Italian City To Dump OpenOffice For Microsoft After Four Years 316
An anonymous reader writes: Between 2011 and 2014, the municipality of Pesaro, Italy, trained up its 500 employees to use OpenOffice. However, last year the organization decided to switch back to Microsoft and use its cloud productivity suite Office 365. According to a report from Netics Observatory (Google translation of Italian original), the city administration will be able to save up to 80% of the software's total cost of ownership by going back. The savings are largely due to the significant and unexpected deployment costs. In particular, having to repaginate and tweak a number of documents due to a lack of compatibility between the proprietary and the open source systems translated into a considerable waste of time and productivity. The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.
Sounds like an ad (Score:4, Insightful)
For some product
Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
It matters a lot. For example what is the price that MS gave on office for that city, did they give it to them for free now to do so? Then that would matter greatly.
Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
The source of news is not irrelevant. Any source can be biased and can present, twist or omit facts that can greatly change the substance of the news.
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Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Funny)
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Uh .. price, i.e. TCO is obviously the key decision factor for many users. It has to play a significant role for these decisions. ..
TFA is saying its cheaper to run MSFT products at large scale than the open source counterpart. Thats the news, its all about price.
Obviously its not a 'fair match', as TCO of cloud hosted product in this decade will very easily work out to be lower, but given a choice between the available options
Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
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"TFA is saying its cheaper to run MSFT products at large scale than the open source counterpart"
No. TFA is saying that is cheaper to accept MSFT lock-in than to use *any* competitor. It is not a case of Office vs Openoffice but about Microsoft locking out everybody else.
I would hope for public officials to look a bit beyond TCO and analyze the root causes for public benefit but, alas, it seems that's not the case.
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They're not even locking people out. They're saying that they're making "open standards" and then doing their best to break anyone else's implementation of those "open standards".
It's like telling everyone your door is unlocked and open, and then tripping anyone who goes though it.
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I'd have to agree with that. Italy never seemed the epitome of labor efficiency to me to begin with.
Of course, I do need to point out that there are annoyances with OpenOffice that have prevented me from bothering with it for long. Could I get around them? Absolutely. Do I want to bother? Not really. So I agree that the Italians probably had real challenges.
The question is: were those challenges really enough to change the TCO advantage? I wonder.
The fact that I prefer MS Office does not mean MS Offi
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The source does count, since the numbers they give really don't add up. Here's a good analysis, it's in Italian sorry: http://www.techeconomy.it/2015... [techeconomy.it]
Also, by technical issues they mean "we relay a lot on Access and have no will to convert".
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True, but consider that the reasons behind it are just as important.
In 1950's Soviet Russia, the trains always ran on time according to any press release that mentioned it... but the reason why is simple: Anyone who delayed a train run (or dared to say that they rarely ran on time) was labeled a 'counter-revolutionary' and either sent to a gulag or shot.
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I agree that your comment is simply stating that it is just happening. I'm wondering why you bothered to make such as statement though if all you're doing is reiterating what the headline and summary already said.
That's like saying "someone dropped a nuclear weapon on a city today" and then expecting people to not want to dig deeper on something like that. Of course, most people would want to go the next step and ask "why". And you can be certain that Microsoft isn't just doing it to say, "Oh and by the
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For home use
Re: Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the hell uses spreadsheets for ticket management..? Anyone who has the knowledge to do that should habe the knowledge why it's an awful idea.
Re: Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
It helps if you actually read the comment [Crazy idea on Slashdot I know]. They weren't using Excel for ticketing. They were using Excel to create a dashboard displaying information and metrics about tickets in their actual ticketing system, which while it may not be the optimal way to do that, doesn't strike me as that unreasonable.
Re: Sounds like an ad (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which is fine, but if you're going to use such an edge case to make the claim that one suite of software is superior to the other, you're on thin ice.
But this is not the only edge case, there are lots of them. As the OP said, Libre is fine for most users, especially home users, but many people run into lots of edge cases, and even if their task is doable, it will take more effort and time. For businesses, that means it's costing them money.
Re: Sounds like an ad (Score:4, Informative)
"t's like saying you built a tractor powered by a Ferrari engine and it's not working as well as a custom built John Deere"
Your problem. It was not a Ferrari what you were looking for, but a Lamborghini.
Re: Sounds like an ad (Score:4, Informative)
Well, except that Excel has the ability to query not only SQL, but also Oracle, DB2, MariaDB, other Excel spreadsheets, web pages, and flat files. LibreOffice... None.
