Denmark Gives Up On Replacing Microsoft Office With Collabora (tomshardware.com) 131
Denmark's Ministry of Digitization reportedly abandoned a pilot to replace Microsoft Office with the open-source Collabora suite less than six months after it began. Tom's Hardware reports: According to Danish publication Computerworld, the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country's dependence on American technology. Denmark isn't alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes.
But even though it's been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. "It's a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project," the professor said in an email. "However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector."
But even though it's been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. "It's a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project," the professor said in an email. "However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector."
Shocking (Score:3)
To me it's shocking that the pilot lasted 6 months.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, she had all the skills and experience to evaluate their Digitization solution, what with her experience:
"She previously worked in government affairs at British American Tobacco from 2016 to 2023 and held board positions at The Danish Tobacco Manufacturers.[1] She was a member of the Copenhagen City Council from 2014 to 2020, representing Venstre.[2] She worked as special advisor to minister of foreign affairs Lars Løkke Rasmussen from July 2024 until her appointment as minister in August 2024.[3] She was elected as a member of the Folketing in March 2026."
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Funny)
You forget. She has an iPhone! This makes her imminently qualified on all matters IT. All that other experience is just icing on the cake.
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What the non sequitur fuck are you even talking about?
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Yeah but for some reason Slashdot commenters jump to targeting people mentioned in the stories when they have a female first name.
Re: Shocking (Score:2)
Yes, they do need to be an expert at digitization. This myth about clueless clowns being able to manage departments is just that. It's a story only believed by idiots. If you can't do the job of your hires then you can't manage them correctly either. Obviously there are exceptions like people who can no longer do the job because of an injury or similar, but in general those who can't also can't manage. That's what happened to Boeing!
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If you can't do the job of your hires then you can't manage them correctly either.
In my 20s, when I was doing minimum wage work, where what you're saying is often but not always true, especially if you work for some old short lady who can't reach the top shelf. You haven't had enough variation in either the kind of work you do, nor have the environments you've worked in and the people you've worked with had much variation to realize this, hence you only understand naive, broad statements like the ones you often make. That's why you've also never been paid very much despite being in a uni
Re: Shocking (Score:2)
Thinking you're better than other people because you bring home more money is only one of the many reasons why you're a little bitch.
Re: Shocking (Score:2)
I'm not really sure what the second bit of your response was speaking to, but I'm sure you're game to explain it to this poor simpleton.
For my part, I was simply responding to a targeting prompt with the first guy that met the given criteria.
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Given the amount of bribes likely flying around this, yes, it's shocking it even started.
They were using Open Source software, so ... (Score:3, Interesting)
if it does not do what you want take the damned source and add what is missing and everyone will benefit. If you do not have the expertise then pay the developers or someone to do it for you. Yes: it will cost but to an entity the size of the Danish government the cost will be less than the cost of licensing MS Office for another year or so. Once this development cost is paid it does not need to be paid again next year - unlike a license fee.
If the various EU governments each pay to fix whatever itch scratches for them [wikipedia.org] then you quickly end up with better packages; as well as regaining digital sovereignty etc. This must be obvious to almost everybody, or it is being used as an excuse to do nothing or maybe keep the brown envelopes coming ?
Re:They were using Open Source software, so ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The crappy articles linked don't explain what went wrong, but I found one which did: https://www.techspot.com/news/... [techspot.com]
It sounds like the main issue was compatibility. They had a large number of templates and documents in Microsoft formats, and had to deal with ones coming from other departments.
The problems sound like the usual ones with MS documents being extremely brittle. Because every version of Word keeps the page layout and font rendering exactly the same, nobody notices. As soon as they switch to another app, slight changes on character dimensions, rounding errors, and unimplemented layout bugs combine to break everything. The resultant document is a mess and very labour intensive to fix.
They could employ people to work on fixing that in code, but it would probably be easier to just fix the documents, or develop an agentic AI that can do it automatically.
Compatibility is always going to be a problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
..Because MS Office has been designed from the ground up to be challenging to be compatible with. It started with a file format that was in essence the internal memory state of the program written out to disk. When they went to XML, all they really did was record that internal memory state in XML
Anyone wanting to be compatible with Office 'properly' need to implement pretty much all of the office program to render the document, and then convert the resulting render to their format.
