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Italian City To Dump OpenOffice For Microsoft After Four Years
An anonymous reader writes: Between 2011 and 2014, the municipality of Pesaro, Italy, trained up its 500 employees to use OpenOffice. However, last year the organization decided to switch back to Microsoft and use its cloud productivity suite Office 365. According to a report from Netics Observatory (Google translation of Italian original), the city administration will be able to save up to 80% of the software's total cost of ownership by going back. The savings are largely due to the significant and unexpected deployment costs. In particular, having to repaginate and tweak a number of documents due to a lack of compatibility between the proprietary and the open source systems translated into a considerable waste of time and productivity. The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.
For some product
That looks like a Microsoft press release, hardly an "article".
That is a message for new organizations to start with open standards from day 1. Otherwise you will get so dependent on proprietary standards that moving out of them may never be worth again.
Sometimes you realize that reality trumps ideology.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I am an editor of sorts. My coworkers all use MSWord 2010, and the formatting gets thrashed every time they pass a document around. Inevitably I am called to fix it, and do so by opening it in LibreOffice.
Furthermore, I would argue that retraining everybody to Microsoft's cloud docs itself constitutes "a considerable waste of time and productivity", but I guess whoever in Pesaro's IT department that got under-the-table money disagrees.
From TFA:
They didn't replace MSOffice in the first place, they had a hybrid solution, which was costly, due to compatibility issues. They should have been able to know that beforehand. msoffice doesn't play well with others, it doesn't even implement any standard format. If you absolutely need to use msoffice in some spots, you should forget about interoperating, and just use msoffice everywhere.
If they switch to anything it should be Libre Office.
Unfortunately they are getting sucked back into Microsoft products. Very sad, considering that they had already broken free of it's stranglehold.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
If you have to interact or exchange documents with any other entity, OpenOffice is dead out of the box. I do keep some things in OpenOffice, but only the things I know I will be the only person viewing or modifying. Any time I try to work with MS Office documents, or send OpenOffice documents out to clients, it's a veritable fuckfest of reformatting, repaginating, fucked up graphics, etc. It's so not worth it. When you consider how dependent business is these days on Office documents and how powerful the software really is, it's retarded to try to get around it. Just pay the money and count it as an expense of doing business. Trust me, you'd be getting your money's worth even if it cost 5x what it does.
I've worked on a state office migration project before, it's no surprise for me that this kind of efforts always end up with the same outcome. The thing is that migrating a state office is a painful process, and tends to generate discomfort on many people, from the office workers to the technical staff.
Here in latin america we may have particular problems regarding that.
Many office employees don't want to fully disclose their working environment because: oh surprise! they hardly do any work at all! They just sit there in their computer and complain when their favourite radio stream which uses proprietary technology from the 90's. I wonder how much of these "propietary files" were actually mail-forwarded .ppt/mp4 files and flash games.
Technical staff has to be trained, and usually that doesn't go well, they are not cooperative and feel the migration process as a personal attack on their capacity and skills.
It doesn't help either that internal politics get involved in the process when some office workers think they're being audited, and actively seek to shut down the migration process through political means (which they usually have way more experience than the guys doing the migration work).
Overall the employees feel migration processes as a unnecessary burden, an attack to their perceived right to do what they please with the state's resources without answering anyone and a challenge to their competence. It also prevents high-ranking bureaucrats to get all those juicy commisions from propietary software vendor's.
I'm sure Microsoft is tickled pink. Vendor lock-in wins over open standards.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
Corruption is everywhere!
No wonder itally is broke. They are not only shifting to something that will cost them a lot more money, they are giving up CONTROL to a mega corporation.
Next year they'll announce they're going back to LibreOffice due to the 15 minutes being spent every day for 300 employees to repaginate documents as they move to Microsoft Office
LibreOffice has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than OpenOffice does. In fact, it has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than MSOffice does; everything in my office routinely gets fucked up by Office 2010.
