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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.
you can open older versions with other programs, but if your spreadsheet has lots of macros, functions or is tied to SQL analysis or reporting services or some other big data server you might have issues if you switch. the basic parts of excel are a commodity. it's the nice features that some people need that are worth paying for like the ability to do data analysis at the desktop instead of asking someone to write a report in cognos or SQL or whatever
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.
"Free" is how they sell the change to the public. In reality, the open suites simply cannot compete with MS Office on the basis of features. I've used Linux since 1992, and have used Open Office and Libre Office at home for years. But some tasks which would be considered simple in Excel are impossible in Libre. For example, I can create a dashboard in Excel fairly easily, that pulls tickets from the helpdesk SQL database, and gives me a histogram of ages. I have found no way to do that in Libre.
For home use, I would definitely recommend Libre for anyone who doesn't have a particular reason to choose MS Office. But businesses can easily paint themselves into a corner by getting rid of Access.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
MS is usually bound by law to physically have government data stored in an EU country and to never move it outside. This applies to O365 too.
This is coming from someone who has worked in the EU in various government agencies and offices.
Day 1 is long past. You have to deal with files from other folks outside the organization. Conversion back and forth between Microsoft and Open Office is glitchy and unfortunately everybody you deal with has a word, excel or powerpoint file to give you.
In my experience, transfer of a document from one copy of MS Office to another is not necessarily trouble-free. Sometimes MS Office isn't even compatible with itself.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
"t's like saying you built a tractor powered by a Ferrari engine and it's not working as well as a custom built John Deere"
Your problem. It was not a Ferrari what you were looking for, but a Lamborghini.
Well, except that Excel has the ability to query not only SQL, but also Oracle, DB2, MariaDB, other Excel spreadsheets, web pages, and flat files. LibreOffice... None.