What we need to do is to somehow make this Microsoft's problem. Make the cleanest open source office renderer the standard, define that rendering as the correct one, and if Word or Excel renders it differently, then that's a bug in Word or Excel. Or even better, make ODF the standard, and judge Office on its rendering and creating ODF formats.
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Nice idea but I don't know how you would do that. Most people are like the ones in the article. They open a document, it looks broken, they blame the app that opened it. They don't care who is right or if it is standards complaint. It worked yesterday, it worked for their colleague who sent it over.
Re:Compatibility is always going to be a problem.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or even better, make ODF the standard, and judge Office on its rendering and creating ODF formats.
Again being the size it is the government Denmark can start with publishing all of its forms in ODF format, no more DOCX; also use open/free fonts. This makes it a MS problems if they do not render properly -- people will start blaming MS for errors not the other way round. Thus industry and people at home will start using LibreOffice (what is in Collabora).
Next they need to push schools & tech colleges to use ODF, too many of them train students to learn how to use Microsoft products, they graduate and expect to use MS in their jobs. Actually: it would be nice if schools were to train people properly, most teachers do not know how to use style sheets, etc, and, eg, will make columns line up by pressing spaces rather than setting tabs/whatever. Start by teaching teachers (harder than you think).
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Simply stating: We Do Not Accept DOCx or XLSx formats, forces compliance. Since MS can produce ODF (allegedly), that's how you get compliance.
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There's always going to be a few people who won't do it, mostly because they're afraid to upset some important customer. How you get around that isn't obvious. However, you can start by making it a requirement that anything that comes in that's in an MS format is sent back with some boilerplate added telling the sender why it's rejected and a list of acceptable f
Re:Compatibility is always going to be a problem.. (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you think a government cares more about, who gets the blame for broken forms, or that people can't pay their taxes, file for permits, apply for benefits, etc.?
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Or even better, make ODF the standard, and judge Office on its rendering and creating ODF formats.
Again being the size it is the government Denmark can start with publishing all of its forms in ODF format, no more DOCX; also use open/free fonts.
Since the pilot program was 38 employees , this advice fails implementation at the pilot stage, since the other half-million employees are making documents in Microsoft.
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Anyone wanting to be compatible with Office 'properly' need to implement pretty much all of the office program to render the document, and then convert the resulting render to their format.
It strikes me that they could do this with the help of LLMs. They have LOTS of documents as references; the AI could possibly use them to help with replicating Microsoft's house-of-cards magic tricks, even going so far as reverse-engineering the executables.
They could create a two-way translation suite which could both import and export all Microsoft formats faithfully. Thanks to LibreOffice they'd have at least a leg up on that process. Replicating the collaborative part might be harder - but I suspect tha
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Indeed, I think they were expecting a smooth transition.
Unfortunately a lot of hype has been put out about how easy it is to ditch Microsoft products like Office and Windows. The reality is very different. LTT released a video just yesterday about how easy switching from Windows to Linux is, and within about 10 seconds of it starting the jargon would have gone over most people's heads.
Yep. (Score:2)
Going against a trend is never easy. Ya gotta want it.
All of the listed problems are surmountable. This little test had insufficient will, determination, and resources behind it.
With little more than a token gesture like this, failure was inevitable.
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It's unlikely an issue of MS documents being brittle and more a case of MS documents being full of legacy trash. You build up a template today you can quite easily migrate it elsewhere. If on the other hand you have an template based on an old doc format which was converted to docm and then to a dotm complete with some 100 lines of poorly hobbled together VB Script, then you're going to have a bad day.
That said we've got that problem within Microsoft as well. There's a shit ton of legacy cruft that may or m
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if it does not do what you want take the damned source and add what is missing and everyone will benefit.
I think the problem is a combination of people not wanting to change workflow, sort of an inertia effect. I've gotten some people running on Libre Office, and they are happy. I don't know enough about Collabra, so I don't have the details of how it works.
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if it does not do what you want take the damned source and add what is missing and everyone will benefit. If you do not have the expertise then pay the developers or someone to do it for you.
Yeah because software evolves that quickly and easily...
Actually these days with vibe coding it may, but then you end up with something which was vibe coded and YMMV.
Unprepared pilot project (Score:5, Interesting)
Presumably they just pushed Collabora to employees telling them "it's just like Word, don't worry" and gave them no training whatsoever.
Because in all the areas of complaints (issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes), Libreoffice, on which Collabora is built upon, is actually superior and more stable than Word. If you know how to do it or get teached how to do it.