But I agree with your fundamental premise. Why deal with a "veritable fuckfest of reformatting, repaginating, fucked up graphics, etc" when you can just use LibreOffice and not have to deal with whatever stupid updates that Microsoft foists on you this month?
"According to a recently published report from the Netics Observatory - commissioned by the municipality and Microsoft itself - the city administration will be able to save up to 80 percent of the software's total cost of ownership (which includes deployment, IT support, subscription plans cost, and other elements) using Office 365, compared to its previous setup. "
Unlikely, Ribbon is a mess, Office 365 is sort of Office 2013 with changes. Any formatting tweaks on documents only need to happen on the templates once and you've done them over the years as you upgraded Office itself and changed printers. Then there's the online nature of it, putting administration documents in the NSA store has considerable legal issues! If EU safe harbour is violated because of NSA surveillance of EU documents, you'll get hit hard moving your documents out of Microsoft cloud.
More likely is there's a back deal here, since Microsoft and the municipality JOINTLY commissioned the study, the collusion had already happened by then. You would never let a vendor interfere in an independent study because that would be bad management, it would contaminate the result.
LibreOffice won the developers so it gets many more fixes
https://phoronix.com/scan.php?...
Besides:
Excel (various macros used on tens of files)
Tens of files ? Oh my god that is sooooo many.... Hercules himself would be needed to sort through all of them.
And from the /. summary:
The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.
15 minute per employee ? That's so horribly long, it's almost as long as their daily coffee pause! They have surely logged tons of overtime because of this! Unpaid overtime! The Italian economy is crumbling because of the daily 15minutes it takes to fix a malformet .docx import into OpenOffice.org !!!
~~~
I can't decide if this is a disguised parody.
Or if Microsoft have decided to advertise *how easy* it is to actually switch to even an out-dated alternative like OpenOffice.org (not to mention that LibreOffice.org is getting more development and much more bugfixes)
15 minutes per day ? and 10 Excel file needing fixing ? Common, sound's like it's actually even easier than a major upgrade of MS Office itself.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
offered some one a better incentive.
Use Libre Office. Never had any formatting problems going to MS word, any version. Going the other direction, formatting nightmares because people don't know how to format a file properly in MS word, let alone save it in the best file format. MS office "standards" are a joke. And last but not least, do you really want your governments sensitive information saved on a foreign corporations servers? I know i don't.
The problem is people are dealing with MS Office and they still try to do MS Office stuff in Openoffice or Libreoffice. I have no problem using Libreoffice in my environment because we don't use anything Microsoft to have compatibility problems at my workplace.
15 minutes to repaginate a file? That sounds like a little much to me. I wonder how much Microsoft paid them for their endorsement.
The absence of a serious alternative to MS Access or easy/documemnted scripting [via macros] and VBA, as found in Excel is a non starter for me.
I am aware of the limitations of these MS Office applications but you all will agree with me that in many small office environments, they get the job done.
LibreOffce or Open Office just do not cut it!
Maybe they should have used LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice, then. Of course, if the city had standardized on OO (or even LO), wouldn't the compatibility issue (ie re-paginating), be on the receiver's end, not the city's? Something sounds odd about this, at least the way it is being spun. Then again, Microsoft is involved...
Any experiences on WPS Office for Linux? Better or worse than LibreOffice?
Some people seem to be under the impression that free software is always a better choice than proprietary software. Some of the stuff released as open source software is garbage and there is often little or no incentive for those who wrote it to fix it. There is also a lot of good stuff out there with wide community support as well. I have used a lot of open source AND proprietary software and there is a lot of good and bad stuff in both camps. It is amazing to me how many people will spend many hours and extra training costs in order to get something working just so they don't have to spend $20 for a license to something else that works a lot better. If I find some really good software and the guys who built it want $50 from me for their efforts, I am happy to pay it. My time is worth something.
It is so bad, its alleged "open" "standard" OO-XML has binary cruft in the spec. The spec basically says "whatever the old MS-Word did with this binary is the standard". Even Microsoft is not able to come up with a reference implementation that does not depend the ability to execute the original MS-Word6 binary buried under several layers of emulation.
