Italian Military To Save Up To 29 Million Euro By Migrating To LibreOffice (softpedia.com)

Reader prisoninmate writes: Following on last year's bold announcement that they will attempt to migrate from proprietary Microsoft Office products to an open-source alternative like LibreOffice, Italy's Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro with this move. We said it before, and we'll say it again, this is the smartest choice a government institution can do. And to back up this statement, the Italian Ministry of Defense announced that they expect to save between 26 and 29 million Euro over the next few years by migrating to the LibreOffice open-source software for productivity and adopting the Open Document Format (ODF).

Comments

A jillion lira

[Anonymous Coward]

and they'll park the thing on a sidewalk!

Re:A jillion lira

[knightghost]

Plus the spreadsheet could have cornered the market overnight by allowing infinite rows, but someone in the "M$ compatibility team" whined.

Re:A jillion lira

[rubycodez]

thunderbird or whatever

Re:A jillion lira

[chr1st1anSoldier]

thunderbird or whatever

Thunderbird works great if you're using IMAP or POP accounts. But if you're using Exchange then you have to pay for a plugin for it to work with MAPI and even then I don't think you get full functionality. Sure, you could connect to your exchange or O365 account as IMAP but then you lose things like calendar and address book integration. There doesn't seem to be a decent free client that works with Exchange besides EM client and I think you have to purchase a business license if your a business and want to use it.

Re:A jillion lira

[rubycodez]

was replying to person who said "Outlook"

Exchange or O365 ever easier to replace, just throw that garbage in the dumpster and use something else. plenty of both proprietary and free alternatives. or continue to enjoy the malware infestations that come on a regular basis with MIcrosoft's badly designed rubbish

Awesome

[NeoGeo64]

Italy is officially smarter than the US.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Italy is officially smarter than the US.

There is no reason every government at every level in every country cannot move to LibreOffice/OpenOffice and ODF immediately. The documents created in 1990 unfortunately are not accessible today if Microsoft Office was likely the "standard du jour."

Re:Awesome

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Until they experience the SHIT that is Libre Office's failed attempt at styles. If you want to write something longer than 5 pages, its utterly useless.

Re:Awesome

[MightyYar]

Word's styles are better, but it makes up for this by making tables and pictures infuriating. Scientific papers are painful in Word.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

So is Microsoft Office when it corrups things over 5 pages long... :)

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

So is Microsoft office when it corrupts things over 5 pages long.... :-)

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why anything scientific or longer that 5 pages needs to be written in Latex. Had to write a 100 page term paper on Word. By page 30 it chocked a mobile i7 Haswell with 8GB ram.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

So is Microsoft office when it corrupts things over 5 pages long.... :-)

It doesn't help LibreOffice to use arguments against MS Office that a ton of users know are wrong from their own experience.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole look/UI on the latest versions of the Office suite stinks. The ribbon is utter shit.

At work we have thousands of Microsoft Office documents saved in older formats which the latest versions of Office do not open. Yet in most cases Libre Office does. Admittedly it doesn't get everything right but at least you can read the damned documents (and then save them in an open format)

Seriously Office is expensive, has a crapulent UI, doesn't open files created with older versions of the same bloody programs from the same bloody company, uses proprietary file formats and is an all round PITA to use.

Why would anyone sane use it again ?

Re:Awesome

[thsths]

Yes, when it comes to writing serious documents, most office packages struggle.

Word has been getting a lot better, especially the new equation editor is miles ahead of the competition, and although not quite as good as LaTeX, good enough for most purposes.

Styles are a contentious issues. LibreOffice has a very logical implementation of styles, but it only works if you are 100% disciplined and approach your styles with great planning and foresight. Microsoft styles have been getting a lot better, and they have always been easier to use. Again, Microsoft is good enough in most applications.

Tables are painful in any program I have used, but Excel and the LibreOffice spreadsheet can deal with them reasonably well.

 

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole look/UI on the latest versions of the Office suite stinks. The ribbon is utter shit.

Oh, it's this meme again.

The ribbon reduces the effort required to find the function you want. It's not buried in a million levels of menus.

Re:Awesome

[jellomizer]

"Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro "

The proof will really how well the deployment is managed. The cost per seat of license with Microsoft office may be mitigated by 1 hours of lost productivity per month having to deal with a system that the users may not be familiar with. End users unlike normal IT folks sometimes will freak out the tiniest details.