Heck, I wrote, edited and formatted a whole *book* with LibreOffice, with proper styling, paragraphs, page jumps and blanks, and change revision... And that was 10 years ago! Although Scribus would have been the best tool for the job, I was extremely pleasantly surprised with the result. No way I'd ever manage to do this with Word...
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Wordperfect is out there with a long history of being a viable alternative.
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Presumably they just pushed Collabora to employees telling them "it's just like Word, don't worry" and gave them no training whatsoever.
Because in all the areas of complaints (issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes), Libreoffice, on which Collabora is built upon, is actually superior and more stable than Word. If you know how to do it or get teached how to do it.
Heck, I wrote, edited and formatted a whole *book* with LibreOffice, with proper styling, paragraphs, page jumps and blanks, and change revision... And that was 10 years ago! Although Scribus would have been the best tool for the job, I was extremely pleasantly surprised with the result. No way I'd ever manage to do this with Word...
I agree, Libre Office is a superior product. And it has gotten even better over the years. It is my daily driver, and I have O365 and Mac Numbers.
Also, if you don't run a pilot project correctly, you are going to get sketchy results. Libre world isn't all that different than O365, but yeah, you need some training. The open and save options are much greater - some might get confused. But the differences aren't even too difficult to overcome.
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You have to just force people to use shit software for a while. Microsoft did the same thing. Anyone who remembers how bad word was compared to word perfect should remember being forced to use crap software for no good reason.
The problem is that again our economy is perpetually collapsing because we are fighting among ourselves to see who can ma
Re: Unprepared pilot project (Score:2)
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is actually superior and more stable than Word. If you know how to do it or get teached how to do it.
Define superior. Many people would define superior as "able to produce results quickly without requiring extensive training". But in any case your guess is wrong
Presumably they just pushed Collabora to employees telling them "it's just like Word, don't worry" and gave them no training whatsoever.
They did include training the employees, the problem was incompatibility with existing templates and documents and interactions with other departments which didn't. This is always an issue in a larger corporation, and even some small ones. That you and I can easily switch between office suites is a given, we don't have thousands of documents and tem
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People are trained for Office.
What people? I'm trained for LaTeX and markdown. Pandoc for conversions. Who are these people who only use software that can't track a heading number reliably?
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Don't be obtuse, companies provide training for office applications through contracted training portals. I've "attended" video trainings on Excel and Word. If they changed to LO tomorrow I'd be fine, but I'd still have to figure out how to do those things again. And some users would not be fine.
Mods hate facts (Score:2)
The algorithm for handing out mod points is broken by design
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People are trained for Office.
What people? I'm trained for LaTeX and markdown. Pandoc for conversions. Who are these people who only use software that can't track a heading number reliably?
Microsoft shills.
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People are trained for Office. This is like the "typewriter course" from the 70s. It even shows up in job requirements. No company will invest in training for a new text-typing tool. Either the tool is exactly like office (not superior, not stabler) or it won't stick.
So it looks like in 3026, everyone will still be using O365, because, well - that's what they have to use.
What happened to EU independence? (Score:2)
I continue to hear about how the EU is dropping MS to become software independent from the US, but then stories like these pop up shortly thereafter. So what is the deal?
Re:What happened to EU independence? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like literally any other thing on the Internet - as soon as someone presents position "A" on a subject, other forces claim it's "B", "C" or "D".
The EU is absolutely moving away from US companies. This is a story about a department in a government of one of the countries that's in the EU - so not the same entity, and not controlled by it. They tried, quite feebly, to move off Office and have now moved back. The EU is entirely unaffected, being an administration of the bloc, not of any particular country.
This is about the same as someone saying "AI is the greatest thing in the world ever", followed by a story about how "datacenters are destroying neighbourhoods". They're related, but one doesn't really affect the other.
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They keep wanting instant gratification. The conversion will have hiccups, but one has to work at solving those over time. Partner with other EU nations to code fixes (or brake-o's, as sometimes one has to mirror MS bugs to make documents compatible.)
Users hate software changes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Users hate software changes (Score:5, Insightful)
While not liking change is true, it's not the only thing at play here. As well as change aversion, these users will also continuously run up against problems with format issues, absence of features, and incredulous peers saying things like 'what do you mean you don't have Teams, encrypted email, AI integration, offline copies...