This is the real way to build a cash cow. No one else can paginate the way old Ms-Word6 binary did. And if you inveigle your customers into incorporating that pagination as the essential part of their process, then you can laugh at them, tell them you are going to squeeze till they yelp, and they can do anything about it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...300 people @ 15 minutes a day, after it was 500 employees total in the organization. It's utter bullshit that 60% of the staff are involved in document production every day, much less so much that just the tweaking was 15 minutes.
It's the exact smell of the bullshit I've seen for 25 years every time an IT department had already made a decision and made up numbers to justify it. Generally, they come up with the money number by working backwards and hope that nobody knows the internal workflows well enough to critique it. But this one fails when we only have one other number to work with, it's so over-the-top.
Then I remembered that Italy is the place that proves Donald Trump really could win: Berlusconi is Trump mixed with Rupert Murdoch and won election. It's the second most corrupt country in western Europe after Greece.
This switch was probably just bought and paid for.
You mean you don't hold down the SPACE bar to make a new line?
The absence of a serious alternative to MS Access or easy/documemnted scripting [via macros] and VBA, as found in Excel is a non starter for me.
There are plenty of alternatives to MS Access unless you have some peculiar requirement that it be shipped to you in an office suite. Kind of ridiculous that you think it should be a clone of MS Office. Personally I use Filemaker when I'm going with proprietary small databases but there are plenty of open source options too.
As for macros LibreOffice Calc has fairly robust macro capability. It doesn't use VBA but so what? If you have tied yourself to Excel with a bunch of VBA scripts then you're probably stuck with Excel unless you want to do a lot of coding. Probably not good planning to hog tie yourself with proprietary technology but I know a lot of people do it with Excel+VBA.
LibreOffce or Open Office just do not cut it!
That's funny. I've standardized my company on LibreOffice and it works great for us. Been using it exclusively for 5 years now without problems. Not the right solution for everyone but it works great for us.
A single city alone cannot win.
Need National government, State governments, and all cities to all mandate only ODF files will be accepted for business with those entities. Then leave it to each to pick the best tools.
There may always be a need for true MS-Office - put 1 license on a remote server and let people RDP into it. It needs to be painful. Oh - and while you are at it - dump MS-Windows so people just just pirate a copy and install it on their systems.
People hate change. It is always a hassle. The first question asked is "why can't we do it the same way we've always done it?" That worked. That is there perception, not the truth. There are many problems working with MS-office, but they just don't remember those anymore. They've worked around each, one at a time over the last 25 yrs.
Due to the complex and proprietary nature of microsoft products not working with other software Pesaro is forced to go back to microsoft.
Fail transition. Not uncommon for a gov't rollout though.
I still have issues with libreoffice and msoffice fucking up pagination and the like, or msoffice printing out libreoffice documents with random bullshit all over the place, but overall it's definitely better than OpenOffice ever was. Plus LibreOffice makes it stupidly easy to just export a PDF if all I need to give someone is read-access.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Not as bloated as MSOffice. There's nothing wrong with using either of them, but these people expected miracles from moving out of a proprietary system to an open system without putting any effort whatsoever into it. I don't have a problem with using libreoffice in my work environment because I forced everyone else to use it exclusively. Works great. Any old excel file/programs were simply converted to work right in libreoffice (Yes, surprise, you actually have to do some work to migrate to a different system!). And I don't have anyone send me any MSOffice files.
Meanwhile, have you tried opening an old document file in MSOffice with a recent copy of MSOffice? Absolute disaster just the same. I've seen some places have Office 97 and Office 360 together because the old docs don't look right in the new Office or some functionality removed. If you don't have the time, money or effort to properly migrate, then yeah, you're going to have problems no matter what. A lot of these businesses could have easily just hired some college kid part time to help them migrate, but they don't want too. A lot of these places don't even have any plans on how to properly migrate in the first place. Not even any plans to make sure updating MSOffice doesn't screw up everything.