Re: Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is fine, but if you're going to use such an edge case to make the claim that one suite of software is superior to the other, you're on thin ice.
If that one edge case was his entire case against Liber Office you'd have a point, however he just cited it as a single example. I expect that when it comes to features in spreadsheet apps it's a bit like search engines. The searches that make or break a search engines is not the ability to return hits for not common searches like "america's got talent winners" it's being able to return results for a large set of rare and specific searches like: "ip67 rated bulkhead mounted sma connectors" or "new old stock 1965 mustang steering box". If you talk to people who use Excel extensively to analyze data you'll quickly find that the reason they find LibreOffice lacking is not because Libreoffice is lacking basic features, it is because the Libre Spreadsheet app is unable to perform a for a wide collection of really specific 'edge' tasks that Excel can either do out of the box or for which there exist well established and professionally maintained third party Excel expansion packages. All of that is simply down to Excel having been around longer and having many more users doing a wider variety of specialised tasks that Libreoffice Calc has had and for Libreoffice Calc that boils down to the fact that gaining market share will be a long and tedious up hill struggle.
Re: Sounds like an ad (Score:3)
Pulling data from an external data source and reporting on it is a pretty common use of Excel in businesses. It's hardly an edge case.
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But some tasks which would be considered simple in Excel are impossible in Libre.
Or greeting cards in MS Publisher vs. Open Office Writer/Draw.
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Actually, I find that I have to keep both on my computer for easier work. I do a lot of work with text heavy CSV files, like linguistic concordances drawn from a database. Libre has features that Excel doesn't, such as regular expressions in filters/searches, and much much better handling of UTF-8 for export. I often find myself with workflows that require BOTH, which is absurd. Luckily, I don't have to pay for Excel, my employer does, so it could be worse.
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Re:Sounds like an ad (Score:5, Interesting)
Because microsoft gave them unlimited free use licenses for 5 years.
And they will have the exact same problems, as Office 365 has huge incompatabilities with a lot of older word docs as well as spreadsheets, etc...
It's a BS article trying to spin the fact that Microsoft caved in and gave the city a lot of free to ge tthem to switch back.
protection money from the mafia (Score:4, Insightful)
even the press release cannot mention a single good reason for it except "we have been conned in the past and now must pay the price... for pagination!"
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even the press release cannot mention a single good reason for it except "we have been conned in the past and now must pay the price... for pagination!"
Yea, it actually sounds like they really failed at training. Yes, converting a document from one format to another, I've found, will often give you different page breaks. So... don't rely on the page breaks. You can use hard breaks, document sections, template formats, etc., and not deal with that issue.
Liars will tell the truth ... (Score:2)
Yup. Original source: news.microsoft.com
Even if Microsoft is the messenger that doesn't mean the message, that a town tried FOSS and found unexpected costs, is untrue. Liars will tell the truth when the truth is coincidentally on their side.
The town should have had an easy way to report their difficulties to the FOSS developers and the FOSS developers should have been responsive. Such reporting and response is necessary for FOSS adoption. I think this is the first thing to look into, not the messenger, not competition's sales force.
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That, or you can RTFA.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one.
msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around.
That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
Compatibility is not an unrealistic expectation (Score:3)
That, or you can RTFA.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one. msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around. That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
I did read the article and you are completely mistaken. The problem is OpenOffice's failure at being compatible. If it paginates wrong an OpenOffice developer should fix that. If macros are missing an OpenOffice developer should add those.
A hybrid approach is a given in the sense that outsiders will be sending or expecting office documents even if you are 100% OpenOffice internally. Compatibility is not an unrealistic expectation, it is a business requirement.
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If it paginates wrong an OpenOffice developer should fix that.
If will paginate wrong if a different MS Office setup is being used as well.
Unless you strictly control pagination, the exact breaking points on pages will depend on what fonts are installed on the system. Both MS-Office and Open/Libre Office get their typesetting metrics from the printer fonts, not from some hard-coded internal source.
Before TrueType came along, in fact, it was pretty much a crap shoot, since the only fonts available were the ones that came with the printers and different manufacturers/mod
Start open from the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
That is a message for new organizations to start with open standards from day 1. Otherwise you will get so dependent on proprietary standards that moving out of them may never be worth again.
Re:Start open from the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
Day 1 is long past. You have to deal with files from other folks outside the organization. Conversion back and forth between Microsoft and Open Office is glitchy and unfortunately everybody you deal with has a word, excel or powerpoint file to give you.
