UK Government May Switch from MS Office to Open Source

New submitter Karashur sends this report from The Guardian: "Ministers are looking at saving tens of millions of pounds a year by abandoning expensive software produced by firms such as Microsoft. Some £200m has been spent by the public sector on the computer giant's Office suite alone since 2010. The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude believes a significant proportion of that outlay could be cut by switching to free 'open-source' software, such as OpenOffice, or Google Docs. 'I want to see a greater range of software used, so civil servants have access to the information they need and can get their work done without having to buy a particular brand of software. In the first instance, this will help departments to do something as simple as share documents with each other more easily. But it will also make it easier for the public to use and share government information.'"

Comments

Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely privacy issues prevent the use of GoogleDocs? Libreoffice on the other hand could save them a lot of money.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Jean Taureau]

No, firewalls and application layer filters would be needed to prevent the use of GoogleDocs, privacy issues won't even get a look-in at the level they're considering especialy as the user'll do what ever works easiest for them regardless. I've seen how UK Local Government works up close.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to discredit the hard work and dedication of the LibreOffice developers, but I don't think it's a suitable solution to save money. It's great for one who uses open-source software as a matter of philosophy or principle but it has too many usability issues and bugs to be a reliable solution for getting actual work done.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you're in luck because this is most like a negotiation ploy to bring down licensing costs.

Re:Privacy Issues

[The MAZZTer]

AFAIK Google Apps for Enterprises allows you to run Docs on your own server. Of course it costs money. That's the tradeoff of course.

Re:Privacy Issues

[rmdingler]

Plausible.

If so, is Microsoft now calculating the loss of revenue in the UK versus having to discount more and more nations if they cave to the Brits?

Re:Privacy Issues

[Immerman]

Really? I find it at least as stable and easy to use as MS Office. The only issues it ever seems to throw in my face are the occasional formatting hullabaloo on trying to open one of MS Office's engineered-incompatible files. And that's not really relevant to a government that can simply say "you want to do business with us, you use the industry-standard odf format".

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of it works great. The only issues I've seen is interoperability with the M$ proprietary formats and the M$ garbage odt output. The conversion from Access to Base is what will really prevent widespread adoption.

Re:Privacy Issues

[CastrTroy]

Very much agree with this. Not because of productivity concerns but mostly because the price of office software is just such a small amount of money. They probably pay at maximum $500 per license. And they probably upgrade at maximum once every 2 years. So that's $250 per year, per employee. Switching to OpenOffice would probably cost them more in training then they would save in 20 years of licensing fees. Assuming 1 week off to learn the new software, just the lost time alone would probably be worth a couple thousand dollars, add in the price you pay to the training organization, and you are probably close to $5000. And even after the week long training it will take them months to get up to speed and be as productive as they originally were.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Nutria]

Switching to OpenOffice would probably cost them more in training then they would save in 20 years of licensing fees.

As opposed to the relearning time wasted when I was forced to upgrade from MSO 2007 to 2010?

Thus, I say that "oh, the retraining costs" is a red herring.

Re:Privacy Issues

[draxbear]

If they don't like it chuck 1% of the 200m pound previous spend to a summer of coding style competition...

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Plausible.

Not really. PP is a FUD-spreader.

Besides, have you used MS Office recently? It's horrible, and most workers who have to use it are confused and annoyed at the way it (semi)works. Libre Office is like a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Even in the MS-dominated company I'm consulting to, a significant proportion of workers now keep a copy of Portable Libre Office on a memory stick or external drive to get real work done. The change away from MS is gathering momentum, Munich is a good example for organisations looking at switching to open formats and software. .

Re:Privacy Issues

[icebike]

But we are talking government document here. Papers and memos etc.
The vast majority of Office document processing never encounters anything more complex than a table embeded in a text document, and most of it is less complex than that.

OO/LO can easily handle that load. And Once written with either of these free package, conversion to the other works perfectly.

Getting from Word to OO/LO is occasionally problematic for complex documents. But in my experience, about 95% of the DOCX/DOC files I get convert perfectly. And I have a much better rate going the other way (oo/ol to Word).

Databases are a minuscule portion of the typical government work load, and even with Microsoft products, they are so unreliable and fragile that as soon as the developer walks out the door your Access + Word + Excel project becomes maintainable.

Re:Privacy Issues

[icebike]

Switching to OpenOffice would probably cost them more in training then they would save in 20 years of licensing fees.

As opposed to the relearning time wasted when I was forced to upgrade from MSO 2007 to 2010?

Thus, I say that "oh, the retraining costs" is a red herring.

Agreed. The retraining nonsense is pure MS hype.
Switching to either is pretty simple, something that most people do with very little retraining. (Often none). You open the document from Word, or Excel and it just works the VAST majority of the time. The typical government office has little that is that complex. True you can find some horribly complex stuff occasionally, but most is simple letters and reports.

Re:Privacy Issues

[FirephoxRising]

I'll second this, the new office is buggy and I find it a pain to use.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Darinbob]

I find it odd that "GoogleDocs" was described as open source as well. And it's usability is very rudimentary and I wouldn't classify it as out of the experimental stage yet, whereas LibreOffice is stable and usable (or at least no worse than MS Office on a Mac).

Re:Privacy Issues

[femtobyte]

The fact that you spelled it "Laytex" (hint: there is no "y") shows that you likely have near zero experience with actually using Free alternatives. How about giving stuff a try, instead of speaking out of obvious ignorance? Also, if you last used "that shit" a decade ago, the code has improved.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Nerdfest]

For cost savings and flexibility, getting rid of office for a more open alternative is the first step towards being able to use non-Microsoft platforms for desktops as well. Once you're not tied to them you can start looking at Linux, OSX, Android, etc. The lock-in is gone. If Microsoft is paying attention, this should scare the crap out of them.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

This exactly! The code had improved 100 fold over M$ office in the same time frame. It will continue to do so because the developers working on it believe in the end product not how much money they made on it this year. It also tends to not require retraining every 2 years because the developers just wanted to rearrange the interface (think ribbon). We just moved our users from M$ Office 2003 to M$ Office 2010. As a local government we also don't get training (other than what we teach ourselves in our spare time). This makes support time/costs immense every time M$ breaks the GUI.

If you haven't tried it in a few years maybe you should give it a shot.

Re:Privacy Issues

[s.petry]

But pressing "CTRL+B" to make bold text is harder in LO/OO than in Microsoft, really! [/snark]

Re:Privacy Issues

[davester666]

This is just a way for the UK gov't to get some additional "concessions" from Microsoft...

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a way for the UK gov't to get some additional "concessions" from Microsoft...

No it is not.

Real people are sick of MS in general and MS Office in particular. They're sick of lockin. They're sick of manipulative licensing schemes. They're sick being overcharged for being outside the USA. They're sick of engineered incompatibility. They're sick of upgrade treadmills. They're sick of pointless UI changes and they're sick of all the FUD and deception it takes to keep it all the way it is.

The world is now trying to route around the damage that is Microsoft and its shoddy products and practices. They'll make the change happen sooner rather than later.

Re:Privacy Issues

[pablo_max]

While I agree with you that OO/LO can handle much of what word is used for, I completely disagree that these are a suitable replacement for excel.
I have tried LO/OO on both mine and my wife's laptops as we both tend to do a lot of work while at home and do not wish to always bring our computers home.
For someone who is a "power user" of excel, these two programs are simply not sufficient.
The general performance issues aside, the functionality you get with excel 2013 just cannot be matched right now by OS software. I wish it could because it would have saved my 300 bucks.
After a week of use, my wife said she would continue to just bring her work laptop home until I bought "real" office.

Re:Privacy Issues

[davester666]

"Real People" are not the ones who decide if MS is used in gov't offices or not.

There are less than 50 people involved in deciding this [as, presenting suggestions for how to move forward with the UK's IT infrastructure, and it will come down to 1 person who goes yes or no.

The Real People who are sick of MS products are little people, and how they think or feel about it will have NO bearing on how "the decider" decides.

Hell, it's more important that they can exchange files with US "law enforcement" than it is for the little people to be happy.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Bert64]

MSOffice also has huge usability issues and bugs, the only difference is that the kludgy workarounds required are more well known.

Re:Privacy Issues

[crutchy]

how they think or feel about it will have NO bearing on how "the decider" decides

nobody may have ever been fired for choosing microsoft, but money talks and bullshit walks

also, when dealing with anything government-related, if budget cuts are required, the union will make the decision

Re:Privacy Issues

[crutchy]

I don't think it's a suitable solution to save money

if you're happy to pay good money for microsoft office when there is a free alternative available, i think your concept of saving money is a bit flawed

too many usability issues

ribbons?

reliable solution for getting actual work done

it's plenty reliable if you are willing to try it... gladly the UK government seems willing to... good for them (and UK taxpayers)

Re:Privacy Issues

[Xest]

Are you confusing versions? The retraining cost between 2007 and 2010 should be roughly about zero. The retraining cost between 2003 and 2007 was much larger but it's expenditure that's already been done so is irrelevant going forward unless Microsoft plan another massive UI change as they did when they moved Office to ribbons.

The differences between Office and OpenOffice are far more drastic than between office versions now, and honestly, the problem is only amplified when you throw the level of incompetence seen amongst a non-negligible portion of public sector workers into the mix. I worked in public sector here in the UK once, and saw things like "Why isn't there any left handed computers in this room", where by left handed computers, she meant computers where someone had picked up the mouse and mouse mat and put it on the other side of the keyboard for her. Other gems include "Can you come and fix my printer, it's got an orange light, no paper in it and it's just not printing". Yes, you read that right. It was uncomfortably common to see this level of ineptitude. Work would stop for days for them to have a whinge about the fact their new base unit was bigger than the old one, let alone sticking such a large change as Office to OpenOffice in front of them and god only knows you'll never hear the end of it when they receive a .doc via e-mail and OpenOffice fails to render it properly.

There are a lot of hard working public sector workers, but they're propping up the rest who not only provide literally no benefit, but actively get in the way of everyone else. Until you find a government that's willing to make the argument that those wastes of space would cost society less being on unemployment benefit forever than being paid an actual full time salary on the tax payers coin for doing absolutely nothing, actively causing problems for the ones that actually do do work there then you'll never get the training costs of the move from Office to OpenOffice down to the levels of moving between Office versions, which is already high enough. You wont even get close.

Honestly I agree proprietary software costs are a massive problem, god only knows I've been annoyed at the fact my council spent £3 million upgrading everyone from Office 2007 to Office 2010 whilst cutting useful services crying "Blame the government", "Austerity, it's not our fault!" when the upgrade provided literally not the single slightest bit of benefit to the council tax payers they serve. But I think you're naive to believe government workers are consistently technically competent enough to cope with a move from Office to OpenOffice as well as they are Office to Office.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

how they think or feel about it will have NO bearing on how "the decider" decides.

The "decider" wants to write documents, spreadsheets and presentations on his or her tablet while they're on the plane or in a hotel room, then have them work when they get where they're going. They want to be able to collaborate on documents on the intranet without them being locked for editing because someone forgot to close the file when they were done. They want to be able to merge data from machines, people and storage without having to ask an IT expert to untangle which proprietary application was used to create them.

Most of all, they didn't get to be "deciders" because they were comfortable with somebody grabbing them by the balls and yanking them back every time they took a step forward.

Microsoft has burned to many bridges for anybody to be happy using their products. Time to change.

Re:Privacy Issues

[xelah]

Probably, though I can't help thinking that if they can be sorted out (a private Google Docs server, or equivalent?) there could be some serious advantage through staff being able to just get on with using it without begging for licences/install disks.