Heck, I have issues with MS Word where documents I create that are fine on the shared printer near me are completely messed up when someone else opens it and their default printer is not the same...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This is unsurprising. As you may recall, in his "3rd Treatise on Government," John Locke wrote:
How he foresaw this, I cannot imagine. But you have to admit, he was right on target. Most people who are familiar with late 20th century technology would never even think of this, since in day-to-life you rarely care about pagination, or especially if your page breaks match someone else's -- indeed you probably only rarely think in terms of "pages" at all. Yet Locke had the distant objectivity, in order to see that pagination would some day return to being an important topic, worthy of peoples' -- nay, The People's -- attention.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Really? I probably spend more than 15 minutes a day just discussing with my co-workers where we're going for coffee break.
Hope the municipality of Pesaro has removed all the water coolers or they're screwed!
how could they possibly ever have known there were going to be small compatibility / formatting problems? This must have been quite the surprise given how unexpected these extreme costs and expenses were for dealing with this. Now it is just so much better to not spend any time on this but instead spend money on the right to view these documents and for their citizens to also have to pay for the right to view these documents. Microsoft is a great saviour of these people's time and they should be continually rewarded with the money they require for these rights to view the documents.
I am a Linux fiend and I ended up using Word to avoid issues with formatting. This had more to do with printing however, as I would print at school which of course uses Windows and my format would just go off the rails. Not too fun when you are turning in papers. Now I just use Google Docs to avoid this, but this is certainly not a solution in this case.
The same productivity loss as firing ten people.
Which, on the scale of the mentioned 300 people is barely above 3%.
You probably lose more than 3% of your time when you go peeing in the toilets or have a coffee break.
In most European jurisdictions, you can lose more than 3% productivity to sickness without even needing to justify it.
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By the same logic, you probably lose 1 sec a day burping and farting.
In a company of 100'000 (like some big branches of the State), that's nearly 30 man hours lost per day. That's nearly one week. The same productivity loss as firing five people.
Thus one needs to outlaw burping and farting for anyone working for the Government !!!!
I mean, dude, do you even math?
Dude, proportions, do you even ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There is surely going to be a cost to migrating away from OpenOffice to whatever that MS (lock-in) solution is going to be.
Is that cost really less than the cost of just fixing (probably in the form of hiring somebody knowledgeable enough -- perhaps even a core OpenOffice developer on some contract time) the one pain point that they seem to have with OpenOffice?
Surely the amount of money they are going to spend on that migration, would lure some OO developer to just fix the problem.
It always amazes me how money can be misspent this way. Did it really not occur to anyone in that IT department that the entire reason they are using FOSS is so that they can fix this sort of problem themselves and be in control of their own destiny?
The problem is people need to update there documents and either don't want to or are incapable of doing so. If they successfully switched to the new LibreOffice then the costs are almost certainly past 4-years later. Switching makes no sense what-so-ever. Especially to another proprietary solution. The only thing that might make sense is to switch from a desktop-oriented system to an open cloud-based one. But switching to Google or Microsoft-based proprietary cloud solution no way. That's just dumb. That might make sense for a small entrepreneur looking to get up and running quickly- but ultimately even there its the more expensive option. I started a business in 2008 and went with a cloud-based VoIP solution. I'm still paying for it and regret doing so every f'ing day. I just can't find the time to switch to an in-house solution and that's after I've located the company and people which will enable me to switch out company away from a proprietary cloud-based solution. The open solution would save us considerably and I've got every intention of switching still.
Teach everyone latex *once*.
Done.
Half the purpose of latex is that authors should not be concerned with formatting at all. Document designers should. They produce the stylesheets while authors just write content--letting everyone focus on what they are best at.
Instead we have everyone fighting to use "word processors" which makes everyone do double duty as a document designer fighting incompatible page layout editors.
Lastly, latex makes sure that pagination is done sanely--something that a computer is amazingly good at doing in an automated fashion. Imagine, letting the computer do some heavy lifting.
