LibreOffice_Calc_vs._Microsoft_Excel https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr... [1] "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even lead developers as represented in that community..." [1] https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hacker-news/ https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...
- belter 2y agoA proof Microsoft has sock puppet accounts here, from the words of their own CEO, selectively down voted out of a whole thread...Fascinating....
- whywhywhywhy 2y agoSuggesting LibreOffice 19 years after Google Docs is so weird to me. Are you expecting people to shuffle around single files to each other every time something is changed? Is that what we consider perfect?
- belter 2y agoExcept for emailing Linux kernel patches...:-) Do people for example do that with Code in 2025? Or do they use Version Management and Shared Portals with document locking? Are most companies having three or four employees working in the SAME document at the SAME time? Maybe while singing Kumbaya over Teams? That would not be very efficient... Or just use: https://www.collaboraonline.com/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/
- kennysoona 2y agoIt's about not putting your data in the hands of a US company. Collaboration can be managed by offline servers that facilitate that. Not everything needs to be in a web page.
- grimblee 2y agoThe files can be on a shared filesystem with open file locking, the word processing suite is irrelevant. Samba existed long before google docs and already did this. We only use google because of the convenience of having everything in one interface. I think this is the real issue, we are all so lazy we would rather give away our freedom for a little bit of convenience.
- belter 2y agoA suggestion to dump Office and Teams and move out of Windows, selectively down voted out of a whole thread...Fascinating....