Re:Awesome

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Libre Office's styles IN THEORY are OK, but they DON'T FUCKING WORK, the implementation of that (and a billion other things) is so buggy its just plain unusable. I have 50 page manuals. The actual font, point size, etc for each logical style is UTTERLY RANDOM, if you go to a document, hit enter, select "H3" (for example) LO picks ANY arbitrary font, point size, etc with no rhyme or reason to it. This has been true for at least the last 5 or 10 versions of the software.
Try to make a horizontal rule in LO (or OO, its no better). You simply cannot do it without using some truly bizarro-world hack.
Frames, especially if they contain tables, are an UTTER DISASTER (and putting a table inside a frame is the ONLY way to make text flow around it, its not like you can avoid doing this in anything but the simplest document).
I could go on for hours. The program is a bleeding disaster. Its been years since I used Word, so I can't even begin to comment on what the situation is there, but LO is frankly just shit. Again, its fine for writing a 5 page memo where you just don't really give a crap what the formatting is or if everything is buggered, beyond that you need something like LyX, Scribus, or just plain write your stuff in LaTeX and live with the pain of constantly re-exporting it as you tweak every little thing into shape. At least you CAN get what you want, and Scribus actually has pretty good style management, for what it does. Problem with any of these tools is they're just not that good for WRITING. My current solution for serious writing where layout quality is going to matter is to just write the bulk text in LO and simply cut and past it all back into text frames in Scribus. You can do pretty large dumps of text if you know how, so its not THAT bad. The lesson is, each tool for what it is good for, and word processors are NOT good for doing quality layout, you have to use a separate application (I'm sure the various commercial DTP tools will work well too, but Scribus really is pretty good).

Re: Awesome

[KenHansen]

Scientific papers are painful in Word.

Do Italian soldiers write a lot of scientific papers?

Re: Awesome

[KenHansen]

How much is being spent to teach users how to work with Libre Office? If you read the article they are investing in E-learning to teach users how to work with Libre Office. This transition will take over 5 years, based on expiration of existing office licenses - the cost of that training eats into their 'expected' savings.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Word is utter garbage from so many points of view, ranging from the UI to the handling of nested list to inserted images to documents of any greater length than the mandatory "Your mum doesn't work here" sign, it's not even funny. It's a veritable conglomerate of various functions and task, none of which works really well. It's a superficially easy looking piece of shit, which starts breaking down in all kinds of way once you try to use it seriously. And all these flaws has been known for years, some of them even for decades.

You Word-retards who are too afraid to ever try anything else really don't help your case when you're pretending none of these issues and many, many, many more exist while over-inflating every single problem that any alternative might have. It just makes you look all the more silly.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like user error or a problem with your computer. Or you're just trolling.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a ~50 page textbook for a music course with LO and felt a little of your pain - finding a reliable way to make music notation writeable with custom fonts was 'interesting'. But my experience was nowhere near as bad as yours. It was a far superior experience to trying the same project with MS office - that choked so badly after a few images you couldn't even scroll the screen and this book had them on every page.

Re:Awesome

[chipschap]

I published a 500+ page book using LO, and had no problem managing and using multiple styles. I had to put a little effort into learning how to do it but in the end it all worked well.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

You Word-retards who are too afraid to ever try anything else really don't help your case when you're pretending none of these issues and many, many, many more exist while over-inflating every single problem that any alternative might have. It just makes you look all the more silly.

So, again using arguments that the other side knows for a fact is wrong. This "Word-retard that is too afraid to ever try anything else" have used Wordstar quite a bit, I used WordPerfect *a lot* (4.2 ftw), but my all time favorite that I used professionally for years was XyWrite (the macro, shortcut and formatting ability was extremely effective). For a while OS/2 was my main OS at work, and Lotus SmartSuite my office suite. And not to make this a novel, I have used and tested a variety of programs in the office/word processor since, including both OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

But, I have also used Word *a lot*. In daily work, and including writing 3 illustrated published booklets (~100 pages) where print original with layout, screenshots/illustrations, captions, automated table of contents, automated footnotes, etc was done directly in Word.

But, yeah, you made my point again, thanks.

Re:Awesome

[SQLGuru]

The ribbon has been the interface since 2007. It's 2016. Look at how much Android has changed in that time (picking a non-Microsoft product). As the industry learns more, things get refined and improved......if it's disliked, they revert (Win8 --> Win10). The Ribbon is still around.....probably because it's not as terrible as you think it is. Move on....you've lost this fight.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. And stop trying to portray your subjective opinions as universal truth.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Your point? Yeah right. Insert image. Save document. Move image to another page. Save. Watch the fun begin. Same fucking buggy piece of shit all the way back to Word 6.0. Or make a nested bullet list. Now have fun trying to stop Word from fucking around with it. Yeah, your point. lol.

Word is a broken piece of garbage, and I don't care about your made up bullshit about what you have and haven't done. Word has been a stinker overloaded with useless garbage, a true "jack of all trades, sucks ass at everything" since at least as far back as Word 6, and there are *still* bugs in it that goes back to those days. So just get the fuck of my lawn.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

So, when you conveniently just accuse me of lying to maintain your world view, I know for a fact that there is a ton of people who have used Word the same way I have. And that, like me, have significant experience with many alternatives (that you so extremely condescendingly and narrow minded claim no-one who disagree with you have dared to). You completely missed that I wasn't at all saying Word was the best for everyone, quite the opposite, I was just saying that hyperbole claims about Word a lot of people know from their own experience is dead wrong doesn't help promote LibreOffice at all, quite the opposite..