I was at an NHS hospital recently, arranging a second appointment. They couldn't give me the appointment because they'd run out of pages in their (paper) appointment book, and the Keeper Of Additional Pages wasn't answering the phone. The appointment book even covered appointments for three hospitals in three different cities/towns - I've no idea how the data moved around, possibly in a consultant's car. They had to sort it out later and post the appointment to me. This is stupid, and I'm sure the people involved know it is and would be perfectly capable of setting up their own ad-hoc system with Google Docs to replace their ad-hoc system with paper. But I suspect it doesn't happen just because the only way anything IT related happens is through someone many levels up with no connection to what's going on rolling out some custom monolithic IT project that costs a fortune.

IMO, simply making it easy for staff to make little improvements by being able to use stuff like Google Docs without begging someone else to be allowed to/to buy licences/to install software could have quite a cumulative effect.

Re:Privacy Issues

[daem0n1x]

I use it quite a lot at home and fits all my office suite needs. I use Microsoft Office at work because my company forces me so. Open of Libre Office would do the same job just fine and the company would save many thousands of euros that they could use to raise our salaries instead.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Common Joe]

I agree. I've used MS Office since the '97 version and I used OpenOffice for a few years until they split to LibreOffice... then I used LibreOffice. I have gone in depth in both the spreadsheets and word processors. Especially the word processors.

My conclusion? Both have bugs. Both have their advantages. I'd rank them about equal, although the current version of Excel does have feature advantages over Calc if you need to make your spreadsheet really pretty. I've had all of them crash on me over the years (although LibreOffice has gotten much better). Word has a particular problem with corrupting and losing data especially with large files. (In contrast, I've successfully loaded 86 MB text files into Writer.) My wife (and very heavy word processor user) has had to rely on LibreOffice several times to load and re-save a file that Word saved and then couldn't read anymore.

At home, I use LibreOffice. I have the capability but only very rarely use Word or Excel.

Re:Privacy Issues

[terryk29]

And I'll second that. Disclaimer: I've used OO->LO for years, and only use MSO when it's someone else's party. So FWIW (and without concrete examples right here right now), I don't find the new UI (ribbon + redesigned dialogs) all that "discoverable", and the editing quirks/bugs seem to be more inexplicable (i.e. conditions of occurrence less apparent).

Re:Privacy Issues

[gbjbaanb]

the current "killer" usability issue is with Outlook - you no longer get to see upcoming appointments if they're not for today. So tomorrow's 9am meeting... you don't see it until you drag yourself into the office at 9:10.

Of course the 'social integration' is another killer as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Privacy Issues

[L4t3r4lu5]

Have you used Excel recently, vs Open/LibreOffice Calc?

Come back when you've "experienced" formulae and macros on the open alternatives, the kind of stuff accountants and traders make their money using. Before you do, though, you might want to invest in a bottle of hair dye. That shit will turn your hair white.

Re:Privacy Issues

[KingMotley]

It's not baseless FUD, the open alternative to Excel are absolutely terrible. You can tell this is nothing more than a PR stunt to help contract negotiations when they list "this will help departments to do something as simple as share documents" as one of the reasons. Switching to a different platform than what the majority of offices use will hinder their ability to share documents, not help.

If you want to make your case, at least stop posting as an Anonymous Coward. Hiding behind AC just shows that you don't believe what you are saying is true, and most people will see right through your BS, and you don't want your name associated with a bunch of lies.

Re:Privacy Issues

[KingMotley]

In contrast, I've opened nearly 1GB (1,000MB) files in Word. 86MB files? I'm glad you could open that readme.doc file.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Common Joe]

Perhaps you did, but you didn't do anything with it. I just opened my 86 MB file (only a text file) in Word 2010 and forced it to scroll to the end of the file. I got the following error message: "You have exceeded the maximum number of pages supported by Microsoft Word or this document may be damaged. Microsoft Word will save the document, but to repair the document, use Open and Repair command (click Open, and then click the arrow next to the Open button)." LibreOffice Writer can scroll to the end of the document. It takes it a very long time, but it can do it without giving up.

I would also highly recommend that you not work on files over 100 pages in Word. Saving them has historically introduced intermittent errors and those errors increase over time. I have seen many, many examples of this over many versions. And it wasn't just me. I was in a help desk like position and I had a lot of complaints about that. (Unfortunately, our customer was a moron so we had to deal with those huge Word files.) My wife has also seen this in her profession as well and she came to the same conclusion: 100 pages. No more.

Re:Privacy Issues

[denobug]

This is just a way for the UK gov't to get some additional "concessions" from Microsoft...

No it is not.

Real people are sick of MS in general and MS Office in particular. They're sick of lockin. They're sick of manipulative licensing schemes. They're sick being overcharged for being outside the USA. They're sick of engineered incompatibility. They're sick of upgrade treadmills. They're sick of pointless UI changes and they're sick of all the FUD and deception it takes to keep it all the way it is.

The world is now trying to route around the damage that is Microsoft and its shoddy products and practices. They'll make the change happen sooner rather than later.

I call bullshit.

Google Doc for business requires a yearly fee, per user as well. Adding additional administrative personnel and all, and assuming local hosting (Assuming UK Government is not stupid enough to trust Google's cloud for government data), the cost might came out awash, pending their negotiation with Microsoft.

And guess what, Microsoft does have one of the most effective productivity package, including Access, OneNote, Projects. Excel Spreadsheet is top of the line with data access and all.

Personally I think Microsoft and Google both have quality products. I would hate to see either one go, although with more advancement from Google's suite that might not be too far off. Then Google will simply be another Microsoft and become a menace to the slashdot crowd

Re:Privacy Issues

[gothzilla]

Talk about FUD...

Office 2010 is the standard for office in enterprise environments. I've tried many times to replace it with Libre and OO and they can't come even close to comparing. Complex spreadsheets will not open in any other program than Excel, and nothing in either of those can replace the functionality of Exchange when it comes to having multiple apps and information sources integrated with it.

Now if you want to say Office 2013 is difficult and confusing then you could have a point, but 2010 is pretty solid. Not perfect, but close enough that everyone can do their jobs without having another product butcher the formatting of Word docs and wreck formulas and macros in Excel. Office tends to go in cycles like Windows does. Win 98 was great, ME terrible, XP great, Vista terrible, Win 7 great. Same as Office 2003 was great, 2007 terrible, 2010 great, 2013 not so great.

Re:Privacy Issues

[iampiti]

Libreoffice 4.2 (currently in beta) seems like it's going to add significant new functionality to the spreadsheet program (at least lots of Excel functions). https://wiki.documentfoundatio...

Re:Privacy Issues

[Immerman]

Pretty weak jab, considering name changes don't cost users anything, while interface changes most certainly do.

In fact I find the "name change" a *splendid* teaching opportunity on the real value of open source, because it wasn't a name change at all:

- Open Office was languishing in its parent company and was donated to ("bought by") another company, who also didn't really do much with it. Who hasn't experienced that with some product at some point? You sigh, accept it as a fact of life, and start looking for an alternative option knowing that you won't find a drop-in replacement.

- In this case though Open Office was open source, and had thus been capable of being forked by a community of volunteers who wanted to keep making improvements as a parallel project as an independent "company" named Libre Office. As Open Office continued to languish, Libre Office began improving rapidly, and much of the volunteer community that had grown up around Open Office began contributing to Libre Office instead. By the time it became clear to most users that they were going to need to find an alternative to Open Office, Libre Office was an obvious choice - it actually *is* a drop in replacement, because it's an upgraded version of the same product, just made by a new "company".

Unlike with proprietary software, so long as there is a community who wants to continue improving an open source product, it *will* survive, regardless of any corporate decisions that might cause one branch to wither away.

Re:Privacy Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Open/Libre Office for years, and never missed MS Word. But you'll pry Excel from my cold dead fingers...

Re:Privacy Issues

[phorm]

Training can actually be easier, *ESPECIALLY* for those were used to the older office versions (pre-ribbon bar).
That stupid thing actually pushed a number of people from the office side of the fence over to OO, as OO was often more like the older non-ribbon MS Office than the newer versions of MS Office were...

Re:Privacy Issues

[emaname]

Pls cite some examples, because I have not experienced any compatibility issues or bugs. Note that I've been using OpenOffice and, in recent years, LibreOffice to edit content and fix formatting in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents. The only time a compatibility issue arises is when someone sends me a docx file. It's inconvenient, but I can get around it.

So, once again, pls cite examples. I am genuinely curious what kind of compatibility issues or bugs you're experiencing. I don't doubt that there are some, but I don't think it's as extensive as your question subtly implies.

BTW, I use software like OpenOffice or LibreOffice not because it's a "matter of philosophy or principle." I use open source software because it's stable, the UI is consistent (not subject to the whims of some UI "expert"), and it's maintained in a more timely and conscientious manner. And the bonus is I'm not locked in by some EULA. I can enjoy the freedom to use the software wherever I want on any platform I want.

I have friends who continue to use MS Office. Whenever there is an upgrade I hear complaints about changes to the interface. The "ribbon" is the most recent example. They wonder why MS did that. It seems more and more MS and Apple introduce changes simply for the sake of change. That way they can advertise something "new" has been added.

Re:Privacy Issues

[FirephoxRising]

My biggest gripe is the new outlook, I have personally seen problems with basic emailing on five machines!

So which is it? tens of millions of pounds" ? Or &

[Anonymous Coward]

Any savings, of course, would be offset by the unproductivity of "tens of millions" of government workers who can't seem to get their open-source office software to "just work the way it always has" over the next 5 years.

Hmm

[J-1000]

For actually doing office work, Microsoft stuff is hard to beat. Maybe it'll turn out great though, who knows.

Re:Hmm

[coolsnowmen]

Doesn't that kind of depend on your work?

Re:Hmm

[GodfatherofSoul]

Open Office is great for the basic 70-80% of what you want to do. But, past that I'd much prefer Office.

Re:Hmm

[ian_billyboy_morris]

I wax always really pro open source I used Linux since the days of Debian potato, libera/open office was the software that convinced me to give up on open source and buy a mac. It's just bloody awful if you have to do anything remotely technical, mail merges suck worse than anything I have ever known. Even with the latest libra office you still have to use a database rather than a spreadsheet, and don't get me started on the running that is base. It makes access 95 seem good

Re:Hmm

[MightyMartian]

Your words ring hollow as I try to figure out why just one of the people in my office is getting a password prompt when using Outlook 2010 to access our Exchange 2010 server. Is it Outlook? Is it Windows 7 cert store on the staff member's workstation? Is it Active Directory? Is it Exchange 2010? Is it God?

Microsoft, making simple things complicated since 1988. Christ, I know people who still insist Wordpad is all they need in a word processor.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. MS Office has no competition as a jack-of-all-trades. Sure, if you're doing a lot of report writing you may want Latex or a lot of data analysis you may want specialist software and so on. But for general purpose usage MS Office is the best available software by a country mile. Using Open Office (or whatever they're calling it these days) is like using MS Office from at least a decade ago.

Re:Hmm

[akozakie]

Depends on what you're doing. Powerpoint beats Impress hands down, sure, even though you can make nice presentations with both. Excel... well, for 90% of spreadsheets Calc is just as good (and don't get me started on the productivity killer called "ribbons"), but for some functions it's no match - Excel is truly the powerhorse of MS Office with no real competition. But Word? It's a PoS buggy half-baked text editor. MS was unable to fix that for the past 10 years. Writer is simply better. It does have its weaknesses, but the strengths are quite convincing. I find it more stable and the decent handling of styles makes me cringe every time I have to use Word.