I've switched from OOo to Softmaker Office years ago precisely because of these issues.
even the press release cannot mention a single good reason for it except "we have been conned in the past and now must pay the price... for pagination!"
I've worked for a company where "free" philosophy was felt from top to bottom. yet even there, we were running MS office in Wine on every desktop. there is just no way of functioning in corporate world without it.
Simply not true. My company has been functioning without MS Office quite happily for about 5 years now. We have precisely one seat of MS Office which is on my personal laptop that we can bust out if there is an emergency but the last time I did that was about 2-3 years ago. Unless you are already an MS Office shop or have a very specific use case where you need it, you can exist quite happily without it.
the only way to successfully use open/libre-office is to export your documents to pdf before emailing them to clients.
That is a good practice in general. I almost never send anything but a PDF to someone unless they have a need to edit the document or they specifically request some other format. Then you don't have any formatting issues or someone editing the document without authorization.
the only other place i've ever come across who sent us .ODT documents was LINX (london internet exchange). other than them, every single time i sent somebody a document in ODT format, i got an email back asking for a different format. that is the unfortunate reality we live in today.
So send them a .DOC file. LibreOffice does a more than respectable job with all but the hairiest MS Office documents. We send and receive files from other companies all the time. Internally we mostly use ODT but some stuff in DOC as well. Even a few in DOCX.
I've been doing end user stuff for years, and Microsoft Office is a de facto standard. It's not because it's the absolute best product out there, but because compatibility needs to be maintained. Most -simple- documents and spreadsheets will open in one or the other. The problem comes when you get documents created with a Word template that someone got very creative with while building it. This happens a lot in engineering organizations, places that have document control/management systems, and yes, governments. Word has never had the easiest-to-decode formatting methods; that crown still goes to WordPerfect for the closed source world, and some law firms still use it today. Little stuff like page breaks, font kerning, and special positioning that don't matter in a simple document but matter a lot in a formal contract are sometimes very hard to find and fix in Word, for example.
The reality is that even though the format sucks, everyone is used to it and works around the quirks. Is it right? No, but it happens. No one outside of scientific publication is going to advocate for regular users to write their documents in TeX for example, even though that's the perfect example of a completely open, known formatting standard.
I think open source office suites are fine as long as you don't have crazy formatting needs and you don't have to share complex documents with too many Microsoft Office users. Otherwise, like the article says, users will waste time tweaking little things in their documents instead of doing productive work. If you're a small shop that has standardized on Linux, that's fine. One of the lifeblood things the company I work for does is respond to RFPs from governments. The standard response usually needs to be added to their crazily-formatted Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, and $deity help you if your use of LibreOffice is even thought of as the reason that a bid is rejected.
The Italian city of Padua has been using libreoffice for many years. No Microsoft licences have been bought nor they will be in the foreseeable future. Maybe we have better employees.
I keep hearing people saying replacing MS office with openoffice or libreoffice is no brainer. It is no brainer when your're replacing the word processor. It is a total different story to replace excel.
Yup. Original source: news.microsoft.com
Even if Microsoft is the messenger that doesn't mean the message, that a town tried FOSS and found unexpected costs, is untrue. Liars will tell the truth when the truth is coincidentally on their side.
The town should have had an easy way to report their difficulties to the FOSS developers and the FOSS developers should have been responsive. Such reporting and response is necessary for FOSS adoption. I think this is the first thing to look into, not the messenger, not competition's sales force.
I don't claim to be a professional Office software user (of any sort) - although I am a professional in the IT field. I have used several versions of both open and paid office software (mostly MS).
The free version gets you by in most cases. But nearly every time, given the choice (money not a consideration), I would choose the MS product to work with. Its just easier to do more with it.
This is another case where the 80-20 rule comes into play. Almost everyone could switch to LibreOffice, but there are edge cases where Microsoft works better.
I uninstalled Microsoft Office and installed LibreOffice on my work laptop about a year or so ago. I'm a web programmer, so I use it only once every couple of weeks, to read and sometimes edit Word and Excel files from coworkers. So far so good. I even made a user guide with Write, including drawings made in Draw. I published it to PDF, so compatibility doesn't come up. Still, I liked using OpenOffice more than Microsoft Office, even ten years ago.