Re:Start open from the beginning (Score:4, Informative)
Day 1 is long past. You have to deal with files from other folks outside the organization. Conversion back and forth between Microsoft and Open Office is glitchy and unfortunately everybody you deal with has a word, excel or powerpoint file to give you.
In my experience, transfer of a document from one copy of MS Office to another is not necessarily trouble-free. Sometimes MS Office isn't even compatible with itself.
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Except the article doesn't explicitly support this. The documents might be coming or going to businesses or other governments that use MS Office so it may not even matter.
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I've worked for a company where "free" philosophy was felt from top to bottom. yet even there, we were running MS office in Wine on every desktop. there is just no way of functioning in corporate world without it. as you said, the lock in is complete. the only way to successfully use open/libre-office is to export your documents to pdf before emailing them to clients.
the only other place i've ever come across who sent us .ODT documents was LINX (london internet exchange). other than them, every single time
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Governments can just do what's best for their citizens, and tell others to piss off. .pptx or .docx to be easy to open for their prospective customers. They can just offer docs and data in open formats.
It's a nice place to start.
Remember that governments deal with public data, so they should hold formats to higher standards than private companies. OOXML is just not open enough for government, partly due to the problems exposed in this article.
Also, they don't sell stuff, so they don't need their
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odf is good for collaboration...
Maybe, but it pales in comparison to cloud hosted collaboration suites. Which coincidentally, Office365 and Google Docs are. I don't know about the msft latest stuff but i'm a gdocs user and trying to collaborate on an offline copy of spreadsheet/text, regardless of the format, feels like stone age and does have extra overhead costs, too.
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At the company I work for we have a lot of techs/engineers who are smart and a lot of leeway to install whatever OS/software we want. Several have gone all linux with Libre or Open Office. It seems like they all eventually switch back for some reason.
For the last 20 years I've had (or created) such freedom but I've always dual booted. Different tools for different tasks. I've also usually been able to hang onto the old machine when getting an upgrade, "need it for testing". I could leave the old machine running outlook and do office when needed over there and boot the new machine into Windows or Linux depending on the software development task at hand. Its worked well for me, admittedly I had full sized desks.
Contrary to my experiences (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, I would argue that retraining everybody to Microsoft's cloud docs itself constitutes "a considerable waste of time and productivity", but I guess whoever in Pesaro's IT department that got under-the-table money disagrees.
Re:Contrary to my experiences (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Contrary to my experiences (Score:4, Insightful)
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Did you notice that the city is migrating to Office 365, not Office? Apparently not.
Re: Contrary to my experiences (Score:2, Informative)
MS is usually bound by law to physically have government data stored in an EU country and to never move it outside. This applies to O365 too.
This is coming from someone who has worked in the EU in various government agencies and offices.
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Fuckin' I've worked in a LARGE governmental organization that made 2 format switches and you know what they have that most businesses don't?
A shit ton of documents, dating back YEARS
So you're not just dancing around with a version or three out of software X, you're plumbing the depths with garbage from 15+ years ago and god only knows what level of mess. I don't like Microsoft OR its formats but what costs actual money, taxpayer money, is having some manager somewhere tell you what you need to support and h
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I have Word documents from the 90s. Hey, guess what? They don't open in a modern version of Word.
I had to track down a copy of Word from the Windows 3.1 era to be able to open them.
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I've found formatting trashed regardless of office suite, mainly it goes down to whether the staff understands how to properly format documents.
It may be that Microsoft Office/Office users are more tolerant to formatting transgressions.
Shocking: a hybrid solution was expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
They didn't replace MSOffice in the first place, they had a hybrid solution, which was costly, due to compatibility issues. They should have been able to know that beforehand. msoffice doesn't play well with others, it doesn't even implement any standard format. If you absolutely need to use msoffice in some spots, you should forget about interoperating, and just use msoffice everywhere.
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And while Excel works for those areas which you explain, it is hardly the right tool for that job either, just convenient. Get a real SQL reporting tool
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And while Excel works for those areas which you explain, it is hardly the right tool for that job either, just convenient. Get a real SQL reporting tool
The best camera is the one you have with you. Sometimes, the same concept applies to other tools.
Oh, the horror~~~ (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides:
Excel (various macros used on tens of files)
Tens of files ? Oh my god that is sooooo many.... Hercules himself would be needed to sort through all of them.
And from the /. summary:
The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.