In 2007 I honestly thought that the only reason MS introduced ribbons was their failure to make Word any better (along with OpenXML, introduced for the same reason). They wanted to retrain their users with something OpenOffice was unllikely to follow (because it's stupid) before Writer got so much better than Word that even average users would want to switch. After a year or two with ribbons Word users would feel sufficiently unfamiliar with Writer to make the retraining not worth the time. Add to that OpenXML quirks and Writer would be stuck in a niche. Seems to have worked. Even though my job requires Linux and I feel much more at home in that environment, I have to keep a Win7 VM with Office 2010 installed just to work with some multi-author DOCXes where small formatting details matter. I can't force others to use ODT and DOC simply does not handle some formatting that ODT and DOCX both do.

So... Presentation: MS. Document: Open. Spreadsheet: depends on your needs. The rest is niche.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to respectfully disagree. I have been using OpenOffice almost exclusively for about ten years now and it has worked beautifully for me. I've only run into one case in the past four or five years where I desired a feature from another suite. That is a pretty good record, in my opinion. Even then it was a case of dealing with a really oddly set up docx file I had received, had the other person been using older .doc files or an open standard I would have been fine with OO.

Re:Hmm

[hairyfeet]

Why did he get modded down? MS Office hasn't sold a ton of copies because folks LIKE giving piles of money to MSFT, its because its one of those tools that works damned good for most small to large businesses.

As someone who sells computers to SMBs I keep trying LibreOffice, each time hoping it gets there so I can save my customers money and each time....sigh. For home users? It is fricking GREAT, does everything your home users would ever think to do, just perfect, but for business? Maybe it'll change with the ODF but under Sun it was obvious that Writer got all the love while their versions of Access, Visio, and Excel were left sucking hind tit. While writer has reached office 2K, maybe 2K3? The rest just doesn't cut the mustard. i'm sure the Excel and Access guys can chime in and list the reasons why it doesn't cut it but at the end of the day if a tool ain't right for a job it ain't right and LO as a suite just isn't anywhere close to MSO.

Re:Hmm

[jafac]

Is it Outlook? Is it Windows 7 cert store on the staff member's workstation? Is it Active Directory? Is it Exchange 2010? Is it God?

Clearly it's the NSA's backdoor.

Re:Hmm

[Alain Williams]

If there are features that open/libre office lack that would cause some parts of the UK government a problem then the obvious solution is for the government to pay someone to implement those features. If some requirements are really hard it might cost a few £million - but then the features are free forever. They have spent £200 million on MS Office in the last 3 years -- that sort of money would pay for a big heap of new features!

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

and when they try to make things simple they usually get it wrong so that yes it is simple but also a goatse sized hole for hackers to abuse

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Excel... well, for 90% of spreadsheets Calc is just as good

Unfortunately, if you need interoperability with Excel and your spreadsheets use non-trivial formulae, using Calc remains a non-starter.

I've seen all the usual Slashdot comments about how modern OpenOffice/LibreOffice versions have near-flawless interoperability with MS Office, and how even Microsoft changes its file formats and breaks compatibility occasionally. IME, the reality is quite different, and you can easily spend more in wasted time just converting one spreadsheet from Calc to Excel than it would have cost to buy Excel in the first place.

Re:Hmm

[Jane Q. Public]

"Not really. MS Office has no competition as a jack-of-all-trades. Sure, if you're doing a lot of report writing you may want Latex or a lot of data analysis you may want specialist software and so on. But for general purpose usage MS Office is the best available software by a country mile. Using Open Office (or whatever they're calling it these days) is like using MS Office from at least a decade ago."

This is simply not true. For one thing, Open Office uses proven icons and menus, as opposed to the almost-universally-despised Ribbon Bar. Secondly, something like 90% of feature requests for Microsoft Office over the last 10 years have been for features it already has.

The point of that last bit is: the vast majority of users don't use anywhere near all the features that the Microsoft programs do, and for people who just need the 80% of most common features, other software works just fine.

I have been using Open Office for 12 years or so now, and I have absolutely zero reason to go back. Negative reason, actually: I like Open Office (or Libre Office) far better than Microsoft Office.

Further, it's cross-platform to an extent that Microsoft can only dream about.

Re:Hmm

[rbrander]

Sounds like you and the post you're replying to might have the answer to a question I've wanted to ask a real spreadsheet power user for some time. I'm a MS detractor in general but have fallen deeply for Excel in the last decade as I learned VBA, creating whole small applications with same, pivot tables, database access via ODBC and OLE - sometimes Excel is my whole work environment, hitting on huge databases, downloading chunks into pivot tables, using spreadsheet calcs to create masses of UPDATE statements that then change the same database.

Does ANY of that work in OOo ? I know it has some kind of database connection, but it seemed pretty lame by comparison; I know it has a macro language of its own, but unlike VBA there aren't six thick books on it and mega-lines of code to steal from the Net - so I'd anticipate a huge drop in capability if I switched.

Re:Hmm

[chipschap]

I respect everyone's choices and if you say you need MS Office then go ahead and use it. You use what you find best, I'll use what I find best.

However here's my question. First let's compare current MS Office and a version from, say, 10 years ago. What is getting done better that matters with the newest version? Has productivity increased? Are presentations and documents slicker? Does that mean they communicate their information better? Are spreadsheet models a lot better (maybe they are, I don't know)? Or are they just more complex and maybe buggier?

Now do the same comparison between the latest MS Office and the latest LibreOffice.

There was this guy I used to work with who was considered the organization's PowerPoint guru. He did all sorts of amazing tricks, effects, and whatnot. I will be the first to say there is no way those tricks, effects, and whatnot could have been done with Impress. His presentations wowed his viewers just about 100% of the time.

So, was he getting his message across better?

What actually happened is that the viewers were so busy watching all the pyrotechnics that his message often got lost.

So think about the true value of all the "extras" in MS Office. Certainly there are edge cases where they present value, but is that true for 90% of users 90% percent of the time?

Re:Hmm

[Immerman]

> Using Open Office (or whatever they're calling it these days) is like using MS Office from at least a decade ago.

You mean from back when MS Office was a relatively straightforward office suite that focused on doing the 95% of things most people wanted without making them jump through hoops? I agree.

Re:Hmm

[techno-vampire]

After a year or two with ribbons Word users would feel sufficiently unfamiliar with Writer to make the retraining not worth the time.

If you have an office full of people who used MS Word before ribbons were introduced, they should already know how OO Writer works. Retraining shouldn't take more than telling them, "You know how Word used to work? Well, that's how Writer works; just go back to doing things the way you used to." Your trainers won't like it, because that takes money away from them, but really, that's all that the average user needs to know.

Re:Hmm

[Immerman]

>Is it God?

Clearly not. What would God be doing mucking around on a Windows network? His competition on the other hand...

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I've never tried integrating Calc with a serious database, so unfortunately I can't give you the answer you're looking for. Sorry.

However, I can tell you that when you try to save a Calc spreadsheet in an Excel file format, you quickly run into problems with converting the formulae from one spreadsheet's model and built-in functions to the other. I wouldn't hold out much hope that more complicated tasks like the ones you described will be any easier to port, and I would expect a lot of manual tweaking to get everything working properly again even if Calc does have the features you need for any given application and you do somehow manage to get it converted.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

>but then the features are free forever

I wish to move to the world you live in. You know, the one where software never needs bug fixes or maintenance.

Re:Hmm

[rts008]

I have been using Open Office for 12 years or so now, and I have absolutely zero reason to go back.

Same here, but for 16 years.

Another added bonus you did not mention:
There is usually better backwards compatibility opening older MS.doc files with Open Office and Libre Office, than there is with newer versions of MS Office.

I can't count the number of times(and people) that have come to me with .doc files they recieved that they could not open with their version of MS Office, I successfully opened with Open Office. I would then save as '.doc' in OO, they could then open that file with their version of MS Office. They sometimes (on VERY rare occasions) would have to fix some small format issues, but they could easily fix those when they could not even open them before.

IMHO, this kind of stuff is unacceptable for a gov't., and I would love to see a global mandate that required all official doc's to be in an open format. I won't hold my breath waiting, but I can hope and wish! :-)

Re:Hmm

[Jane Q. Public]

Back around 2000 or so, I sent quite a few emails to various departments of my city and county, telling them to STOP publishing public data online in Word docs. Even though *I* could read them just fine, I tried to tell them how unfair and discriminatory that was... a full version of Word cost $200! Many people did not have access to a computer with Word on it.

For a long time my comments seemed to fall on deaf ears. Finally, they started putting documents out in .pdf format... which was still proprietary, but at least pretty much anybody could read them without having to buy expensive software.

Re:Hmm

[Razordude]

Generally the benefits come with improved ease of use and "helper" features, features that you don't think about but appreciate once they appear. For example, in PowerPoint I discovered that thin alignment lines appear when moving around shapes and images, which help when you want make two images perfectly parallel but spaced apart on the slice. Impress (last time I checked) doesn't have this feature, but it's something you miss if you make presentations a lot. You don't NEED it, but it's one of many, many tiny little enhancements that tend to add up towards make it easier and faster to create stuff the way you want, and that effort and time saved is worth money for a LOT of people, for good reason.

Most open source creation software suffers the "death by a thousand cuts" issue. There's no motivation to add these little helper features to curtail the time/effort required to do something because it's seen as pointless fluff. But a lot of people will pay good money to buy software in which said helper features make life easier. Most people's lives are stressful enough - software shouldn't be making it worse.

Re:Hmm

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Microsoft stuff is hard to beat, but the Free Software solutions these days are damn close. And a little more adoption will refine the polish even better.

I've complained before that Open Office Calc (Excel equivalent) cannot print zoom ("Fit to page", etc.) at least on Windows.

The *REAL* problem is that Microsoft has paid sales people to influence and whisper in ears. Open Source? Nope, no paid minders to spread the word and take decision makers to lunch.

Advanced countries *REALLY* should have government spending to open source freedom advocates because this is in the public good. But we aren't there yet.

Re:Hmm

[FuegoFuerte]

If you've been using OOo for 12 years now, how do you really know how it lines up to Microsoft Office?

I had an experience where I switched to OOo somewhere around 2001, and for years I was quite happy with it. Then I got a job where I had Microsoft Office installed on my work computer, and started using many of the more advanced features (especially in Excel).

I went back to my home computer and tried to do the same things in the most recent version of OOo, and failed miserably. At which point I gave up and installed Microsoft Office.

For basic use, OOo is fine. For anyone needing advanced functionality and compatibility with 95% of the business world, Microsoft Office is an absolute must. The others are simply not there.

Re:Hmm

[westlake]

In 2007 I honestly thought that the only reason MS introduced ribbons was their failure to make Word any better.

MS Office is focused on the productivity of the 9 to 5 clerical worker. Full time staff, Office Temp, Senior Volunteer. You can have hundreds and maybe thousands of these guys and gals on your payroll for every one who needs a precision tool like LaTex.

Microsoft markets Office as a component of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. Think Outlook. The FOSS alternatives continue to be framed as the stand-alone office suite of the nineties.

Re:Hmm

[mendax]

I second this opinion. I've been using Open Office in order to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on my Macs. It works very well for what I use it for. It has little quirks which I've been able to figure out but MS Office is no different in that regard; they're just different quirks. And that damned ribbon menu is nowhere to be seen. That is a blessing.