Someone got money for that, or a kickback..
That's just the way things like that work in municipal government.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
... to properly implement software that complies to open standards, is seen as a failure of open software to reproduce those bugs and non-standard features? Hm ... where have I seen this before?
I work for a tech company that employs 350k individuals world wide. We use open office, ain't no thang.
The Italians didn't deploy it properly because I have never had any pagination issues when moving between .docx and .odt formats. Of course, I am using LibreOffice but the difference between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice shouldn't be that extreme.
Maybe, but it pales in comparison to cloud hosted collaboration suites. Which coincidentally, Office365 and Google Docs are.
And Google Docs pales in comparison to the functionality of the desktop versions. I use Google Docs routinely but it's just not a viable solution for substantial parts of what I do, particularly for spreadsheet work. If you want to collaborate on a very simple document or spreadsheet then it is fine. Someday maybe it will match the desktop software in features but it isn't there yet.
This is the perfect /. news item, as it triggers all the expected knee-jerk responses from the FLOSS fanboys, and then all the usual attempts at explaining to them how the world works by the non-fanboys. And around and around we go.
I've been using Linux since the very early days, and office suites and programs since WordPerfect had phone line help DJs to keep people entertained while on hold. I've tried very hard to move all of my work and recreational computer use (which includes no gaming) to Linux and OO or LO, and I still can't get there. I've probably installed and spent a good amount of time with every one of the top 50 distros over the years, and Linux is STILL a geek toy and a server OS.
The only way to make Linux a serious desktop competitor is to [1] change all the things in Linux itself that seem pointlessly alien and a pain in the ass to new adopters, AND [2] fix the application compatibility issues -- either make OO/LO handle MSO docs perfectly or make it very easy to install and run MSO under Wine. Fail on either of those challenges and Linux will continue to wallow in its niche.
That, or you can RTFA.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one. msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around. That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
I did read the article and you are completely mistaken. The problem is OpenOffice's failure at being compatible. If it paginates wrong an OpenOffice developer should fix that. If macros are missing an OpenOffice developer should add those.
A hybrid approach is a given in the sense that outsiders will be sending or expecting office documents even if you are 100% OpenOffice internally. Compatibility is not an unrealistic expectation, it is a business requirement.
The onus isn't on Microsoft to make sure open sores trolls can use subpar software to interact with their documents.
Bitches just can't handle the truth, yo: y'all can't come up with a reason to switch other than, 'ablooblooitsfree'. That's cool, and Imma let you finish, but business don't give a fuck 'bout free. Ain't no starvin' college bitches runnin' biz-ness.
Word. MICROSOFT WORD, BUSTA.
For instance, 0.25 hours * 300 employees * â10 per hour = â750 per day that they're spending on conversion. And that assumes the average wage is â10/hour; I would guess it's more.
And using the same counter example, that also means that - by my burping and farting example - burps and farts cost the government a whopping EUR 350 per days!!!
Let's outlaw burping and farting for employee in all branches of government, that will save the Greek economy!!!
In practice EUR 350 in a 100'000-big company is a drop of water in a bucket. Nobody with their right would buy your argument. Even thinking about your argument costs more money than the argument solves.
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Same with EUR 750 for a 300-small company, that's probably in the same ball-park that they're going to save if they switch to different different brands for various office supplies.
Keep in mind that the total budget for all the 300 salaries for the same 8-hour day would be EUR 24k. It completely dwarfs the EUR 750 you mention.
So unless Microsoft caves in and gives them a good rebate on the Microsoft Office license (which they could do, and apparently did in this case) it's not really worth considering.
And even including such a cheap license, the overall impact on the company will probably the small.
It's a ridiculously small price to pay.
Because overall, it's only about 15min per workday.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Opposed to peeing elsewhere? Yes, using the trashcan in my office *would* be more efficient, but one must draw the line somewhere.