Microsoft Office is not just a desktop suite anymore. It is now an integrated component of a much larger and much more capable cloud service, M365. And before anyone responds with 'you can make OSS do this or that', think about and acknowledge the fact that after great difficulty implementing it, you will then have a system that 90% of the World doesn't have access to or compatibility with. Even Google WorkSpace, matching M365 feature for feature, can't seem to overcome the critical mass and network effect that M365 has established.
There's far more to this than just hating change.
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Even Google WorkSpace, matching M365 feature for feature, can't seem to overcome the critical mass and network effect that M365 has established.
No, Google Workspace doesn't match M365 feature for feature. Today's example: I was working on some web site boilerplate updates and wanted to copy some text from the web page into Google Docs so I could provide commentary on the changes needed. Drag-select, context menu, "Copy" then switch over to the Docs tab and right-click to select "Paste plain text". What did Docs do? Told me I needed a friggin Chrome plugin to do that! Or use the keyboard shortcuts.
And people wonder why long-time Office users shudder
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You're right. It was a poor choice of words. I should have said trying to match M265 feature for feature. They are lacking in feature parity.
Though your description sounds more like a bug than a missing feature. It's still a laughable deficiency.
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you will then have a system that 90% of the World doesn't have access to or compatibility with
I think most people here don't understand this kind of thing because they don't work at a major multinational that integrates with vendors. At my work my EntraID is federated between multiple vendors and contractors. My Teams doesn't just work with employees in my company, with a click of a button I'm using the Sharepoint, Teams, and Office365 systems of vendors, contractors, engineering partners, even customers. I share this space with competitors, auditors, government agencies, notified bodies.
And then th
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To that one user: "Tough shit. You're getting and using the updated software or you can find yourself a new job." Assuming you have that power, of course.
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To that one user: "Tough shit. You're getting and using the updated software or you can find yourself a new job." Assuming you have that power, of course.
User: The annual report is nit ready because IT forced a software update and it broke the report generation. I tried to warn them but they did it anyway...
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That sounds like an incompetent employee to me and also not at all similar to a user who simply "does not want the new version".
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You're not wrong, there is an aversion to change.
The reality too is that using "the one they're familiar with" is what gets work done.
Nobody wants to climb another fucking learning curve unless it ACTUALLY benefits them (and even then, there's a cost-benefit calculation to the time-to-payoff).
Microsoft - and more and more SAAS bullshit companies - keeps just *changing* shit for no reason (cf the 'start button in the middle of the bar' in Win11). MAYBE they add some teensy feature but imo 95%+ users could b
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if Corel just built a bulletproof basic-featured 1990 version of Wordperfect and sold it AS IS in totality today,
Are you kidding me? They never stopped selling it. [wordperfect.com] And, it works better than ever! And it's much cheaper. And it's perpetually licensed rather than subscription. And it handles MS Office formats pretty well, though not perfect. But people do want the features you negated and there would be a learning curve for those who came up on MS Office.
What is the difference? (Score:2)
So... just like Microsoft Word.
Wasn't replacement the point? (Score:2)
Obtain some venture capital (Score:2)
Why Collabera, and not OpenOffice? (Score:2)
I was using OpenOffice, then went to LibreOffice when it forked.
I've *never* had a problem with a) sending a resume, b) writing reports, and c) now that I'm a writer, sending queries, mss, and dealing with copy-edited changes. No complaints from whoever I was sending them to, who are, presumably, using M$ Office.
Denmark Microsoft expenditure DKK 4.1 billion (Score:3)
Atea Denmark wins large public sector frame agreement within software [cision.com]
“Atea is the sole supplier under the frame agreement. 103 municipal governments and related organizations in Denmark are obliged to procure software and related services under the frame agreement. The term of the agreement is 3 years. The expected value of the frame agreement is DKK 4.1 billion.”
Migration (Score:2)
A company an acquaintance works is trying to migrate to Google Workspace from the Microsoft ecosystem. They have thousands of design documents that require a very specific formatting as they are sent to dozens of different suppliers and contract houses. The import completely blew up the formatting of the documents. Googles response was to use Gemini to fix the formatting. When that didn't work, they recommended just re
LyX – The Document Processor (Score:3)
“LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).
LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface. This results in world-class support for creation of mathematical content (via a fully integrated equation editor) and structured documents like academic articles, theses, and books. In addition, staples of scientific authoring such as reference list and index creation come standard. But you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. A broad array of ready, well-designed document layouts are built in.
LyX is for people who want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, “finger painting” font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output — or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced — looks like nothing else.