Re:Hmm

[Darinbob]

But MS Office from a decade ago was a nicer version than MS Office you get today.

Re:Hmm

[akozakie]

Agreed, except for Excel. Having to work with spreadsheets prepared by our analysts (who can wrangle a spreadsheet I worked on for hours into something I can hardly recognize that is WAY better within minutes - read "real powerusers"), seeing how easy to use these spreadsheets are and time and again finding out that the features they use just aren't there in Calc... I'd say Excel is actually aimed at the poweruser. For a 9-5 clerk Calc is just as good.

Re:Hmm

[Darinbob]

It's even worse at times. A document written in one version of Office may not be readable in an earlier version of Office! Whereas I can read new PDF files in old version of Reader, minus a few inconsequential features.

Re:Hmm

[akozakie]

I thought I was clear, but I see you still misunderstood. I do not find MS Office best and would love to get rid of it. I use LibreOffice almost exclusively. However, when working on one document in a consortium, sometimes you need to see the document in the exact same way. For final versions that's no problem, PDF does that. While working - sorry, no, you need 100% compatible tools. Nothing is 100% compatible with MS Office, including MS Office (between versions). In fact, Office 2010 will probably soon be too old and incompatible... So I do need MS Office even though it's painfully inadequate at times and as far from intuitive as it gets.

The unmatched bells-and-whistles power of PowerPoint is not what I had in mind when I said it beats Impress. I meant the basic things - text resizing, positioning, etc. It just works better. The advanced tricks? I don't use them anyway since I don't trust the format - it failed me too often. My presentations end up in PDF anyway. It Just works (TM). Yet even so they are much easier to prepare in PP. Impress is just cumbersome.

Seems a bit like you and me are making the same point, and yet you seem to attempt to overthrow mine. Weird.

And BTW: Excel IS getting more powerful, albeit slowly. Almost seems as if it was a separate being from the rest of Office. And - if you check the history... tada.wav! It is.

Re:Hmm

[akozakie]

Near-flawless - yes. Certainly good enough to use as the main office suite. Flawless - no. If you need to swallow whatever some MS users throw at you, you still need MS sometimes.

And yes, often you just can't force Calc to do what Excel does. It still has a long way to go.

Actually, makes me wonder what would happen if MS brought the SaaS model to a successful end, making Office available completely through a browser in a pay-per-use system. I definitely wouldn't buy Office anymore - or a costly subscription. I do have the tools for 99% of my needs. And for that 1%... That's what SaaS is truly for.

Re:Hmm

[femtobyte]

If you're doing fancy database work, then you should just learn a useful full-fledged programming language (like Python). Spreadsheets are simultaneously complex to use and error prone --- if you're doing much more than adding up a couple dozen numbers, you're using the wrong tool. Once you get over the initial learning curve, a few lines in Python can get what you need done far more flexibly and reliably than the baroque constructions necessary to apply spreadsheets for tasks they are poorly suited for.

Re:Hmm

[jd2112]

sometimes Excel is my whole work environment, hitting on huge databases, downloading chunks into pivot tables, using spreadsheet calcs to create masses of UPDATE statements that then change the same database.

All you need to do now is have Excel read email and you would have emacs as if it had been developed by Microsoft!

Re:Hmm

[exomondo]

There's not really any reason you have to choose one over the other, just have both.

Re:Hmm

[Nivag064]

I know that about 8 years ago I was meant to use Microsoft Office at work, but it was too difficult to use as their method of font selection was atrocious - so I used OpenOffice, and no one complained. Though now I use LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org) of course, as it has more features and much more development momentum behind it.

Re:Hmm

[Nivag064]

Note that LibreOffice 4.2 (currently at RC4) has had a lot of work done on Calc & Impress as well as Writer - you might find a lot of your issues may have been resolved.

Re:Hmm

[yuhong]

I think there is the free Word Viewer, and it existed even back in 2000.

Re:Hmm

[sublayer]

Office 97 will read .docx and .xlsx files if you install the converters from http://support.microsoft.com/k... New functionality won't work - eg new functions in Excel 2007 will give #NAME errors in 97, but otherwise it works fine.

Re:Hmm

[s.petry]

I think you should go back and read what they wrote again, because you missed about 90% of what they said. They said for advance features MS may be better but 90% of the users don't need those features.

Another point is that you imply that they can't compare OO to MS because they switched to OO, but somehow you can because you switched to MS. Boggle.

Re:Hmm

[DaveAtFraud]

How well did the database connectivity work with datbases other than MS SQL Server?

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Hmm

[symbolset]

What good is it to be an early adopter of the new version if you can't use it and your power geek skills to make documents the laggards can't read? The whole point of it is to make them admit they are inferior.

Re:Hmm

[peppepz]

even Microsoft changes its file formats and breaks compatibility occasionally.

To make an example, once Microsoft broke a Word (2000 IIRC) VBA application of mine because a service pack, not even a version upgrade, changed the indexing of tables' elements from being zero-based to being one-based. I was shocked to see that they care so little about compatibility.

Re:Hmm

[blackest_k]

I honestly don't find much difficulty with office suites in general, I use what's available on the pc at the time, if it's linux then generally it's libre office if its windows tends to be office 2010.

Office suites are pretty much the same as web browsers, I might prefer one over another but they all get the job done.

I do see a potential problem that when you set people up in a mono culture there tends to be more difficulty in coping with change. Even if you restrict your self to microsoft office it's got so many flavours now that having only ever dealt with one version users will find it harder to adapt to a newer version.

Isn't microsoft finding the new windows 8 a hard sell because it is different from what came before?
It's easier to admin a mono culture , but is that a good thing for users? Personally I think no because it is all subject to change and if anything our past experience should tell us even 5 years is a long time in IT so it is probably a good thing to keep users flexible.

There isn't just a choice between office google docs and open office there is a whole lot more open office/ libre office microsoft office has 97, 2000 2003 2007 2010 2013 then there are a bunch of other office type programs on mobile and tablets. Most of us on this forum will be able to work with any of them because of who we are and our own interests. For people less into IT its a nightmare for them. It would be better for them to learn on a range of different variants then they will quickly adapt to the next version. There was a time when people were demons with wordperfect5.1 but it was soon consigned to the scrap heap (about all i remember is F1 was help , i think) It was a useful skill at the time but a complete sea change when the switch came to office 97. But that probably was the last time things changed so radically.

So it doesn't really matter a deal which office program you use most of the time. As its write once, read a few times. maybe 1000's If your writing a document to be printed or to be a pdf it is irrelevant what word processor it was written with.

     

Re:Hmm

[Nivag064]

I agree with most of what you have written.

I think the key thing for organisations is to have a format (such as the OpenDocument format, otherwise known as ISO 26300 see: http://iso26300.info/ and https://www.oasis-open.org/com...) that is a standard that:

(1) allows documents written now to be read correctly in 30+ years time

(2) anybody can legally implement without have to pay any kind of licence fee, or other form of fee

(3) will allow documents to be read & edited by any software that adheres faithfully to the standard

(4) can represent what people need to do in a document without having to pay a large fee for the privilege and without restricting people to charge a hefty fee should they so desire

So a lot of the value of the OpenDocument format is to the organisation itself, and other organisations it interacts with. In fact it is of value to individuals as well. Also of prime importance, no company can hold peoples documents to ransom by locking them into a proprietary format - like Microsoft attempts to do.

Note that Microsoft is entitled to fully implement the OpenDocument format and to charge whatever it wants for its software, so it cannot validly complain it is being locked out of markets - if it refuses to properly implement the OpenDocument format!

The fact that most people only use a very small subset, and that this subset is within the OpenDocument specification is important, as this means that people should not need extensive training to create and distribute documents that can be used by other people with different software.

LibreOffice is just one of many pieces of software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument) that is committed to the OpenDocument format.

Re:Hmm

[Bert64]

And how about documenting what those features are, so that people can go ahead and start implementing them?

As for compatibility, this story is about government - its not their job to be compatible with business, if you want to do business with the government then you have to be compatible with them.

Re:Hmm

[Bert64]

They try to put a simple frontend on top of extremely complex underpinnings, a recipe for disaster... Unix systems tend to be the other way round.

Re:Hmm

[Bert64]

I suspect that it does, because if people see calc providing a different answer to excel they will assume calc to be incorrect even if its not the one at fault.

Re:Hmm

[Bert64]

I respect everyone's choices and if you say you need MS Office then go ahead and use it. You use what you find best, I'll use what I find best.

I too would like to respect people's choices, however MS clearly do not, as through their use of proprietary file formats or intentionally poor implementation of standard formats they are trying to take the freedom of choice away from others.

Re:Hmm

[Bert64]

They don't bother with small businesses, they bother with large ones... Small businesses tend to just follow what larger ones are doing.

And yes, decision makers in this respect are easily influenced because they generally don't understand technology, so they fall for flashy vendor presentations easily.

Apache and Linux are successful because they compete in more technical markets, where the decision makers are far more likely to understand technology. That's why the more technically competent an organisation is the more likely they are to not be using ms for everything.

Also, MS owe much of their success to "it's almost the same but cheaper"... They were always a cheap and somewhat crappy alternative to OS/2, Mac, Unix and Novell etc.

Re:Hmm

[crutchy]

MS Office has no competition as a jack-of-all-trades

LibreOffice can do pretty much everything MS Office can do and more, with the exception of MS Access... which is only good for little things and becomes an unreliable piece of crap once you start using it over a network or approaching its limitations (like number of jet connections). Governments should have already long since banned using Access for anything anyway as there are much better tools for enterprise database (such as LAMP, with Maria or Postgre instead of MySQL because Oracle sucks frosty piss, and c'mon PHP isn't *that* bad - especially compared to assp or python).

Re:Hmm

[u38cg]

They are not darn close, at least the spreadsheet certainly isn't. I use both, extensively (my day job is driving spreadsheets), and have done quite complex projects in each. However Office, for all its crazy foibles, is much more productive and predictable. No sales whispering here; I've run Linux since 2001 and used OOo for years before I had Office imposed on me at work.

Re:Hmm

[crutchy]

software doesn't get stale because it doesn't degrade over time, and people update software for various reasons

sometimes an update is necessary merely because old versions don't work on operating systems that come preinstalled on new PCs, because unlike software hardware does degrade over time and people eventually need to replace their computer hardware

bugs are annoying, especially when you are at the mercy of a closed source software vendor like microsoft

luckily for libreoffice there's lots of people working on fixing bugs and thanks to the gpl those fixes will always be free... can't beat free

Re:Hmm

[IrquiM]

There is nothing in my day-to-day job that prevents me from using Libre/Open Office, except from corporate policies. Your tasks have to be highly specialised before it's an requirement to use MS Office.

Re:Hmm

[crutchy]

given that this is about saving money they will more likely end up just being an open source leech

with so many people leeching off welfare paid for by taxpayers, what's wrong with government doing a little leeching on behalf of the taxpayer?

besides, who really uses foss for any other reason than because it's free? freedom is great, but most people don't require any more freedom from foss than they would from proprietary (since most are just end users)... what's important is the free as in free beer aspect. corporations fill up entire data centers with servers run on foss because it's cheaper (and more reliable, but mainly cheaper).

do you have an internet router? if so you're likely leeching from the foss community yourself

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

As a contractor who's taken many jobs converting unstable messes of VBA and uncommented delicately tangled cell references into maintainable version tracked implementations in appropriate language choices, I thank you and everyone like you for all the opportunities you have provided me.

Re:Hmm

[Alioth]

PDF isn't proprietary, it's an open published format.