15 minute per employee ? That's so horribly long, it's almost as long as their daily coffee pause! They have surely logged tons of overtime because of this! Unpaid overtime! The Italian economy is crumbling because of the daily 15minutes it takes to fix a malformet .docx import into OpenOffice.org !!!
~~~
I can't decide if this is a disguised parody.
Or if Microsoft have decided to advertise *how easy* it is to actually switch to even an out-dated alternative like OpenOffice.org (not to mention that LibreOffice.org is getting more development and much more bugfixes)
15 minutes per day ? and 10 Excel file needing fixing ? Common, sound's like it's actually even easier than a major upgrade of MS Office itself.
Absolute vs. relative (Score:3)
The same productivity loss as firing ten people.
Which, on the scale of the mentioned 300 people is barely above 3%.
You probably lose more than 3% of your time when you go peeing in the toilets or have a coffee break.
In most European jurisdictions, you can lose more than 3% productivity to sickness without even needing to justify it.
---
By the same logic, you probably lose 1 sec a day burping and farting.
In a company of 100'000 (like some big branches of the State), that's nearly 30 man hours lost per day. That's nearly one week. The same productivity loss
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You probably lose more than 3% of your time when you go peeing in the toilets ...
Opposed to peeing elsewhere? Yes, using the trashcan in my office *would* be more efficient, but one must draw the line somewhere.
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Catheters at your desk. Only the manager can remove them...
Don't give them any ideas.
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If you're not in management, you might consider going down that path. You have the right mentality.
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People started to realize that there are somethings that MS Office has a stranglehold on and no matter the how cheap the other software is you cannot get rid of Office 2k20. That and the conversion factor
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This story should have been:
Vendor lock-in is real, and it's very hard to shake off.
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Ok, I'll bite.
This whole story is about msoffice being _incompatible_ with anything but itself, and that issue costing the city a lot of money when trying to have a mixed environment.
This is just another example why their proprietary file formats should never have been approved as a standard, because in practice, they are not interoperable. Also, shows one of the the risks organizations face when using proprietary formats regarding access of information. Once you bite office, you are stuck with them for lif
Libre Office (Score:2)
Unfortunately they are getting sucked back into Microsoft products. Very sad, considering that they had already broken free of it's stranglehold.
Re:Libre Office (Score:5, Interesting)
We use numerous highly-customized document templates that simply don't like anything except MS Office, and have occasionally had problems over the years even with MS Office and problems as features are tweaked by Microsoft.
Part of the problem is that users that are extremely proficient with MS Office do not want to change, much like users that were extremely proficient with WordPerfect didn't want to change either.
The state is a lost cause (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked on a state office migration project before, it's no surprise for me that this kind of efforts always end up with the same outcome. The thing is that migrating a state office is a painful process, and tends to generate discomfort on many people, from the office workers to the technical staff.
Here in latin america we may have particular problems regarding that.
Many office employees don't want to fully disclose their working environment because: oh surprise! they hardly do any work at all! They just sit there in their computer and complain when their favourite radio stream which uses proprietary technology from the 90's. I wonder how much of these "propietary files" were actually mail-forwarded .ppt/mp4 files and flash games.
Technical staff has to be trained, and usually that doesn't go well, they are not cooperative and feel the migration process as a personal attack on their capacity and skills.
It doesn't help either that internal politics get involved in the process when some office workers think they're being audited, and actively seek to shut down the migration process through political means (which they usually have way more experience than the guys doing the migration work).
Overall the employees feel migration processes as a unnecessary burden, an attack to their perceived right to do what they please with the state's resources without answering anyone and a challenge to their competence. It also prevents high-ranking bureaucrats to get all those juicy commisions from propietary software vendor's.
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As I just posted, THIS state has been a lost cause for some time. Italy is the second-most corrupt, (and poorly run) country in western Europe after Greece.
Maybe try LibreOffice first? (Score:3)
LibreOffice won the developers so it gets many more fixes
https://phoronix.com/scan.php?... [phoronix.com]
Maybe (Score:3)
Maybe they should have used LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice, then. Of course, if the city had standardized on OO (or even LO), wouldn't the compatibility issue (ie re-paginating), be on the receiver's end, not the city's? Something sounds odd about this, at least the way it is being spun. Then again, Microsoft is involved...
WPS Office (Score:2)
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I used to be pretty excited about WPS. However it's certainly not better than LO. I was quite disappointed with it actually. I tried opening a fairly large spreadsheet we use in it and found that LibreOffice actually did a better job handling all the formulas. WPS (a year ago anyway) seemed to have a lot off ERR values for whatever reason that LO doesn't get. I didn't investigate further.