LyX is released under a Free Software/Open Source license, runs on Linux/Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X, and is available in several languages.”
Been there, done that (Score:3)
Some decades ago, I worked on an automated testing and manufacturing system. All of the engineering source was produced in plain old ASCII. It worked well, until the Microsoft consultants started showing up* and rewriting our requirements documents. In the end, they had convinced management to use Excel for the generation of what was essentially source code. Talk about the wrong tool.
*This was when I asked my boss how they even got in the front door. Seeing as how we had armed guards for the facility.
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You didn't tell us if it worked or not. Someone paid Microsoft to come, Microsoft used the product they had. Did it work? Remember Excel has a full programming language built into it, technically 2 languages now thanks to the addition of python.
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Did it work?
No. They spent some millions of dollars to re-release all the engineering. And then discovered that VB and other stuff wasn't up to the job of doing natural language processing and generating source. They re-re-released the engineering documents and hired a warehouse full of coders to translate English requirements into C source.
Euro-Office? (Score:2)
I only learned about it yesterday from a NextCloud blog but it seems like Euro-Office is another rising contender, designed pretty much with the intention of escaping dependency on American products. (Seriously, FDJT.) I guess they've taken care to wrench it from Russia's influence, as well. (Seriously, FVP.)
Reminds me of those UBI experiments (Score:2)
the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees
They started with a claim that "everyone" in the Danish government would move away from Microsoft Office.
The actual test involved 38 employees, for just a few months.
The pilot flopped.
Oops, maybe they should have done the 38-employee pilot quietly, before announcing it to the world.
Likewise, the UBI "pilot" programs generally involve a handful of people who are carefully selected. A few do benefit, but in the end, all of these pilot programs end up being canceled or otherwise ended.
Sovereignty vs. Briefcases of Cash (Score:2)
The right way to do this is to hire a group of developers and have test volunteers report workflow problems - then FIX them - then iterate. That's the point of choosing an open source solution.
Eventually there would be no problems remaining.
But so many possible scenarios exist that it's impossible to guess what happened here.
PS _NSA_KEY
Motivation applied to wrong subject (Score:2)
Re:It's funny (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, management would have to understand the alternatives, none of which are they familiar. MS-Crapware is ubiquitous on their desktops, hence they have developed a sense they understand it. Their accounting depts agree, they can put a precise value on the stuff, it isn't out of the ordinary expensive, they happy. Plus, there are all those Excel spreadsheets with all their home-grown macros doing fuck-all, and it is worse if the fellows who wrote that crap have left the company; they are not around to explain how it works. So the accountants speak unto the management and explain in horrifying detail all the hobgobblins lurking in their minds over what would happen if they were to chuck the MS-Crapware. Management doesn't know any better. The accountants speak their language, the technical folks do not. Accounting wins, they always do.
Re:It's funny (Score:5, Interesting)
More to the point, management would have to understand the alternatives, none of which are they familiar. MS-Crapware is ubiquitous on their desktops, hence they have developed a sense they understand it. Their accounting depts agree, they can put a precise value on the stuff, it isn't out of the ordinary expensive, they happy. Plus, there are all those Excel spreadsheets with all their home-grown macros doing fuck-all, and it is worse if the fellows who wrote that crap have left the company; they are not around to explain how it works.
The inertia, the "tools I use" outlook brought up a memory. This all happened within a couple weeks. A guy on the non-technical, more marketing arena at work needed to make an instruction manual for the projects sponsor. So he used PowerPoint to attempt the manual instead of Word. It all fell apart on trying to index and other issues. Problem was, he used the entire budget for his mess. He brought it to my department and tried to get us to start all over without charging for it, which we couldn't do. Had to get special permission and an emergency charge number from accounting. Then there was the young lady from accounting. Fresh graduate, she needed to put together a presentation. So of course, she used Excel. And likewise faceplanted. She was also a bit of a handful. Came in all afire, ready to bite my head off, eventually crying and hyperventilating. Fortunately I knew her reputation already. With a barrage of screenshotting and redoing the things Excel doesn't do, I got her a reasonably nice PowerPoint, had her go over it. Even taught her some breathing exercises. She ended up doing okay on her big presentation, came back apologizing for yelling at me.
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A presentation in Excel? That's incredible. "Computer skills" are somewhat of an unwritten requirement when hiring these days, maybe we need to make it more explicit after all?