Re:Hmm

[crutchy]

well there is the perpetuality of foss+gpl that is good too, but i still think money talks, and you can't compete with free

They don't think the software is important

most fortune 500 have already invested in linux for data center use... this is gradually filtering down to smaller companies (this one is probably more limited by access to local expertise rather than trust in foss)

They (feel they) are basically forced to use that vendor and don't have a choice in the matter

this is true... the oem landscape has been microsoft-centric, but more oems are offering linux as an alternative, including dell (http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/linux-solutions) and ibm (http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/systems.html). i'm sure consumer oems like toshiba will eventually offer linux (probably vendor distributions like ubuntu or red hat) preinstalled as an option.
there is also the ecosystem problem; once you have significant legacy data in proprietary microsoft formats it can be difficult (and costly) to migrate to open formats; things like access databases for example

if the company goes out of business or stops development we can buy the source for $x

liquidation can be a nasty affair, and just because a contract has such a clause is by no means a guarantee it will be honored. bankruptsy hearings determine how assets are liquidated, and if source code is allocated to a creditor, it's unlikely that any other company will get to see it (the court will simply rule such contractual clauses unenforceable). if you're lucky you might be able to work out a deal with the creditor, assuming you can even find out who they are.

Re:Hmm

[TheRaven64]

Small business users probably have it hardest. But the UK government is spending £200m/year on MS Office. Cut that in half, and now you have a budget of £100m/year to improve LibreOffice. There are a load of small UK companies that would love to take that money. The average salary for a software developer in the UK is £40K/year (less in places where the cost of living is low). Throw in overhead of 100% and that means that it will cost around £80K/year to employ one to work full time on LibreOffice. The UK government could pay companies to employ 125 software developers to add the features they need and fix the bugs that they hit. If they did this, then:

1. They would be spending £100m less of taxpayers' money each year.
2. The money that they spent would be going to people working in the UK and circulating in the local economy, not being sent directly to the USA.
3. There result of the £100m/year spending would be available for public use, making it LibreOffice a more viable alternative for businesses every year.

It seems like an obvious choice to me. The pragmatic business choice isn't 'do we pay Microsoft or try to use a free alternative', it's 'do we get better value for money by paying Microsoft to provide whatever they decide to provide and hoping that it's what we need, or by taking an off-the-shelf open source product and paying for the customisations that we want?'

Re:Hmm

[KingMotley]

You could always view it without having to buy expensive software. Here you go: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...

At least with .doc/.docx you can edit the file if you need to. .PDF files are crap, and don't work well for those that need screen readers. Think of the handicapped!

Re:Hmm

[jopsen]

PDF isn't proprietary... I'm not even sure it ever was (but it might have been). While it only recently became standardized, the specification for if not all then large subsets of the format have been out for years.

For non-writable document exchange PDF is still my preferred format.

Re:Hmm

[J-1000]

I don't know about 10 years ago specifically, and I don't use the entire Office suite, but I really like the current versions of Outlook and Excel. Outlook's view customization is nice, the searching is instantaneous, and the formatting is so quick and works so well that Outlook has become my repository for half-baked ideas and notes. (OneNote is my repository for more permanent notes.) If I need to remember something, or if I need a place to save a screenshot along with some text, I just open a new email, paste and type a bit, then close it. I can search for it instantly later on if and when I need it.

I love Excel's "Format as Table" command for quickly formatting, sorting, and filtering chunks of data that don't take up the entire sheet.

I use these features all the time.

While I can't sit here and do a quantitative analysis about why Office is superior to the open source options, I can say that I really, really like the stuff I'm currently using. I even like the ribbon!

Re:Hmm

[Jane Q. Public]

"PDF isn't proprietary... I'm not even sure it ever was (but it might have been)."

Yes, it is. While the specifications might be published, it belongs to Adobe and they reserve the right to change it any way they want, any time they want. (And they often have.)

Re:Hmm

[Jane Q. Public]

"I think there is the free Word Viewer, and it existed even back in 2000.

Yes, but (A) you had to know it was available (many people did not), and (B) it had to be installed. Very few if any libraries, for example, had the Word reader installed. If you didn't have a computer, and only had access at the local library, you were SOL.

Re:Hmm

[rbrander]

Never used MS databases; we're an Oracle shop. The Oracle driver supplies some extra goodness from OLE, the MS ODBC driver supplies adequate speed and all, though.

I've just started in on PostgreSQL connectivity, and that's fine too.

Please don't misunderstand me, guys, I H8 MS as much as the next FLOSS commie; but MS is my work environment and Excel gets stuff done for me.

Re:Hmm

[blackest_k]

one thing microsoft don't want to be compatible with is pdf i was looking for a pdf print driver today but all seemed to have issues with cost or adware. seems the easiest solution is to use libre office or open office for conversion.

Re:Hmm

[FuegoFuerte]

Sure, as a start, the little box that pops up allowing you to auto-complete parts of formulas in Excel, and lists the valid arguments you can pass to it. That one little feature has undoubtedly saved me hours while working in Excel.

Additionally, the "Format as Table" option is incredibly useful, and wasn't in OOo last I checked.

Admittedly it's been 2-3 years since I gave up trying to do anything remotely fancy in Calc, though I still use it occasionally on my Linux boxes, so these features may have been added. Point is though, they've been in MS Office since at least 2007, and as of a couple years ago still weren't in OOo Calc.

Re:So which is it? tens of millions of pounds" ? O

[Anonymous Coward]

Any savings, of course, would be offset by the unproductivity of "tens of millions" of government workers who can't seem to get their open-source office software to "just work the way it always has" over the next 5 years.

I can't get Microsoft Office to "just work the way it has".

This has happened before

[maroberts]

...and normally appears to be the Government trying to force Microsoft to discount its licensed to the UK Government or invest in the latest boondoggle.

Re:This has happened before

[Immerman]

Agreed. And yet it seems like every year there's a few more government offices in the world that are actually making the switch. Insufficient kickbacks? Actual cost savings? Does it really matter? Ever so slowly MS is losing it's stranglehold on the desktop, and that will be better for everyone. Even MS will be freed from having to constantly "innovate" incompatibilities with everything else in the world and can focus on their core competency of buying innovative products and driving them into the ground.

Re:This has happened before

[sunderland56]

How many copies does the government buy per year? And how many do they really need?

£200 million over 4 years, at the single-unit MSRP of £199, is about 250,000 new copies per year. If we factor in a reasonable discount, say 50%, that is 500,000 copies. According to the government, total headcount is about 450,000. Does every single government employee need a brand new copy of Office every single year??

Re:This has happened before

[pacman on prozac]

That's exactly what it'll be this time too.

There is little chance that UK govt would get rid of all the grey IT VB/Office hacks they have running business critical services. The larger, better funded organisations have been trying to centralise and standardise their IT for years and those guys have barely even started scraping the surface. It'd take decades and cost far more than £200mil.

about time

[mpb]

Its taken them years to understand they actually have a choice and can save UK taxpayers a huge amount of money and have a better safer system. Let's hope they don't mess it up.

Take the very successful example of Munich:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-munich-rejected-steve-ballmer-and-kicked-microsoft-out-of-the-city/

Re:about time

[BasilBrush]

10 years to switch isn't what I'd call very successful.

The word I'd use is "Finally!"

Re:about time

[mpb]

Here is some interesting reading for you Mr Basil Brush:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters

Re: about time

[NapalmV]

If in the end they got to pay the same amount of money except to German workers instead of MS, this would still be a good result for them.

Re:about time

[vandamme]

Their adoption rate in 2008 was 20%. In 2011 they had done 9000 of the 12000 desktops.

In no way is Google Docs 'open-source'

[c4320n]

The original article doesn't even make this mistake: it just says that Docs can handle ODF. Nice summarizing, Karashur.

Re:In no way is Google Docs 'open-source'

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Don't worry, it isn't much of an office suite either.

Redmond, we need to talk...

[rsborg]

Sounds like your plain old customer "renegotiation" where they ask the vendor to lower prices. Have no fear - I would bet solid money that Office stays preinstalled on any UK Govt builds.

Only question is how much money they can save by threatening to leave. The UK government of cronies (doing their best to improve on US-style cronyism) would not benefit from any vendor graft if the vendor doesn't ever get paid, would they?

No danger of anything happening here as long as UK government is still for sale (Vote of no confidence? That's not remotely possible anymore given the Tory/Lib alliance charter).

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[Uloi]

Yea just read. They aren't moving to Open Source, looks like they are moving to "anything but Microsoft" Big difference.

Wrong answer. Switch file formats first, then apps

[Karellen]

I want to see a greater range of software used, so civil servants have access to the information they need and can get their work done without having to buy a particular brand of software.

In that case, you want to first switch your mandated file format from MS's doc(x)/xls(x) to ODF's odt/ods. Then you can use MS Office, or switch to a new (possibly open-source, possibly even Free Software) office suite as you prefer.

Not going go down well

[powerspike]

The owner of the company I work for hates Microsoft with a passion, around 1/2 our office computers are now Mac's.
we have tried openoffice, officelibra etc. However the problem is they aren't 100% compatible, there is always formatting issues, colour issues, and in some instances data just went missing.
in the End, the owner gave in, and purchased office for MAC for all the machines, and also all the pc's. Unless something has massively changed in the last several months i can see this been a great waste of time and money.
With the amount of time it takes to get things done in government as it is, this is only going to slow them down even more.

Re:Not going go down well

[erroneus]

Actually, a government can standardize on an ISO format like ODF. That will cause a ripple effect which will result in lots of people exchanging documents in that format instead of MS Office formats.

Microsoft will not take this lightly, of course. They will have to give it away for free pr less to prevent the ripple effect.

But the UK's intent behind this may not be entirely based on cost -- there's that NSA partnership that might be of concern to many.

Re:Not going go down well

[hcs_$reboot]

This is why when an official entity, like the UK gov, goes for OpenOffice, ie something open, that will push companies to do the same. Little by little, world will tend towards something more standard and open, and the remaining hard MS officers, will have no other choice than migrate to the new standards if they want their docs readable. This is what happened with Internet Explorer, as more and more people went away IE 6-7, pushing MS to do something more compatible. The difference lies into the fact that MS Office is not free, and, more importantly, MS office is for many companies the only blocking reason they can't migrate to something else, Mac or Linux. I'm not saying they would migrate but at least - after MS Office is gone - most of them can.

Re:Not going go down well

[tomtomtom]

You are assuming that MS Office's handling of ODF is the same as LibreOffice's. It isn't.

Re:Not going go down well

[erroneus]

I'm not presuming anything. When Microsoft is required to make their ODF support compatible, they will.

Things are chaning. Technologies from US companies are under scrutiny and are less trusted. The economy is causing everyone from individuals to business to government to rethink their spending priorities.

The notion of Microsoft lock-in isn't quite as compelling under these circumstances. Cisco's feeling it. Microsoft is feeling it too.

Re:Not going go down well

[Immerman]

The government doesn't have to worry about 100% compatibility - they're in a position to simply mandate "all files must be in ODF format", and anyone who wants to do business with them can damn well download a copy of any of dozens of free programs that support it properly, or buy expensive I/O filters for MS office that are at least mostly compatible.

Re:Not going go down well

[mjwalshe]

And when there is a queue of constituents complaining to their mp that they cant send a document from their pc into government plus the CBI and IOD complaining about having to use a nonstandard format to work with government - which will be spun as more red tape :-)

Re:Not going go down well

[tomtomtom]

MS can't even make their own products backwards/forwards-compatible without subtle formatting or processing bugs creeping in - so even with the best will in the world I'm just not sure this is an easily solvable problem.