Also WPS office has moved to a freemium model now (which is understandable). So besides the occasional nag, it canno
Open source is not always the best option (Score:5, Interesting)
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What is the LibreOffice equivalent to PowerPivot?
Just because you don't use anything but the most basic of features in Office doesn't mean that LibreOffice is equivalent.
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What is the LibreOffice equivalent to PowerPivot?
DataPilot.
Just because you don't use anything but the most basic of features in Office doesn't mean that LibreOffice is equivalent.
The basic functions of LO plus a few custom Python scripts get my work done. On the other hand, if I was trapped on VBA and MSOffice extensions, I would be fucked as soon as Microsoft foisted some shitty compatibility-breaking update, wouldn't I?
Re:Open source is not always the best option (Score:4, Interesting)
Since I was just posting about how Libre's higher-end stuff is poor compared to Excel, I should be joining you on this. But "PowerPivot" is high-end even for me. Only introduced for Excel2010 (my office doesn't have it yet), and restricted to certain versions of 2013, I have to wonder how big the user base is.
I wrote my own VBA utility that lets me type an SQL statement and that sucks the results straight out of Oracle into a pivot table, plus has a bunch of buttons for doing stuff to the pivot table that take multiple menu moves without my add-in. (You can do this with menus, my addin just saves several steps - steps that most engineers around me would never learn in the first place).
Fooling around on menus, I couldn't find any way in LibreOffice to bring the result of an SQL query directly into a pivot table; that's pretty bad right there. Once you're spending time on workarounds, you quickly overcome any cost advantage of the free software. For me. Now if only 1% of users need these differences between Excel and Calc to save dozens of hours per year, we could easily be outvoted by the folks who just need to manage a few tables of numbers and formulas.
Pagination incompatibility? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is so bad, its alleged "open" "standard" OO-XML has binary cruft in the spec. The spec basically says "whatever the old MS-Word did with this binary is the standard". Even Microsoft is not able to come up with a reference implementation that does not depend the ability to execute the original MS-Word6 binary buried under several layers of emulation.
This is the real way to build a cash cow. No one else can paginate the way old Ms-Word6 binary did. And if you inveigle your customers into incorporating that pagination as the essential part of their process, then you can laugh at them, tell them you are going to squeeze till they yelp, and they can do anything about it.
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They took it to insane levels by changing the formatting when the printer is changed.
Oh, what a (hopefuly not too hazy) memory that brings back. Mid/late 90s, working as a store computer tech, I once spent half a day trying to figure out why a client who had just installed a new printer could only select from a few fonts in Word. Somehow the system was using a generic driver for the new printer, and thus Word was only giving a few options for fonts. IIRC, installed the updated, device specific driver, set the printer as the system default, and went for a 3 beer lunch.
They lost me at... (Score:4, Interesting)
...300 people @ 15 minutes a day, after it was 500 employees total in the organization. It's utter bullshit that 60% of the staff are involved in document production every day, much less so much that just the tweaking was 15 minutes.
It's the exact smell of the bullshit I've seen for 25 years every time an IT department had already made a decision and made up numbers to justify it. Generally, they come up with the money number by working backwards and hope that nobody knows the internal workflows well enough to critique it. But this one fails when we only have one other number to work with, it's so over-the-top.
Then I remembered that Italy is the place that proves Donald Trump really could win: Berlusconi is Trump mixed with Rupert Murdoch and won election. It's the second most corrupt country in western Europe after Greece.
This switch was probably just bought and paid for.
repaginating? (Score:2)
The Prescience of John Locke (Score:5, Insightful)
This is unsurprising. As you may recall, in his "3rd Treatise on Government," John Locke wrote:
How he foresaw this, I cannot imagine. But you have to admit, he was right on target. Most people who are familiar with late 20th century technology would never even think of this, since in day-to-life you rarely care about pagination, or especially if your page breaks match someone else's -- indeed you probably only rarely think in terms of "pages" at all. Yet Locke had the distant objectivity, in order to see that pagination would some day return to being an important topic, worthy of peoples' -- nay, The People's -- attention.