Re:Awesome

[tibit]

I find it easiest when professional documentation/manuals/books are done in DocBook and then processed into whatever presentation you desire. Of course you won't write DocBook by hand, use LyX for that.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, move on to libreoffice and you won't have to see the ribbon shit anymore.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I did my thesis in Word in 1994 and it worked just fine. My classmates spent a lot of time struggling with Latex, I was using Word at work and saw no reason to make it hard on myself.

http://www.bio.fsu.edu/~astuy/thesis

Re:Awesome

[rnturn]

"The ribbon reduces the effort required to find the function you want."

Uh..... no it doesn't. Sure, it could be merely my experience but I've spent more time searching for things on the ribbon that used to be easily found in the multi-level menu. I'm not a full-time Office user, though. Maybe it's file processing nirvana for someone who uses it all day long but, as someone who only uses it when occasionally when required at work, I feel like I'm having to re-learn the darned user interface whenever I come back to it.

Re: Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Until they adopt one of their own. Because at the end of the day, when you stop whining and decide to learn the damn thing, it's actually quite nice.

Re: Awesome

[stooo]

Nope. The cost of training is also needed on new office versions.
The real saving and also time investment comes from the cleanup of all old crappy excel based, script ridden spreadsheets used as pseudo databases or worse, as data analysis.
Munich did this right, and managed that cleanup nicely.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have the words for how stupid this guy sounds. He is spouting pure nonsense and when you call him on it he reverts to a 10 year old and calls people word-retards. How pathetic.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

The menu-based interface is great for people who prefer word recognition/association.
The icon-based interface (ribbon) is great for people who prefer image recognition/association.

Personally I hate guessing what an icon stands for (and consequently I abhor the ribbon), but I can see how someone unfamiliar with Microsoft Word could more easily figure out how to bold text by clicking on the picture of a bolded letter than by hunting for Format->Font->Bold.

Re:Awesome

[mattventura]

Old UI: I could have two toolbars crammed full of buttons, allowing me to find 99% of common things without ever touching menus.

New UI: Lots of switching between ribbon tabs to access common functions.

How is that more efficient again?

Re:Awesome

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, its kind of a tossup between DocBook and LaTeX. If you have nothing but text, code samples, and that sort of stuff, and maybe a very few simple illustrations, then DocBook is great, and has some real advantages in being easily transformed (this is a real boon if you were to for instance want to convert the text into Wiki pages, a very straightforward XSLT can do that, whereas with LaTeX you're kinda at best going to need multiple steps that each probably introduces some errors). LaTeX OTOH certainly has the advantages in terms of orthography, complex tables, etc.

I really have come to the conclusion that if what you REALLY want is high quality PDF output, and/or output to print, where you have any kind of more elaborate layout, Scribus is the better tool. I like the idea of doing it in LaTeX, but the number of round trips you need to make is just a killer.

Re:Awesome

[thewolfkin]

The whole look/UI on the latest versions of the Office suite stinks. The ribbon is utter shit.

The ribbon reduces the effort required to find the function you want. It's not buried in a million levels of menus.

this only holds true if what you want is one of the 10 most common functions under five pre-determined tabs. The just last night I had no idea how to find out how to adjust column text settings in ribbon Word. Where as I had it open in LibreOffice and it was fairly easy to figure out Pick one heading that I think it might be, Pick another and what do you know it IS there. I'm STILL not sure how I found it under Ribbon.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Move on....you've lost this fight.

Actually, he hasn't, and one aspect of it is the switching between the ribbon interface and the menu interface. WPS Office - which uses MS Office formats exclusively - has a switchable interface. The user can switch between a ribbon and menu interface. The ribbon is exactly like MS Office, while the menu is exactly like MS Office used to be. Microsoft claimed that that was "too hard" for them.

Re: Awesome

[jgfenix]

No, it doesn't. With older versions and with Libreoffice I know where to find almost everything. With Ribbon many times I have to Google (for very normal things). Ironically I thing that for tablets is a good interface.

Re:Awesome

[MightyYar]

Just opened your thesis. For what you did, Word is fine. You didn't even use features like cross references or styles. It looks like you used spaces and tabs instead of justification. A picture pasted into the center of the page is indeed handled correctly. Using Word like a typewriter works fine, but some of us find that very frustrating.

Re: Awesome

[MightyYar]

Do they write a lot of anything? I suspect they mostly fill in the blanks in templates. But I'm completely ignorant.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Having fun talking to yourself, autofellater? The one getting called out, with specific examples of what is broken in Word, and have been for years, is you, Mr "Word Is The Best Thing Ever". And you have no counter to it. At all.

Re:Awesome

[UnknownSoldier]

> The ribbon reduces the effort required to find the function you want.

Assuming the window width is wide enough to show ALL the icons.

The menu bar doesn't play these shenanigans of "Guess where I'm hiding?" games.