I suppose there's a good use for AI right there though: "convert my excel spreadsheet into a powerpoint presentation" ;-)
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My father in law used to do design work in Excel. No kidding. He claimed Publisher et al didn't give him the precision he wanted, or something like that. It was amazing what he could put together in Excel.
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Yes "Spreadsheet" might go down as one of our best inventions, it's a go to for a lot of things, and very flexible. I work in mechanical simulation, spend a lot of money on making pretty UI's for users to copy the results into Excel. Changing my plan now, if you cant beat 'em, join them.
Re:It's funny (Score:5, Funny)
Yes "Spreadsheet" might go down as one of our best inventions, it's a go to for a lot of things, and very flexible. I work in mechanical simulation, spend a lot of money on making pretty UI's for users to copy the results into Excel. Changing my plan now, if you cant beat 'em, join them.
I use spreadsheets all the time, yes they are wonderful tools. Only downside is friends teasing me, some claiming I use a spreadsheet to plan intimacy. Of course not - that's my wife's job.
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Yup. Taken me a while, 55 years to figure out foreplay is taking out the bins and making the bed.. and cooking.
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Yup. Taken me a while, 55 years to figure out foreplay is taking out the bins and making the bed.. and cooking.
The only proven aphrodisiac is a man doing household chores.
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My father in law used to do design work in Excel. No kidding. He claimed Publisher et al didn't give him the precision he wanted, or something like that. It was amazing what he could put together in Excel.
I do antenna designs in spreadsheets. First the basic calculations, then the adjustment calculations for final SWR accommodations. I might try plotting out frequency sweeps some day if I get bored.
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Back in the 1-2-3 days of the late 80s/early 90s there was a tiny segment of the DOS software market that made "spreadsheet compilers". That's right. The software would take your macro-laden spreadsheet, wrap a custom spreadsheet handler around it and turn it into an EXE with optional overlay files.
You could do some amazing stuff with them. I know of one engineer that built a whole cooling tower design tool, with textual graphics, that was "compiled" and distributed this way. Several others compiled reporti
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A presentation in Excel? That's incredible. "Computer skills" are somewhat of an unwritten requirement when hiring these days, maybe we need to make it more explicit after all?
You use the tools you know to get the job done. That's a real computer skill. Sidenote: Powerpoint is a better image drafting tool than word or Excel,
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A presentation in Excel? That's incredible. "Computer skills" are somewhat of an unwritten requirement when hiring these days, maybe we need to make it more explicit after all?
You use the tools you know to get the job done. That's a real computer skill. Sidenote: Powerpoint is a better image drafting tool than word or Excel,
You're correct, butThat's a pretty low bar. We used to get a lot of posters in PowerPoint form. You can make a decent poster from PP, but it would fall apart between the person originating the poster and our office that had a large format inkjet, where it was printed Seems the file kept track of the printer used while creating it. That wreaked havoc. If the aspect ratio was different, between the two, it would summarily stretch or squeeze. Plus some people liked using the obscure fonts coming from those ch
Re: It's funny (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve never encountered an Excel presentation.
Iâ(TM)m very familiar with "Excel databases" though.
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Whoa, I was expecting you to be a jerk to her. You have really impressive people skills to meet her half way and give her guidance on the way forward. I'm glad she apologised, was clearly in over her head though that doesn't excuse her behaviour towards you at first.
One of my skills is working well with difficult people - or highly stressed people. It slowly incorporated itself into my whole workflow. In the job I retired from, it was mostly difficult people, a few stressed like her.. My present work is often dealing with stressed out people.
In this case, the poor young woman was about ready to piss herself. She was about ready to truly freak. Just about to the point where she was ready to stop taking input. So I got her calmed down to the point of at least just cry
Re:It's funny (Score:4, Insightful)
By the same token, management clearly either didn't understand or was unwilling to sign off on a meaningful replacement program. For that you don't just install and pray, you study what each department's users are actually doing on a daily basis and then you test the new software to determine a) whether it can actually do those things or not and b) how they are done if so. Part of that for example is to check all the templates being used to see if they will work, which they clearly didn't do here.
Office is literally designed to be hard to emulate, the so-called "standards" are bad jokes which aren't actually standards because you can't actually follow them and get an proper result. They're malicious. Not taking this into account when attempting migration is incompetent.
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Excel isn't done until the macros won't run (on anything else).