The other big problem is that LibreOffice Calc in particular is still a long way behind Excel in terms of functionality. Even ignoring VBA, the basic formula support just isn't there. I don't know if this is lack of work, copyright/patent issues or something else but it means I simply can't use Calc for work at the moment. Anyone who needs to interoperate with Excel needs to buy Excel, and that means forcing people to use something else is likely to cause more problems than it solves.

I expect what will actually happen is that we'll end up with a (long) period of "Works best in Internet Explorer"-style hell. People who need to work with government will resort to doing their work in MS products then copying the outputs into LibreOffice, or using PDFs, or other equally time-wasting strategies. Everyone will hate it. And everyone will blame LibreOffice (and by extension, OSS) for it.

Re:Not going go down well

[Immerman]

Sure, it will be spun however vested interests like. But when you get down to it LibreOffice natively supports the only widely-supported document formats approved by an international standards body (several in fact, IIRC). And anyone who wishes to use it has their pick of software to support it.

MS Office on the other hand only supports MS Office files, as defined by the output of MS Office. They don't even support the format that they themselves bought passage through an international standards body for.

Re:Not going go down well

[guruevi]

Meh, the same happens between Office for Mac and Office for Windows though. Especially now with Office being online, the rendering online will be different again.

Re:Not going go down well

[Malc]

Having switched to the Mac at work a few years ago, I suspect your boss will disappointment. I absolutely love the Mac hardware and OS X compared with Windows, but Office is buggy and crippled compared with the Windows version. It works better than OpenOffice did last I tried it though.

Re:Not going go down well

[maxwell demon]

MS can't even make their own products backwards/forwards-compatible without subtle formatting or processing bugs creeping in

That may be because their own formats are a mess.

People who need to work with government will resort to doing their work in MS products then copying the outputs into LibreOffice, or using PDFs, or other equally time-wasting strategies.

If the result is using more PDF (a format meant for finished documents) instead of DOC or ODF (formats meant for working on documents), I'd say it's a win. Think only of how much information it unintentionally leaked in document histories.

Anyway, with modern MS Office, I cannot imagine anyone using it if they don't need to. I mean, who would want to use an interface where thanks to the oversized controls the amount of his text that fits on the screen is less than on a 70's terminal?

Re:Not going go down well

[jez9999]

This is why when an official entity, like the UK gov, goes for OpenOffice, ie something open, that will push companies to do the same.

What's the latest thinking on this, Slashdot crowd? Is it still better to get LibreOffice than OOo, or has OOo gotten better again?

Re:Not going go down well

[mjwalshe]

so it's document standard from sub par product that is not the de facto standard in use by 99.99 % of industry - good luck with that. Its not the uk' governments job to bully the population into doing what it wants or to pick national champions at the drop of a hat opr would you rather that JANET had had its way and OSI was the preferred standard for networking not if this messy = make it up as you go along - tcp/ip hippy crap :-)

Re:Not going go down well

[Immerman]

>Its not the uk' governments job to bully the population into doing what it wants or to pick national champions

Quite correct. So why is it okay for them to pick Microsoft as the officially sanctioned champion?

On the other hand it very much *is* the governments job to ensure that public documents are, and continue to remain, publicly accessible. Microsoft refuses to guarantee that going forward - and has done a very second-rate job so far of continuing to support opening their own older document formats. Moreover Microsoft Office is an expensive product, requiring it for dealing with the government disproportionately harms the poorest citizens (and they actually care about such things somewhat in much of Europe and the wider world). And Microsoft has made it quite clear that they have no interest in allowing anyone else to inter-operate with their file formats, to the point of corrupting an international standards organization into approving their own labyrinthine and grossly under-specified "open standard" so that they could weasel their way through "open standard only" government procurement requirements. And the icing is that even they have never actually supported their own "open standard ".

Re:Not going go down well

[mjwalshe]

Because the market has spoken and msoffice is the defacto standard - and any computer is expensive for the poorest on society irrespective of whether they use OO or MS office.

\so maybe not rushing headlong into digital first and closing down non electronic means of accessing government service might be a better idea - there are more votes in keeping the village post office open

Re:Not going go down well

[Immerman]

I can pick up a perfectly functional second-hand computer for $50 pretty much anywhere in the US, though it will probably need to be wiped clean to restore performance and security. And I suspect the same can be said for most developed nations. Meanwhile MS Office costs $100-$200, so unless the government is encouraging copyright infringement that's going to drastically increase the cost. Not to mention you can't get MS Office at all for anything except Windows (and, last time I looked, a crappy incompatible Mac version), so the government is mandating citizens purchase Windows as well. So, $250 -$350 for a computer whose only real advantage over it's original $50 self is that it natively supports MS Office files. And you think this is a good thing?

And you neglected my other point completely - continued access to existing documents. MS Office files aren't actually a de-facto standard, they're a collection of incompatible version-specific formats all bundled under the same label to give the illusion of continuity. Just try to open an MS Office 2010 file in MS Office 2007. Or an MS Office 95 document in either. It'll be ugly, because there really isn't a standard MS Office format, just a sequence of new formats designed in part to keep everyone on the upgrade treadmill. CEO gets the latest version of MS Office on his new machine? The whole damn company has to upgrade to be able to read her documents reliably. And then every other company who exchanges documents with them will need to as well. Etc, etc,etc.

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[gb]

I think you'll find that the UK Government (or GCHQ at least) are responsible for more than their fair share of the spying. There's been pretty much a free flow of traffic between GCHQ and the NSA by all accounts.

I'll stick with the rattling MS's cage to see if some discounts shake loose theory. I very much doubt the cost of retraining and stripping out customised solutions built on top of MS Office will be less than the savings moving to Open Source.

What is more interesting is the Cabinet Office banning (excpet under 'expcetional' circumstances) all IT projects billing more than £100M - in order to stop them being locked into a few big integrators. You never know, perhaps they'll start delivering IT projects that are semi-functional and only a factor two over budget - that would be a real improvement.

Re:Wait for it...

[t0qer]

No joke.

I ran for city council once, and one of the items on my platform was more OSS software in the city. I was contacted by a MS sales rep that told me he could offer us hosted exchange servers for $4@user per year. Office for $5 a seat, and free OS upgrades.

Google Docs is Open Source?

[monk]

> could be cut by switching to free 'open-source' software, such as OpenOffice, or Google Docs.

Where is the source for Google Docs?

Tale of 2 migration to Open Office

[liwee]

The city of Freiburg in Germany embarked on a migration to OpenOffice.org and failed terribly while another German city -- Munich -- announced that the success of its open source migration had netted savings around $13 million. Partial migration / mixed environments seem to be a very bad idea.

Re:Wait for it...

[NiteMair]

Or the other option...

Mysteriiously, same government representatives have a change of heart, buy all new licenses, and then happily leave their jobs a couple years later to work for Microsoft.

I call Bullcrap.

[deviated_prevert]

Every time a government anywhere in the world decides to threaten a drop of Microsoft software you can bet that their seat license agreements are coming up for renewal. And the threats to migrate are only a ploy to cut a better deal. You can bet the Microsoft rep has already been authorized to sweeten the coffers of some politicians pet riding fund raising or do what ever is necessary to very quickly ensure that the by the time a real decision is taken that MS office and MS server products are the ones the government chooses. Same thing here in Canada, but with our government the decision to go all MS is a forgone conclusion there is no such thing as "looking for alternatives to save money", we just contract out every service possible and kill off labour unions like the CUPE instead and spec that contractors use nothing but MS office and server software compatible with existing government servers. We, unlike Great Britain have public money to burn now that Harper has gutted government services and pushed just about everything out to contract.

Re:I call Bullcrap.

[TrollstonButterbeans]

^^^ Winner. And no I don't like the argument, these governments *should* be using Free Software. But in reality, probably a negotiating tactic.

Re:I call Bullcrap.

[femtobyte]

Every time a government anywhere in the world decides to threaten a drop of Microsoft software you can bet that their seat license agreements are coming up for renewal. And the threats to migrate are only a ploy to cut a better deal.

Munich. Assertion disproved by counterexample.

Re:So which is it? tens of millions of pounds" ? O

[tomtomtom]

I've been using the Ribbon format for about 3 years now and I STILL hate it. The newer versions of Outlook are the worst - the combination of the ribbon and the way MS couldn't be bothered to reimplement the compact header format really eat up vertical screen space for those of us who prefer the bottom preview pane layout (yes I know I can hide the ribbon but then I lose all the buttons which do what I use all the time, which is mainly the quick search box). On a laptop with only 768 vertical pixels (when I'm not docked) that is a serious headache which leaves me using OWA instead of the full blown outlook usually.

As you point out, the 2003->2007+ switch was therefore a huge opportunity for OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whichever fork is your favourite. The UI is great, easy to understand and the small differences from Office 2003 (like where the cursor ends up mid-editing a formula in Excel) are actually mostly positive incremental steps. You theoretically get the usability benefits of 2007+ (particularly for Excel, where memory/size constraints in 2003 were getting to be a problem for many).

Unfortunately though, interoperability is extremely poor - LibreOffice simply can't handle a big Excel spreadsheet (which is in my experience at least 60% of what most businesses buy Office for), and I've sent docx files from LibreOffice where, when people open them in MS Word, all the line breaks are suddenly gone or other formatting oddities appear. As another example, trying to use LibreOffice's "track changes" equivalent functionality left me with a docx file that Word (and often LibreOffice itself) is unable to open.

I would love to think that if the UK Government does move to LibreOffice they would fund someone to provide decent support who can fix a lot of these issues - that is supposed to be how the model works and fixing these issues would be of huge benefit to everyone. Unfortunately I can't really see that happening. I suspect instead it will end up being a typical government cock-up and massively overspend/under-deliver. I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.

Much as I detest almost everything from MS...

[fatphil]

Star Office, sorry Open Office, sorry OoO, sorry LibreOffice, sorry whatever they're gonna call it by the time I realise there's another name, is shit. It has to have bug-for-bug compatibility with MS Office, for a start. Nothing that attempts to mimic, including retaining the functional flaws, can be considered superior to the original.

(Don't get me wrong, the last 10 versions of MS Office have been shit too. The last office package from MS I had any respect for was MS Word 2.0.)

Maybe people should start learning how to communicate again, rather than getting wizards to create bullshit for them. Every day our office receives documents in the latest .doc-like formats where the authors have used the tab key or the space bar to align text in columns, even across lines. These people, whose jobs are to propagate information, would probably produce a better result if they used vi.

Re:Much as I detest almost everything from MS...

[chipschap]

Maybe people should start learning how to communicate again, rather than getting wizards to create bullshit for them.

.......

These people, whose jobs are to propagate information, would probably produce a better result if they used vi.

That was one of the main points in my posting earlier in this discussion. Slicker is not better unless it communicates more effectively, and often it does the exact opposite. Back in the day, some people used WordStar and were happy enough with it. Slick? Hardly. Could you communicate with it? Yup. (Not that I recommend it today, but that isn't my point.)

Another poster made the point that LibreOffice and predecessors don't break the paradigm, and instead try to more or less mimic MS Office (sans ribbon). That is an interesting observation and could generate a long discussion of its own. Even AbiWord, which prides itself on being small and lightweight, has an MS Office feel. That leads me to ask, where could office software go that is new and different, and most importantly, allows for easier and better communication, if the paradigm were to change?