Re:Awesome

[UnknownSoldier]

Nonsense.

Back in 2006 I put together 192 page PDF in OpenOffice 1.x or 2.x. Never had any problems with styles the way I did with Office corrupting them.

And I abused the hell out of styles too.

Re:Awesome

[ericloewe]

Funny how you're doing exactly that.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not a big fan of the ribbon, but here is what does work well for me. First, learn and use keyboard shortcuts. Second, move the Quick Access Toolbar from above the ribbon to below the ribbon and add all your often-used items to it.

There are people I work with that complain about the Ribbon but don't use the QAT. I have no sympathy for them.

Re:Awesome

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I love it when people come out with this crap "well, it didn't happen to me, so its BULLSHIT!" Dude, I have MANY documents written in OO, LO, etc of various vintages and types. It happens in ALL of them, and its happened for at least the last 2-3 years. This isn't open for fucking debate, I can demonstrate it at abso-fucking-lutely any moment in time on almost any document. I know ALL ABOUT styles in LO, its A BUG. I don't know exactly WHY it especially plagues me and not you, but calling something bullshit that I can see with my own eyes will just get you told you are full of crap.

Re:Awesome

[Tough Love]

Funny how you did exactly that.

Re: Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it just works. Thats why.

Re: Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you even used word? I just performed those same steps. Took less than 3 seconds and it all worked. I think you are just looking for something to complain about.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty anal-retentive regarding styles, and I never, ever had this issue with LO/OO. I write something, I press ctrl+1/2/3 depending on the style I want for headings, for example, and bam, by sentence is the correct style, correct font, correct numbering if I want numbering... Everything just works and is soooo9 much better and more intuitive than this piece of crap that Word is...
I really don't know what's wrong with your install, but your example is just as anecdotal as mine, and I guess it LO was as piss-poor as you say, people would have complained about it quite loudly. They didn't.

Re:Awesome

[digitect]

Hmm... my experiences differ from yours. I find LibreOffice's styles very useful and predictable. I have 100+ of my business templates in Writer .ott format and they do great. I've got many thousands of documents associated with my architectural practice, some very technical, some heavily graphical. Some tips:

1. F11 to pop open the Styles and Formatting sidebar (undocked is my preference)
2. Use Ctrl+M to clear direct formatting.
3. Keep a master template of styles to re-import into the others to ensure uniformity. (Make sure to check Overwrite or you're wasting your time.)
4. Don't confuse paragraph styles with character styles. (Use Page and Frame styles for extra credit.)

Of course, NO word processor is going to do layout like a true graphics workhorse like Illustrator, InDesign, Scribus, or Inkscape. If you are looking for 1200 dpi accuracy, LO is the wrong software. But if you're looking for general office functionality, I don't know anything better, free or not. (And my first word processor was Claris MacWrite II about 1989, with long stints of WordPerfect and Word up until 2013 when I went pure OO.o/LO.)

Re:Awesome

[bingoUV]

Or say that the Italian Military won, and Ribbon lost?

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

/. users have posted before that no one Office program fits the need of all users.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using Libre/OpenOffice for over 10 years and In my experience LibreOffice is much better at long documents than MS Word. I have written several documents of around 50,000 words with it.

Re:Awesome

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, I know the program inside and out. There is a very straightforward bug. Any time you select one of the styles from your library, LO is liable to just arbitrarily set the font, point size, and other font attributes to some incorrect values. These will generally be values that are used in SOME style SOMEWHERE in the document. If you are going by the default styles that exist in any document when you open it, the general ones that form the default template, then setting something like 'h1' will USUALLY give you 16 point bold liberation sans, but because liberation serif is the body text font, it MAY select that instead! It may select 14 point (which is the h2 and h3 point size) as well, or even 12 point (body text) or possibly some other point size. The same is true for setting ANY style, and it will usually get 'stuck' for a while, insisting on the same incorrect values for a while, and then just arbitrarily reverting to something else! Beyond that the program gets VERY confused about what elements have what styles under editing. I constantly find that even though various parts of the document have the correct font, size, etc that magically LO now considers them to be part of some heading or other element style that is adjacent. This usually manifests when you build a TOC and all sorts of garbage shows up in it. You can't just easily fix this crap either, you basically have to just find a point in the document beyond the mess where its not screwed up anymore and systematically cut and paste text from the 'bad' part until you can delete the whole mess. In the latest (5.x) series LO releases I THINK they've FINALLY squashed this bug, but its hard to say for sure.

Believe me, I've used this and OO before it for MANY years, since OO was first released. I know all the OO/LO applications reasonably well. I haven't even owned a copy of MS anything since the 90's. Although I don't handle a lot of documents that require using the most complex features of LO write, I certainly have quite a few documents, templates, etc. This is a universal and perpetual problem with write. Has been for years. Really, if I was a little less busy and the code base wasn't such a vast and frighteningly complex beast I'd go in and try to fix it. I suspect there are just one or two basic data structure issues, maybe its a concurrency bug in the code that manages styles. Perhaps its COHERENCY, that could explain how if you were say on a single core machine or certain processors with certain cache design you might not even see a problem. It sure don't work right on an I7-4770S...