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And, perhaps, you begin the effort by 0) migrating the documents, all of them, even archival docs, to earlier and earlier versions - reducing dependency on features perhaps not supported in your POA platform, and 1) testing against the POA and refining.
Drop-in replacements for Office do not exist. Nothing out there. So downgrade and find a POD that can be supported.\
Seems pretty basic, just costs in the preparation.
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Everyone complains about M$ making changes to M$ Office every few years but they swallow it in short order and the complaints vanish almost as quickly as they started.
Why is that? The only answer I know is because management, from the top down, say there is no choice. You're marked if you say anything openly at all.
Stockholm syndrome, inertia, perhaps a bit of baksheesh? Or maybe a bad choice?
I don't know much about Collabra, a quick search shows it is an online app. That for me is a quick, hard, no thanks.
Re:It's funny (Score:4, Interesting)
Collabra is a full office collaboration suite based on several open source projects including LibreOffice. LibreOffice and Collabra have had an... interesting relationship, despite the latter making probably the largest amount of contributions to it in recent decades.
It's not obscure, it's just you probably don't know the primary output of Collabra's work when you use it.
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a quick search shows it is an online app.
Then don't do a quick search. Do a proper search. That way you can have an informed opinion.
That for me is a quick, hard, no thanks.
So is Office 365. They are literally the most comparable products including having an online platform, a cloud based back end, and desktop clients which run locally. I sincerely hope you never are involved in making procurement decisions.
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a quick search shows it is an online app.
Then don't do a quick search. Do a proper search. That way you can have an informed opinion.
Thanks for the suggestion. Good to know.
I searched, got what I needed to know, and stopped. Why? because I have other things to do beside an in-depth, experience based opinion of the workings of Collabra. I saw enough to make my opinion.
If that's not enough for you, well - sorry, not sorry.
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There are always people who gripe when things change. The only gripe that actually matters is, "this doesn't do what we need it to". Issues with change tracking are likely to fall under that, and for a government, formatting may as well. What page something is on may be defined by law.
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Everyone complains about M$ making changes to M$ Office every few years but they swallow it in short order and the complaints vanish almost as quickly as they started.
I went from Word 5 to Office 2000, the ribbon and costs made me switch. I left Office, then Windows 10 and 11 made me leave everything Microsoft. I had years of experience doing various flavors of Unix admin before I saw the way out.
Most of the time change is too much trouble. In this case they weren't committed to change, just the appearance of it. I would give Caroline the worthless cunt award for not being diligent about risks and efforts required. How many times has this happened in the past, she
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Standards, maybe, but features? I'm unaware of any features missing from LibreOffice of note, and LibreOffice has a better UI and discoverability as it supports CUA standards, something Microsoft's Office suites haven't done since the mid-2000s.
Re: Never will (Score:2)
LO Calc lacks live pivot tables. It can't be exaggerated how major that is. For every other app, I agree.
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Seems impressive, but it doesn't do Excel macros.
Re: Never will (Score:2)
I'm not going to an AI-coded anything until it's had a few years to get analyzed and the faults addressed. Yes, I treat other software the same way, it just tends to have a longer history by default.
I don't get why LO doesn't have live pivot. It's got pivot tables, you just have to generate them for every change. It seems like this should be relatively easy to address?
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I'm sure that someone is running an AI agent on Office right now. Word and Excel are the real enemies of switching.
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I'm sure a lot of someones are doing that. But what will they do with the result? Since it's derived from the original, it's a derivative work...
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My suspicion is that all of those comments relate to importing Word documents and templates into LibreOffice. Without LibreOffice full-on ditching their internal DOM and using Microsoft's, formatting changes are inevitable.
The question to me is why they see that as a reason to not replace Word. The obvious solution is import the fucking templates and fix them, a one off task.
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I think most of us aren't autistic enough to think that when someone mentions a country in the context of using an office suite that they are talking about the dirt, lakes, and the entire population.
Save yourself the trouble next time, if anyone mentions a "country" does something, they are almost always talking about that country's current ruling government.
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or Nash Equilibrium. If EU wants to get away from MS and GOP's flakey tribalism, they have to agree to all (or most) moving at once, and accept a learning curve.
I'd go with Nash Equilibrium here. DVORK is not inherently better than QWERTY for typing speed, although it is less prone to causing RSI. The big downside is the learning curve and making shortcuts like Ctrl-V harder to press.
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The only way the US can modernize the FAA is to hire a high tech taskforce, protect their jobs from administra