My point exactly.
And for me, complaining that you lost 15min out of your whole workday goes into the same bucket (pun intended ;-P )
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A government organisation should be able to call the shots on these, insisting that people send stuff to /them/ in open formats. That would also be a great way to help their citizens move towards cheaper computing too, if the citizens want to do that, rather than pay for word-to-OO converters or whatever. Perhaps MS has been buying more of those nice dinners for the politicians though ?
Mussolini Word. Guaranteed to keep the trains running on time.
Our agency has been a MS organization since Wordperfect died. The agency has been moving to Office 360 since last spring, and the problems are numerous. When the network is down suddenly our entire organization is dead. Sharing files amongst workers take forever. There is no ingrained version control so Admins are frequent sending the wrong versions of document create even more problems for collaboration. Remote offices and Offline staff have pagination issues since they aren't using the same printers/copiers available in the main office. Anyone that thinks Office 360 is the solution is a fool. Our office refuses to give up our desktop installations, and is the only department in the organization that hasn't suffered any down time the the last two months due to Office 360. Funniest part is that in case emergencies, the tech department has asked all staff to use Google Docs.
I wonder if they calculated how much time people spend trying to fix formatting errors in Word that just appear when working in it. I always found it so frustrating to work in Word because the formatting would screw up and there was no easy way to fix it. Maybe they've fixed it now but I doubt it. That's why I always liked WordPerfect because you could always do the reveal codes and see exactly where the problem was. The reveal codes in Word didn't help at all.
Born too late to explore the earth.
Born too early to explore the stars.
Born just in time to explore dank macros.
This should be a case study in the efficacy of WYSIWYG editors in general.
"last year the organization decided to switch back to Microsoft and use its cloud productivity suite Office 365"
What were the terms of the financial deal Microsoft made with the municipality?
What was the name of the company tasked with the Open Office migration?
Free software advocates heckle town of Pesaro
So no training and the claims of the software vendor saying how it will be super easy to roll out.
Yeah, right.
Of course, when it costs 180% of what OOo did, we'll not hear of it.
"You have to deal with files from other folks outside the organization."
No you dont. NOBODY sends excel spreadsheets and raw DOC files around. This has always been the biggest straw man argument, it just does not happen.
When I get a contract from Company XYZ, It's a PDF it is not a DOCX. When Vendor ZZT sends me the latest catalog and price list, its a PDF file not a spreadsheet.
It is this way in 95% of the business world. nobody sends raw editable document files around.
Except the millions of lawyers who do it every day...
... Overall, Netics researchers estimated a yearly cost per user of Eur530.38 over a five-year period
... By contrast, for Office 365, the cost was Eur197.49 a year.
... Using Skype for Business and Yammer
This implies that the Netics report has figures to an accuracy of better than 0.01%, which I find, to put it mildly, surprising.
I was going to post something along the lines that I am prepared to believe that an organisation might find it more efficient to use Microsoft products instead of open source, but that given the unbelievable precison of the figures:
(1) I don't trust the figures, and (2) I don't trust anyone who prepares a report with unbelievably precise figures: at best, they are being lazy in not rounding the raw figures, or worse they don't understand what they are doing, or at worst they are being deliberately misleading:
Spurious accuracy seduces journalists time and time again
Wikipedia - False Precision
Slashdotters may enjoy the 3.5inch floppy diskette story. Personal computers with 3.5 inch diskette drives were commonly specified as having 88.9 mm drives in metric countries, 88.9 mm being the exact, though overly precise, conversion of 3.5 inches. In fact, the diskettes are 90 mm wide everywhere in the world per ISO/IEC 9529-1 specification, 3.5 inch being an approximation. (I had intended to put an "allegedly" in front of that story, but the Wikipedia article links to that ISO/IEC specification and to an HP specifications sheet with the width of the diskette drive being 3.5in/88.9 mm!)
That was what I intended to post. Then it occurred to me to look at the Microsoft Italy page linked in the ZDNet article:
https://news.microsoft.com/it-...