There was an important paradigm shift between the older systems, such as the aforementioned WordStar, and the fully-GUI systems of today, although there are those who argue that this did not enhance communication. But clearly usability for the average user is higher.

What might the next paradigm shift be?

Re:Much as I detest almost everything from MS...

[fatphil]

I'm not sure if new paradigms are what are needed.

The ribbon was a paradigm shift, and, even after being very impressed after seeing a great long presentation about how MS were doing all the right things when it came to usability testing and the ribbon, I finally sat in front of a machine with it. And immediately started drooling. And I now realise why people press space to get to the correct column on the next line. Almost none of the core *semantic* functionality was anywhere to be seen. I managed to change to a funky font and change the colours, and then embed a youtube video, sure, and then mail that out to everyone in my contacts list, but wasn't able to create a clear structured document.

Going back to basics is what's needed.

MS did their research well, and made the most often *used* functionality easier to hand, but not the most *useful* functionality. There's been an evolutionary race where the fitness function is on the companies' side slickness, and on the users' side coolness. We've ended up with 8-legged toy poodles with giraffes' necks and elephants' trunks.

Best WYSINWYG (but there's print preview, so the "N" doesn't matter) WP I've ever used? I'm pretty sure it's MS Word 2.0. And I'm a died-in-the-wool linuxtard.

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[tomtomtom]

What is more interesting is the Cabinet Office banning (excpet under 'expcetional' circumstances) all IT projects billing more than £100M - in order to stop them being locked into a few big integrators. You never know, perhaps they'll start delivering IT projects that are semi-functional and only a factor two over budget - that would be a real improvement.

I'll believe that when I see it. Every IT project of that size was already "exceptional" in terms of trying to deliver some promised huge benefits to someone (service users, taxpayers, etc). If they really meant it they would be banning "transformational" projects of any type in government (whether IT-related or not) and just get on with trying to cut small incremental levels of cost out of how they run the current system each year.

Re:Wrong answer. Switch file formats first, then a

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's too bad my mod points just ran out, or you'd have had one for being insightful.

The important thing is the data. Open formats matter, and if there aren't suitable open formats available yet for the data you need to work with, creating additional open formats matters. The specific tools you use to access data that is stored in open formats are much less important.

Re:Wrong answer. Switch file formats first, then a

[Karellen]

Actually, now I've read the article, that's what the Minister is saying. Move to open formats first.

That will make it possible to switch software later, if they choose to. But even if the government doesn't, it will allow the people they work with to use their own choice of software, and prevents lock-in. Using MS Office becomes a choice, and can be selected (or dropped) on its merits, rather than being suffered out of necessity.

It's the BBC article and the /. summary which try to make it look like this is purely about switching software.

hopefully not

[Lawrence_Bird]

why? because it is better that the money be paid to a corporation who at least employees people, pays dividends to shareholders and in general boosts the economy.

what will happen if the govt "saves" the money by going to open office or some other free software? Well I can say with certainty that they will not return the money to the taxpayers. Instead it will fund more bureacracy and more government programs.

off topic: is there any way at all to prevent slashdot from sending me to the beta site? It refuses to retain my login credentials.

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[Immerman]

> I very much doubt the cost of retraining and stripping out customised solutions built on top of MS Office will be less than the savings moving to Open Source.
Over what timescale? This year, probably not. But they get free from MS lock-in permanently - amortize over 5, 10, or 50 years and things look much, much better for open source.

And if they're in the position of upgrading from pre-Ribbon Office then they're going to be looking at extensive retraining regardless. If fact LibreOffice is probably the easier option for an old-school MS-Office user to adapt to.

Re:Wait for it...

[QilessQi]

...as lobbyists in the UK, where they will dine frequently and lavishly with their old friends still in Parliament, to ensure that such a close call never occurs again.

Yep. I think you nailed it. :-)

How true those words are...

[rts008]

LOL!
That is the funniest comment I've seen here today on /..

A tip of the hat to you, Immerman....my thanks for a well needed laugh.

Not about open office

[EmperorOfCanada]

The switch to Linux is not about open office. The simple reality is that most people create very basic documents and don't need much more than a basic text editor with fonts and spell check. Most enterprise software is now web based and thus all the average government machine needs is a web browser. So paying for a Windows license an a word license for a zillion machines that don't need either is just throwing money into the toilet. Plus once you dip your machine into the OSS world people often find that all kinds of commercial software needs can be replaced. Email systems, scheduling systems, VPNs, etc.

While there will be a handful of machines that need to remain windows I suspect that it would be significantly less than 1% and even then they will be in clusters such as an accounting office.

But some of the greatest advantages of OSS is that you no longer have an onerous license audit problem. Basically you point to your dozen accountants hold up a dozen 5 year old MS licenses and tell the auditors to go to hell as you don't even plan on upgrading office for another 5-10 years.

As one government official said directly to Bill Gates, OSS gave them freedom from Gates himself.

What I can't wait to laugh at are all the MS white papers that claim that this will somehow cost the UK more money than they presently spend on MS software. Quite simply these white papers are driven by the hysterical realization that the MS business model of taxing governments and businesses worldwide is nearing an end. People now have realistic options.

But the tears will be even more real as many governments and enterprises the world round will be dumping MS not out of a desire to save money but a desire to keep their computers from being spied upon by US entities.

Re:Not about open office

[Frosty Piss]

The simple reality is that most people create very basic documents and don't need much more than a basic text editor with fonts and spell check.

"Most people" don't do a lot of word processing, period. Many of those who work in offices are not part of that group.

For those who do a lot of word processing, Open Office and its children and clones simply is not up to the job.

As well, many here seem to detest the "ribbon" menu, and assume this is universal because their circle of friends similarly loves Open Office and hate the "ribbon". But again, this group is not representative of the majority of heavy "office suite" users.

And, the open source clones of Excel simply suck.

Re:Not about open office

[EmperorOfCanada]

Then there is the whole "think different" concept. While google docs is not at all comparable to MS Office or even open office, it far exceeds most people's needs. Plus it is really easy for a bunch of people to work on a single document. If I were a student today, I would strongly look at using a combination of google docs, google drive, and some basic .doc file editor such as bean.

I have long argued that doing a MS style feature for feature checklist is completely stupid. Unless someone comes up with an AI format duplication tool, there will never be an office product that is 100% compatible with the crazy thing that is a word doc. I suspect the MS would have trouble writing a real spec for the .doc file format and then a program(from scratch) that would faithfully open a word document as was produced on one of their own versions of word.

But seeing that all but the most serious of power users are basically happy with features found in Word 97 then I suggest to go sideways and not try to emulate word. But to use the awesome power of a modern machine/network to solve the actual problems that people have that caused them to create an office document.

To a tiny extent this is what google docs is now doing. Technically multiple people can edit a word document but that first requires word, then some sort of network fiddling, and finally the knowhow to do it. Sharing a google word document is brain dead easy and all you need is a browser. This plus google drive and you are even safe if you lose internet. Also google docs is a bit mobile friendly whereas good luck doing any MS office work on almost any mobile device.

While there are many problems with Google docs I see that it will become a better product that I am more likely to use while Office heads off in a direction that wants lots of my money and thus I am less likely to use.

Don't get me wrong. I don't see google docs as the be all and end all but products like it are going to win in the end. Unless Office is willing to change they are going to be a niche product for people who have unusually complicated document needs. This is simply evidenced by the plummeting sales of PCs.

Re:Wrong answer. Switch file formats first, then a

[KingOfBLASH]

Not completely true.

The reason office has a stranglehold on the market is that they've implemented every feature you could possibly want in your word processor / spreadsheet.

That's why I currently run Office. Every time I try an alternative (OpenOffice, Pages, Numbers, etc.) there's something missing that the developers didn't consider "necessary."

That sort of thing makes it hard to use other programs for
a. school work (but professor, OO/Pages won't let me do a landscape section break and OO/Numbers doesn't have a Data Analysis pack!)
b. office work (sorry boss but I can't use existing visual basic macros with OO/Pages/Numbers!)
c. other professional work you need to share (sorry mr. recruiter but Word can't correctly render OO documents, you should blame them and give me the job even though my resume doesn't look good!)

Oh and I've tried to make things work. R or any number of statistical packages makes the Excel data analysis toolpack look like a joke. But providing the professor with a completely new format for your regression outputs is not good for your grade. He's familiar with the M$ way, and will only get annoyed you couldn't produce output in his predesired format. Even if Excel can't look at colinearity or autocorrelation or any other of a number of things you really might want to look at.

(All these are real examples from the past year when I switched to Mac. I ended up having to buy MS Office for Mac after quite a bit of headache.)

What's stopping them from sharing documents now?

[jader3rd]

In the first instance, this will help departments to do something as simple as share documents with each other more easily.

If they are currently running MS Office, how would switching to OpenOffice help share documents with each other? The same 'difficulties' of moving a file from one computer to another still exist.

Fund Open Office rather than fund Microsoft market

[Jameson Burt]

If you want a feature in Open Office, fund it. Better yet, considering the cost of Microsoft Office, put the funding of Open Office in the annual budget. Rather than giving $100 million a year to Microsoft, give $10 million a year to Open Office. With a programming / total-expenditures ratio of 1, open source funding is efficient.

Re:So which is it? tens of millions of pounds" ? O

[icebike]

Agreed, ribbons are a mess.

Why are they eating up so much precious vertical real estate instead of using simple menus, or do like OpenOffice does, and put this complexity on the side.

OO Example: http://www.openoffice.org/prod...
LO Example: http://www.libreoffice.org/fea...

I switch back and forth between OO and LO all the time, with occasional forays into Word/Excel. I much prefer OO to Word. No ribbons.

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[jones_supa]

Yea just read. They aren't moving to Open Source, looks like they are moving to "anything but Microsoft" Big difference.

Or actually "software that costs nothing". I bet that they couldn't care less about the source code.

Re:What's stopping them from sharing documents now

[Darinbob]

Maybe because OpenOffice is able to read documents from different versions of OpenOffice, whereas MS Office very often requires you to upgrade or get a compatibility plug in if the versions don't match or are too different. Microsoft has a vested financial interest in making its customers frustrated enough that they have to upgrade to make appear to work correctly.

If you use MS Office like Libreoffice then...

[VTBlue]

*disclaimer: former Msft office guy here*

The standard of use for MS office is Libreoffice, then it is obvious that the government will save on licensing costs, however those who use MS office in an enterprise environment as large as the government do not use Office simply as a suite of applications. Office is a software platform that connects with many line of non-MS business systems. Think plugins and addons on steroids. The engineering effort by vendors, in house IT, and analysts to convert all these things would be hugely disruptive.

Sure it fine to introduce choice for less sophisticated offices, but to mandate LibreOffice or any other product, commercial or otherwise is bad procurement practice. Licensing is chump change relative to the larger personnel & ecosystem costs.

Re: If you use MS Office like Libreoffice then...

[VTBlue]

Apologies for the shit grammar, typed this on my phone while on a train.

Re:Wrong answer. Switch file formats first, then a

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The reason office has a stranglehold on the market is that they've implemented every feature you could possibly want in your word processor / spreadsheet.

For the record, as a "power user", neither Word nor Excel is even close to having every feature I could possibly want. I find it enormously frustrating that with all the resources available to them, Microsoft have mostly been free-wheeling and tinkering with the UI for many years now.

That aside, most of the problems you described are probably at least partially attributable to exactly the fact that MS Office locks data up in closed formats. It creates an almost unassailable barrier to entry for competition, because anyone else wanting to offer feature parity with Office needs not only to implement the feature itself but also to implement conversion algorithms for Microsoft's dominant proprietary file formats.