Re: Awesome

[BDF]

Did that. It's still crappy though.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

This, of course, is a complete lie. I challenge you to post that document for everyone to see. Put up or shut up.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange I just finished writing a book with 490 pages using Libre Office with no problems.

Re: Awesome

[theatrecade]

So in effect M$ Went from underwhelming users by hiding fuctions in a menu to overwhelming them but putting everything on the in your face interface and named it Ribbon....

Re:Awesome

[lsatenstein]

Italy is officially smarter than the US.

So are many other countries. Blame the difference on the cost of university education.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people can be fed with €29 millions ? With your money you buy anything, with public money you don't look for Styles !!!

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Until they experience the SHIT that is Libre Office's failed attempt at styles. If you want to write something longer than 5 pages, its utterly useless.

Sorry, experience here is directly the opposite. If you would care to substantiate...

Free is not

[s.petry]

One of the most overlooked items in these discussions is that Libre Office does not make it "free". "Free license cost" is the correct framing, but that is not what I read.

Don't misunderstand my point, I'm anti-MS and want people to succeed in migrating away from their products. Many Governments have gone back to MS after people point out what I start with. "See, that Free software cost money so it failed to be free and we need MS again!" The expectations have to be correct or projects, especially Government projects, end up failing for the wrong reasons.

Re:Free is not

[loonycyborg]

Both kinds of office are extremely inefficient and require a lot of training to use effectively. But even if they can't even afford the costs of training with libreoffice then ms office is even more likely to be a failure. Many people think that ms office is obvious and known to everyone, but going, say, from ms office xp to ms office 2003 will take as much training as going to libreoffice. And, naturally, MS will always expect them to use latest and greatest things with greatest retraining costs. So, you could as well go with libreoffice in any case. If you fail with it then you would fail with office 2016 either.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

Those governments have clearly no benefit of having an executive CIO of sorts that would hide the complexity from the political decision makers. They should only have to see the numbers and flows of money to choose the right solution for them.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry - they will save 15 million euros in three years when they migrate back!

Re:Free is not

[xtronics]

Actually, M$-office was their best product in MO - now suffering from bloat and trying too hard to make hard things to easy.

A couple of years ago OpenOrfice sort of sucked - today libreoffice is quite usable and getting better. (The fork really helped things ).

So - is it time to short M$ stock? Not sure - they get a huge amount of money from government contracts - seem to have bought the right congressmen etc..

The business model for today's large companies has changed as we drifted into being a 'cartel Socialist' country - don't compete in the market place - compete in buying influence..

Re:Free is not

[s.petry]

Fair points. I was not in any way intending "end user training costs" because that is quite different. Most companies don't pay people to learn Word or Excel, it's expected that you know or can figure it out. Tell 99% of those people that Writer is Word and they will never know the difference. Power users developing macros and such will, and sure their training will remain the same.

There is still a helpdesk needed, there is still provisioning needed, there is still patching needed, etc... From the SA standpoint there is little difference between Libre and MS Office.

Re:Free is not

[peragrin]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud. Governments can't store their work on microsofts servers.

I expect to see more and more of this as Microsoft pushes more and more cloud based control of their software.

Yes I do know that you can use office 2016 without a network connection, but Microsoft is combining everything under a single login. Email calendar office 365 Windows 10 all tied to a single user login. All tied to the cloud. Governments militaries, even most business can't have any of their data exposed to the cloud that way.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

don't compete in the market place - compete in buying influence..

I'm not an economist but it would seem to be reasonable to argue that for every innovation sufficiently powerful to generate a new market there are stages of which in only some of them the real competition and healthy market conditions prevail. In the others, the backroom negotiations, immoral business and "support activities", and personal and irrational preferences dominate. The market space for Office-like solution is matured enough to be replaced with something evolutionary or even revolutionary since we appear to be in the state of letting personal preferences and fears to govern acquisition decisions. Office packages have become a fashionable commodity.

Re: Free is not

[KenHansen]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud. Governments can't store their work on microsofts servers. I expect to see more and more of this as Microsoft pushes more and more cloud based control of their software.

Of course, you know that MS is making the entire Azure Cloud stack part of the next iteration of Windows Server, thereby allowing gov't entities to build their own private cloud that takes the place of MS public cloud, right? The gov't can run their own cloud on their own hardware in their own datacenter over their own private network.

Re:Free is not

[Grishnakh]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud. Governments can't store their work on microsofts servers.

Yes, they can. There is no technical reason they can't. They just need to adjust their laws and policies to match Microsoft's offerings and policies.

Email calendar office 365 Windows 10 all tied to a single user login. All tied to the cloud. Governments militaries, even most business can't have any of their data exposed to the cloud that way.