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Little incompatibilities are a big concern (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been doing end user stuff for years, and Microsoft Office is a de facto standard. It's not because it's the absolute best product out there, but because compatibility needs to be maintained. Most -simple- documents and spreadsheets will open in one or the other. The problem comes when you get documents created with a Word template that someone got very creative with while building it. This happens a lot in engineering organizations, places that have document control/management systems, and yes, governments. Word has never had the easiest-to-decode formatting methods; that crown still goes to WordPerfect for the closed source world, and some law firms still use it today. Little stuff like page breaks, font kerning, and special positioning that don't matter in a simple document but matter a lot in a formal contract are sometimes very hard to find and fix in Word, for example.
The reality is that even though the format sucks, everyone is used to it and works around the quirks. Is it right? No, but it happens. No one outside of scientific publication is going to advocate for regular users to write their documents in TeX for example, even though that's the perfect example of a completely open, known formatting standard.
I think open source office suites are fine as long as you don't have crazy formatting needs and you don't have to share complex documents with too many Microsoft Office users. Otherwise, like the article says, users will waste time tweaking little things in their documents instead of doing productive work. If you're a small shop that has standardized on Linux, that's fine. One of the lifeblood things the company I work for does is respond to RFPs from governments. The standard response usually needs to be added to their crazily-formatted Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, and $deity help you if your use of LibreOffice is even thought of as the reason that a bid is rejected.
In Padova, Italy, we have been using open/libreoff (Score:2, Interesting)
The Italian city of Padua has been using libreoffice for many years. No Microsoft licences have been bought nor they will be in the foreseeable future. Maybe we have better employees.
The 80-20 Rule (Score:2)
This is another case where the 80-20 rule comes into play. Almost everyone could switch to LibreOffice, but there are edge cases where Microsoft works better.
I uninstalled Microsoft Office and installed LibreOffice on my work laptop about a year or so ago. I'm a web programmer, so I use it only once every couple of weeks, to read and sometimes edit Word and Excel files from coworkers. So far so good. I even made a user guide with Write, including drawings made in Draw. I published it to PDF, so compatibilit
Lived there for 10+ years (Score:3)
Someone got money for that, or a kickback..
That's just the way things like that work in municipal government.
So, failure from Microsoft's part ... (Score:2)
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My 0.02 (Score:3)
Maybe they thought it was called (Score:3)
Mussolini Word. Guaranteed to keep the trains running on time.
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LibreOffice is fine for businesses (Score:5, Informative)
The absence of a serious alternative to MS Access or easy/documemnted scripting [via macros] and VBA, as found in Excel is a non starter for me.
There are plenty of alternatives to MS Access unless you have some peculiar requirement that it be shipped to you in an office suite. Kind of ridiculous that you think it should be a clone of MS Office. Personally I use Filemaker when I'm going with proprietary small databases but there are plenty of open source options too.
As for macros LibreOffice Calc has fairly robust macro capability. It doesn't use VBA but so what? If you have tied yourself to Excel with a bunch of VBA scripts then you're probably stuck with Excel unless you want to do a lot of coding. Probably not good planning to hog tie yourself with proprietary technology but I know a lot of people do it with Excel+VBA.
LibreOffce or Open Office just do not cut it!
That's funny. I've standardized my company on LibreOffice and it works great for us. Been using it exclusively for 5 years now without problems. Not the right solution for everyone but it works great for us.
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On the one hand, I have to agree: I use Libre at home and love my Excel VBA at work, and when it comes to interaction with databases, charting, the programming environment, I'd have to pick Excel for my job if they gave me the option, so I'd have to pick it for the corporation (8000 seats) too.
On the other: this wasn't the complaint. They were complaining about simple document tweaks like pagination. That makes it a bullshit complaint they just made up. My "corp" is a large city, but a city with 500 empl
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I still have issues with libreoffice and msoffice fucking up pagination and the like, or msoffice printing out libreoffice documents with random bullshit all over the place, but overall it's definitely better than OpenOffice ever was. Plus LibreOffice makes it stupidly easy to just export a PDF if all I need to give someone is read-access.
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I keep hearing people saying replacing MS office with openoffice or libreoffice is no brainer. It is no brainer when your're replacing the word processor. It is a total different story to replace excel.
Friends don't let friends use Excel.
End of story.
Details: never ever ever use Excel to do math or data analysis. The reasons are legion.. Never ever ever use Excel to set up a database. Again, the reasons are legion.
Never ever Ever use Excel to format a cute-looking front page or even a tree diagram. It's stupid, painfully slow, and will break the moment someone tries to edit.
So then you're left with what Excel actually is: a spreadsheet tool. But just try writing a macro that won't foul up if someone