Using Google Translate gives:
... with OpenOffice annual spending per user has been estimated at more than 500 euros, much higher than the previous annual spending Office user of about 118 Euros ...
... The annual expenditure per user with Office 365 is also approximately 197 euros ...
... the net annual spending per user falls further to around 110 euros ...
The "more than 500" is fine and the "around 110" is probably ok.
Being picky, the "about 118" and "approximately 197" should probably be rounded.
Even so, that is much better than the ludicrous "precision" of the figures in the ZDNet article. I assume Federico Guerrini (for Italy's got tech) didn't invent the figures in the ZDNet article, so a plausible guess is:
1. Maybe the Netics researchers' report did give figures to "better" than 0.01% "accuracy".
2. Someone in news.microsoft.com/it had the good sense to round these figures for their news item.
3. The ZDNet article by Federico Guerrini used the figures directly from the Netics report.
If so, then I suggest that the Italian ZDNet reporters take their Microsoft colleagues out for a long lunch and learn how to treat statistics properly, including asking *really* hard and probing questions to any researchers who use inappropriate precision.
If not, then I am really intrigued as to why the ZDNet article has those "precise" figures.
I may have missed the point but
http://www.easysoft.com/applications/openoffice_org/odbc.html
Which part of the exercise are you having trouble with in Libre/Open? It may be a faff and unintuitive, but have you registered your datasource in base so that you can call it up and query it from the data sources dialog in calc?
http://www.easysoft.com/applications/openoffice_org/odbc.html
As much as I hate to say it
Office365 is very compelling
The alternatives just aren't attractive
VBA was a marketing masterstroke on Microsoft's part.
Yes it was. Particularly in the financial services sector. Those folks have tied themselves to that mast about as tightly as is possible.
If you've been using LibreOffice for five years, and if a significant fraction of your staff are non-programmers, then you're probably pretty much locked into that by now. There are only two ways to avoid it: either you only employ programmers (and make sure they have all the tools they want), or you lock down your system so that people can't write and save macros. Either way has its own costs, and isn't viable for everyone.
Nope - not locked in at all. We simply don't have a huge need for macros for what we do. (manufacturing) Any we do write are pretty basic and would be easily replicated in a new system. Most VBA code is basically people trying to stuff 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound bag. We tend to use tools that are actually designed for the jobs we need them for. Basically we use spreadsheets as prototyping tools but if we have a very complicated spreadsheet we figure that probably is an indication we need a piece of software to do that task better - usually some sort of database.
My basic take on office suite macros is that they get used FAR more than is actually necessary or helpful. Sure sometimes they are the right solution but it's been a rare case where I couldn't find an adequate solution that didn't require them.
Take a look at
https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Referencing_a_Cell_in_Another_Document
https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/References_to_Other_Sheets_and_Referencing_URLs
and
https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Database_Functions
You can connect to anything that can be loaded, including exell, external .ods files, web page tables, and text files and search it using the database functions. The database functions are not SQL, and you cant query a SQL database directly but calc is not a database. n.b. Oracle, DB2 and MariaDB use SQL so you are being redundant to exaggerate here. On the other hand indirect access is not in any way hard, so long as you are reading data without relying on imitate updates, you can set your database to dump the relevant subset as a tsv/csv in an accessible location (i.e. URL) and use it.
If that's really the best you can come up with, then you're about 14, mentally deficient, or both.
"lack of compatibility between the proprietary and the open source systems" There are two key points to be taken here: - governments big and small have to opt for open, free document formats that are not created by a megacompany like Microsoft. OOXML is the most convoluted and ridiculously complicated office file format ever invented, so bad that even the inventors (Microsoft) cannot make software that fully complies with that standard. - OOo (although who still uses that?) and LO need to have much better MSO file support. The issue here is that I could submit plenty of samples to the LO folks, but I fail to find any avenue to get an NDA from them because most of my samples are business docs that I would need to spend hours on to sanitize before submitting. At that point I have to throw the towel in.