You keep making this mistake. Yes, they can. They absolutely can. If they want to use Microsoft software, then they better get used to working this way.

I for one hope Microsoft takes a very hard stance here and makes it impossible for anyone (including enterprises and governments) to not have a network connection when using Microsoft software. That includes computers handling classified information. These computers need to have internet connections so that they can "phone home" to Microsoft. Who do these upstart customers think they are, trying to tell Microsoft how to architect their software?

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

The day we start re-writing data security law to accommodate handing our shit over Microsoft...

Re:Free is not

[gweihir]

I have used LibreOffice for presentations and some text work for quite a while. My take is that you do not save much (but also do not pay more) on the template side. You do save on the license fees, and suddenly you are not OS-locked anymore. (I have had zero problems moving documents between Linux and Windows version of LibreOffice). In addition, you get rid of the brain-dead "ribbon" interface that wastes precious vertical screen area. And another angle is that ODF fulfills archiving requirements that MS-Office formats do not and where you have to convert everything to PDF-A or invest even more effort on MS Office. With LibreOffice
you just archive the ODF documents people are saving anyways.

So as a tactical move, it has limited merit, but as a strategic move, anybody staying with MS Office is just stupid.

Re:Free is not

[SQLGuru]

You do know that you can unpin the ribbon if that little bit of screen space is at such a premium, right? Most of the time, I'm not running Word full screen and I'm zooming out so that fonts don't look so huge......the space the ribbon takes up isn't really that big of a deal to me. Maybe you need a new laptop with something more than 1366x768 resolution.

Re:Free is not

[gweihir]

If it is not an issue to you, why would you conclude it is not an issue to me? Maybe I am just able to keep more of a page in focus at a time than you?

Re:Free is not

[BlckAdder]

I assure you that governments can and do store their work on Microsoft's servers, regularly.

In the U.S., there are many government agencies already using Microsoft Azure Government and Office 365 in government cloud, including HHS, DoD, FAA, NIST, and the U.S. Army. Microsoft is on track to have their cloud FedRAMP "High" certified this summer, which will open the door to even greater usage, as security is one of the last arguments of the agencies who have not yet moved.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as "The Cloud" can be contained as an independent SharePoint server(s), the Govt will be happy. Merging SharePoint and Word/Excel/PPT should not be terribly difficult, and MS gets to charge more (lots more) for the "new" SharePoint while branding it as a single-stop business management environment.

Re: Free is not

[cyber-vandal]

There is still a local version. Microsoft aren't about to kill the market that keeps them afloat.

Re: Free is not

[cyber-vandal]

In other words everyone's use case is identical to yours and moving to LO doesn't require any changes to business processes, templates, macros, complex formulas and graphs or anything else because it's 100% compatible with MSO.

Re: Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

But anything cloud is not private. It all ends up in Utah.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm working in an Italian research istitute, many colleagues already use libreoffice for their scientific documents, i'm working now on a 200-pages doc.
We have many burocratic problems with external clouds and month subscriptions, so when Adobe jumped to cloud and subscriptions, we jumped to scribus, inkscape and other softwares, problem solved.

Re:Free is not

[thegarbz]

Both kinds of office are extremely inefficient and require a lot of training to use effectively.

False. One of them provides intrinsic training for free. You don't need to train a single person who is going through school right now how to use Microsoft Office. Their interface has been stable since the introduction of the ribbon and the cost of training is intrinsically offset by it's popularity.

That's not to say that LibreOffice is hard to use or it can't be figured out. Quite the opposite actually I find it quite intuitive. But most people will need to learn LibreOffice, whereas if you employ anyone who's actually had a job before or recently finished school chances are they know how to use word already. In fact I'd bet my bottom dollar they used it to apply for the job.

Re:Free is not

[thegarbz]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud.

News to me.

But then you seem to be confusing Office 2016 (the standalone program heavily integrated not into the cloud but into Sharepoint!), and their cloud product Office 365 which is a completely different product.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

Your tone suggests seriousness but your position & answers are laughable. Perhaps my sarcasm metre needs adjustment.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud. Governments can't store their work on microsofts servers.

I expect to see more and more of this as Microsoft pushes more and more cloud based control of their software.

Yes I do know that you can use office 2016 without a network connection, but Microsoft is combining everything under a single login. Email calendar office 365 Windows 10 all tied to a single user login. All tied to the cloud. Governments militaries, even most business can't have any of their data exposed to the cloud that way.

No so sure that government agencies will not go to online office suite. At my old US federal agency (retired in January) we used Google Mail/Drive/Calendar etc.

Re: Free is not

[gweihir]

Not everybodies view on things is as limited to their own person as yours obviously is.