If, as an industry, we software developers established standardised, extensible representations for non-trivial data like mathematical expressions and for cross-references in structured data stores like spreadsheets and databases, then the kinds of issues we see with porting between Excel, Calc and specialist tools like R could be greatly reduced. Not all tools would provide all functions, of course, but at least the common subset would be easily portable, leaving different tools and developers to distinguish themselves by what they could build on that common foundation.

For all the ailments of the web standards bodies, it's really quite something that today you can write an HTML document, style it with CSS, and even add interactivity with JavaScript, and you can do it so that several completely independent underlying engines, each forming part of a different but widely used browser application, will all render the common aspects they support in almost identical ways and will even degrade somewhat gracefully if you use features that are only available in some browsers. But of course the browser industry was stagnant for a long time around the IE6 generation, and it took the arrival and subsequent rapid development of a competing product and the ready accessibility of the "file" formats to break the deadlock. I think it will take at least that much to dislodge MS Office from its throne.

Re:So which is it? tens of millions of pounds" ? O

[Nerdfest]

The ribbon also changes state depending on what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, this would be helpful if icons, etc were recognizable, but many are not. Menus, etc, ate stateless and are always in the same place. Shortcut keys are easy to memorize. With the ribbon I found myself looking for icons and actions that were there a few minutes ago, still apply, but are now somewhere else.

Heard that one before...

[flyingfsck]

The Blighty Gubmint sure isn't any good at reducing IT costs.

small government

[julian67]

To me the amazing thing is that within the Conservative Party (the dominant partner in the UK's coalition government, and usually presented by the press as anti-liberal, antediluvian, small minded and exclusively self-interested or overly class conscious) there are people who do sincerely believe in small government and the duty to spend tax income prudently. Some of these people have achieved minsterial office and are trying to put into practise what they believe and propound. I find it reassuring and entirely positive that they arrive at the point of advocating Free(dom) Software and decline to simply concur with the payment of hundreds of millions of our money to (mostly foreign) businesses for no public benefit or advantage.

It's a shame and a scandal that the "left-wing" and "liberal" representatives and parties have failed to realise that being bonded to unethical, solely profit driven (and mostly foreign) corporations does nothing for the public purse or the public good.

We had 13 years of supposedly liberal left wing government and the result was that we approached being bankrupt, handed over billions of tax pounds to greedy banks and foreign corporations for no result, fought wars that only benefited foreign powers and a handful of greedy politicians, and gave up rights bought in blood such as habeus corpus, jury trial and control of our own borders. The idea that the Conservative Party could be the UK's leading proponent of sound financial sense and a pragmatic and ethical approach to government IT purchasing and practise is almost enough to make me wonder if I took a lot of acid in the 60s or alkalines in the 70s but there it is, they are actually doing it, and for entirely rational reasons.

Hail Spode!
Hail Stallman!

Re:So which is it? tens of millions of pounds" ? O

[Nivag064]

Have a look at LibreOffice, 4.2 RC4 is out, a lot of work had gone into their spreadsheet. LO 4.2 FINAL is due out Real Soon Now.

http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...
or
http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...

'open-source' software ... Google Docs

[Arancaytar]

uh-huh...

Nope

[s.petry]

As someone else said, I get very frustrated because MS products don't have everything I need or obfuscate important functions.It was better before the ribbon methods of doing everything, but in the ribbon method it's horrible. If it takes 15 minutes to add a button or learn a magic keystroke for something, I have just wasted 15 minutes of my time.

Many very basic things are always broken to boot. Importing CSV for example is a nightmare in any MS product. They auto assign what ever the hell they want for a delimiter including what you select. I usually have to run CSV data through Perl to massage the format enough to keep Excel from adding it's own formatting.

Not claiming OO is better mind you, but rather correcting your claim that MS is that much better than everyone else. 10 years ago I would have agreed with you, but not recently.

Re:Nope

[KingOfBLASH]

Not claiming OO is better mind you, but rather correcting your claim that MS is that much better than everyone else. 10 years ago I would have agreed with you, but not recently.

MS isn't better than everyone else, it's more accepted and people are more familiar with it.

All of those examples I had something as good (or better) than MS.

However, because people want something specific, it's not possible to use something different.

That's the problem with stepping outside the MS paradigm, you immediately make your solution unusable by a lot of people because they just don't know anything else. Which is why, in your example, I would have used Visual Basic in your example. And as opposed to your perl, everyone who has excel will be able to run it when I put a big button on the spreadsheet linked to the macro (and don't get me wrong I love perl!)

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[exomondo]

This isn't a win for Free Software, it's a win for Freeware. The reason for it is just cost and the way government IT projects are mismanaged I wouldn't count on there being much in the way of cost savings if they actually started to contribute back to it.

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[exomondo]

And if they're in the position of upgrading from pre-Ribbon Office then they're going to be looking at extensive retraining regardless.

If they were, but they aren't, in fact it's right there in the summary that they have spent in the order of 200 million pounds since 2010, the ribbon was introduced in 2007 and the version prior to that was 2003.

Saving money, and security.

[melchoir55]

Saving money is great and all. Woopee. Wouldn't the real value in switching be to get away from a company that has been compromised by US intelligence services? It seems to me that having your entire government running software written by a company known to put backdoors into their software is negligent. If they are using office, a member of parliament makes an interesting powerpoint presentation and the US president knows about it 5 minutes later.

Google Docs open source?

[peppepz]

Has Google Docs been open sourced now? Can it be hosted on a private server, so that the UK government needn't share every single document of them - and therefore their citizen's most private data - with the NSA?

Would work for some...

[NonFerrousBueller]

My wife is a corporate accountant for a large city in New Zealand. I've asked her about this as she uses Excel every day and has used OO/LO at home on occasion (a while back). She says they use so many third-party reporting plugins that work with Excel that a switch to a FS option would be nearly impossible. Word may be crap but Excel will rule the bean-counter world for the time being.

The main bit of software councils need to wean themselves off of is SAP. My jaw nearly hit the floor when I found out the seat license cost for that (I've forgotten the exact amount and am not waking her to find out), and any individual of a company that runs it who enters their own timesheets must hold a seat license, even if that's the only thing they use a computer for in the firm. We're talking thousands of dollars per seat here, not dozens.

The file format, not the software, is important

[horza]

The UK government has been in Microsoft's pocket since the 1980's, with hundreds of millions flowing non-stop from the British tax payer into Microsoft's coffers. Most comments are saying this is a license negotiation tactic, and this is probably true. The decision makers have spent decades paralysed by fear, brainwashed into believing Microsoft is the "safe" option much like in the prior decades people used to say "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

The government needs to clearly define a set of document interchange formats. The ODF format for word-processing is a good start. This makes the software a level playing field for all vendors, closed and open source. Only 100% compatible software gets onto the government buy list.

Until now there is no incentive to anybody to write a decent competitor to Microsoft. It's a huge investment and at the end of the day the government will buy Microsoft anyway even if it squeezes the British public's purse until it bleeds. You cannot even attack markets attached to the government as Microsoft will keep shifting their file format to make any competitors subtly incompatible. With a level playing field suddenly the incentives change. The government is a huge win and a fixed goal means the game is on to try and provide the government with best value for money.

Open Office still has an important part to play as it can set the baseline. GCHQ can vet the source and then make available a version for government employees to download (Microsoft Windows, OS X, Debian, etc). It can come pre-installed on all new government machines. If Microsoft can convince a gov't department to install Microsoft Word alongside it and pay for it, good for them. It must be adding extra value.

Francis Maude is definitely on the right track, if the article is to be believed, but he has a lot of inertia to overcome. Good luck to him.

Phillip.

Re:What exactly is the definition of "free?"

[daem0n1x]

Is anything from Google actually free?

Well, I'm not so sure, just ask the NSA....

I'm sure the taxpayers would like to know exactly which non-government entities are getting access to their private information.

In the case of the US, no problem. It's the government all the way up. In that case it would be spying on itself, which could cause a recursive infinite loop and the eventual stack overflow.

Re:And avoid NSA spying

[gbjbaanb]

not even that, they're moving to "open standard" so people can use .odt formats instead of .doc/docx crap.

Then anyoine can use whatever application that like - including Office for those who still want to use it, but those who have, say Android tablets, get to use whatever tool they like.

I imagine once the lock-in of *having* to use Word disappears, so too will Word.

Re:Wrong answer. Switch file formats first, then a

[NapalmV]

Didn't we have HTML "standard" yet every browser interpreted it in slightly different ways? Remember the days you had to use IE6 or else?

Re:And retraining from MSO2007 to LO is zero too.

[Xest]

In the fact that they are, because the differences between Office 2010 and say OpenOffice are far greater than Office 2010 and Office 2013.

OpenOffice isn't even close to being just a slot in replacement either in terms of existing compatibility, existing features, or existing user interface compared to the level of differences across office versions. As I say the only real time this wasn't true was 2003 to 2007 where the UI and document formats all changed as well as drastic feature changes and differences.

As I say competent skilled technical users will be able to jump between any of them but the same isn't true of your average public sector office worker - a few will find the jump fine, but the majority will struggle far more with a jump to OO than a newer MSO version.

public document

[fluffythdestroy]

But it will also make it easier for the public to use and share government information.

Whats stoping them to use PDF ? Public document has to be revised or someone has to look at it before being released. All that person needs to do is convert it to PDF which is super easy

For sharing them within the same environment and save money, yup OpenOffice or LibreOffice might be the solution but its certainly not free as you have to spend cash for the software lessons to employees and to make sure you hire dev's to have all features you got in Microsoft suite into OpenOffice or LibreOffice. But at the end in the longterm it is possible and you do save cash.

Re:Wrong answer. Switch file formats first, then a

[CodeInspired]

Maybe I am missing something, but isn't OOXML the default document format MS Office versions since 2007? They seem to already be using open formats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

I know it's not very popular around here, but your argument was that open formats could allow users to use the software of their choice. Any office productivity suite is free to implement the ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500 standards used by MS Office.

The reality is, the competitors don't do a very good job of supporting it. But isn't that the same argument as MS not doing a very good job of supporting ODF?

Even better than that

[phorm]

File -> Export to PDF
Right in the menu

This is something I've always loved about OO/LO. Sure, you can install a PDF printer for use with MS Office but it's a lot more complicated and less intuitive. I tried setting that up for somebody and explaining "no, it's not a real printer, it's a fake printer that goes to PDF" was a lot harder than just saying "use this menu to save in PDF format"

Where did the AC lie?

[http]

Putting a name behind it should have no influence on the validity of the case being made. Most people can't tell BS from truth on this topic, but they can usually spot a personal attack, like the one I'm going to make on you because you're advocating polluted discourse. So fuck you, you fucking fuck.

There, I stooped to your level for a moment. I'm not proud, but you can't call me on it without dissing your own worthless argument. Now, back to rational discussion: Where did the AC lie?

Contribute

[NewYork]

Don't just use Open source, contribute your money and resources to its development.

Re:So which is it? tens of millions of pounds" ? O

[bhiestand]

I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.

I've been an open source proponent my whole life, but even I have to ask: How is OSS not the problem? The typical consumer-oriented open source program has a few dozen half-implemented features, lacks critical features its competitors have, and has a UI from ten years ago.

Most businesses I have worked with love their open source-based servers/storage, Filezilla, and Firefox. Everything else is proprietary stuff. They hate Office and Windows, and they still prefer ot to OOo or LO.