Re: Free is not

[cyber-vandal]

It's not limited to my point of view but that of the current business that I work for where using Microsoft Office isn't "stupid" but the only option given the amount of work that would be required to convert Word templates and Excel spreadsheet to work with LO. We present data from SQL Server in Excel spreadsheetswhich looks possible in Calc but requires us to set up ODBC connections for each database and each user's machine. It saves a great deal of development time for us as the users generally just want to see the data in a simple format. I'm sure that LO is fine for some uses but it's not a drop in replacement for MSO.

Re: Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

So you locked yourself into the MS ecosystem and are justifying it with a sunk cost argument.
Here, have a cookie.

Re: Free is not

[cyber-vandal]

'I' didn't do anything but that is the reason why my org and many others haven't migrated. It will cost too much to move.

Re:Free is not

[bingoUV]

Both kinds of office are extremely inefficient and require a lot of training to use effectively.

False. One of them provides intrinsic training for free

False. "One of them" doesn't provide intrinsic training, society provides training at the cost of other software that cannot be changed at the whim of a single corporation.

Their interface has been stable since the introduction of the ribbon

And until next time Microsoft finds it profitable to change the interface.

Re: Free is not

[bingoUV]

Calc but requires us to set up ODBC connections for each database and each user's machine. It saves a great deal of development time for us as the users

When you use the word "us" - the first person plural, someone talking to you can use "you" - the second person plural : for the same concept. So the equivalent of the "you" addressed to you from your perspective can be "I", or "Us", or even "We" at times.

Re: Free is not

[cyber-vandal]

I'm not responsible for the decision to use Microsoft products so sneering at me is kind of pointless.

If you have a magical low cost way of switching to OSS feel free to share. If you don't then try to realise that just because it works for you doesn't mean that it's a good fit for everyone.

Describing people as stupid for not spending large amounts of money for hard to justify benefits doesn't win the argument, providing a way to migrate does. So far there isn't one.

Re: Free is not

[bingoUV]

Free grammar lessons. Take it or leave it.

Those who "leave it" are sometimes described as stupid. But not by me.

Re:Free is not

[Anonymous Coward]

They just need to adjust their laws and policies to match Microsoft's offerings and policies.

And if they don't, the US Department of State and the Department of Commerce are always there to assist the transformation to the right kid of legislation and policies. And if that doesn't work Microsoft can always turn to the Department of Defense.

Re: Free is not

[cyber-vandal]

Thank you for your condescension. It means a lot to me.

Re:Free is not

[Hognoxious]

So the people who do the spying aren't concerned about spying, and therefore nobody else should be?

Re:Free is not

[Gussington]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud. Governments can't store their work on microsofts servers.

That's not true. I'm working on a govt contract right now and we are 90% cloud based. We have independent audits for technical, security, accounting, privacy etc and we always pass.
Our only requirement is geographic location, data must be stored within the government's borders, and obviously all security policies must be complaint (end to end encryption solves most of those)

Re: Free is not

[KenHansen]

'Cloud' is the new 'mainframe' - there are 'clouds' that are not accessible on/connected to the public internet.

How long?

[jawtheshark]

How long a Microsoft representative goes on a friendly business lunch followed by a good golf game (or the Italian equivalent) with the people who make decisions?

These government switches rarely last long because it sets bad precedents. Luckily the decision makers in my government are so heavily convinced that proprietary software is "best of breed", what we'll never see any important use of open source software anywhere at the state.

Writer is fine...

[chispito]

Writer is a passable substitute for MS Word, but Calc doesn't come close to Excel, and most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel. It's the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer..."

Re:Writer is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Impress is actual butchery.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own a copy of Office and use LibreOffice for all my office-y needs outside of work, including using Impress to make presentations periodically. I like it fine for the most part.

Re:Writer is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

and let's not even mention base - for those of us that need something that can do actual work like integrate multiple different data sources together for adhoc work - local data + link to Oracle + link to Postgresql all in the same view....

For most LibreOffice is fine - but then again for most they don't really absolutely need an office type application - that can't be done with more specific tools (think call centre, service people etc)

I use LibreOffice for quite a few things though - would prefer they got a made a cloudy 'mod_libreoffice' running though.

Re:Writer is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Writer is a passable substitute for MS Word, but Calc doesn't come close to Excel, and most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel. It's the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer..."

This is why you won't see it in the US DoD, along with:

-MS Access is the only database a regular user has access to, so Access style "SQL" and VB is required.
-MS Project (and Project server) are in heavy use. I don't think LibreOffice has an equivalent for these (?)
-SharePoint lock in (and no, we can't access the SQL Server backend to use as a real DB instead of MS Access in most cases)
-Compatibility with whatever the Prime Defense contractor for that program is using, and we cannot compel them to use anything specific without something coming from OSD [Secretary of Defense's Office] or Congress that mandates compatibility requirements.
-Complete and Total PowerPoint compatibility is required as we spend 45% of our time in meetings, not including time preparing for meetings. PP is also used to save images and as poor-mans Visio. PowerPoint slides undergo more revisions than 200 page engineering documents, and if a design spec is presented differently in the slides and the report from which the slides came, the slides version will be used 70% of the time.

CAPTCHA: doomsday

Re:Writer is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

That and how many things will have to be fixed when they are moved from Excel to Calc. I know people who still have lotus 123 installed because of the time it will take to convert a lot of files and fix the issues that come up.

The other part is outlook. Outlook is something people fight hard to keep, if they were running exchange as the email server then really fight. IMAP just doesn't compare and web systems like gmail also do not. It isn't to say you can't make it work, it just isn't as good.

Re:Writer is fine...

[nephilimsd]

Is using the features present in Excel now considered abuse? In my position, I see and create a lot of Excel documents specifically because I can create OLEDB connections to transactional systems, aggregate information, and create visualizations all in one place without having to go through the long, painful, and often flawed process of creating a data warehouse / data marts, creating SSIS connections between all the difference sources, then use another product such as Tableau or even SSRS to run the summaries. While all of that is getting set up, the organization gets no visibility into current trends, etc. It's significantly faster to get a dedicated report using scripts created in Excel, even if it's a much worse solution in the long run. From what I've seen, LibreOffice doesn't even have the capabilities to do this kind of work.

Re:Writer is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is. Excel has enough features to dig you into a hole that it can't get you out of. If you're truly trying to do all of the things that you claim you are in Excel, then any desktop office application is the wrong tool for your job.

Re:Writer is fine...

[AthanasiusKircher]

Writer is a passable substitute for MS Word, but Calc doesn't come close to Excel, and most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel.

I think it's all in your perspective. People who use Word's more "advanced" features probably think that it is essential, too. But that's a very small segment of the general office population (probably less than 5%).

And I think that's probably true of Excel as well. Most of the office folks I know can barely do anything with Excel other than entering data into a pre-existing spreadsheet. Of the remainder, most of them use it for relatively simple tasks that never make use of advanced functions (e.g., basic arithmetic manipulation of cells, sorting, etc.).

I'd guess if you looked at office worker usage of Excel, you'd probably find only a couple percent of office workers actually use those advanced functions which you couldn't find in Calc.

So then the larger question becomes -- should a company pay the MS Office premium for those few people? And it also brings up other questions, because a lot of those "advanced" functions are mostly useful to people who'd be better off using a more appropriate piece of software -- e.g., a database, a math program, a stats program, etc. -- rather than a bloated spreadsheet like Excel.

If you start thinking along these lines, it's a pretty rare office worker for whom Excel is the only useful AND appropriate tool.

Re:Writer is fine...

[StormReaver]

...Calc doesn't come close to Excel....

Let's assume for a moment that you are correct. I'm not saying that you're right, but I'll accept it for the sake of argument. Neither I nor any of my customers that use Calc have experienced any major problems with it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Excel's amortization function, for example, rounds incorrectly in many cases; whereas Calc's corresponding amortization function rounds correctly.

I have learned over time to not trust Excel's math.

...most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel.

This is a non-sequitur that Microsoft likes to throw into arguments it is losing, and is the last refuge of the desperate. This is a particularly shallow argument, as new versions of Office have required extensive retraining due to major user interface changes.

Re:Writer is fine...

[chispito]

Is using the features present in Excel now considered abuse?

Great question... which you answered:

It's significantly faster to get a dedicated report using scripts created in Excel, even if it's a much worse solution in the long run.

Re:Writer is fine...

[chispito]

I'd guess if you looked at office worker usage of Excel, you'd probably find only a couple percent of office workers actually use those advanced functions which you couldn't find in Calc.

Unfortunately, that relatively small percentage are creating all the reports and templates the rest of the lot are using.

Re:Writer is fine...

[Grishnakh]

No wonder the F-35 is such a disaster.

Re:Writer is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Abuse" is using an application for something it was clearly neither designed nor suitable for.

Compare to Word, which might be a passable substitute for a typewriter, but is chock full of functions that supposedly enables you to use it as a drawing-program, a spreadsheet, a DTP-application, and so on. ALL of which in short order derails the poor fragile word-processor it at it's heart is, and just cause a huge amount of pain and problems.

Re:Writer is fine...

[AthanasiusKircher]

Unfortunately, that relatively small percentage are creating all the reports and templates the rest of the lot are using.

That's often true -- so that raises two more questions:

(1) These are often the most tech-savvy people in an organization, so isn't it easier for them to retrain to use a new piece of software, or hire people who can use cheaper or more flexible software? (And would it be cheaper to retrain 2% of the office workforce to avoid licensing stuff to 100% of them that 98% of them don't use?)

(2) In most cases, the "normal office workers" are just entering data. Why exactly do they need full-fledged Excel on their computers to just enter data? (I suspect the answer to this second question is "because that's how Excel works." And thus I again raise the question about whether it might not be better to try to find a better solution -- spreadsheet or not -- that perhaps separates out functionality or provides a cheaper solution for people to enter data into.)

Re:Writer is fine...

[gweihir]

And if you do that, you are rightfully considered a problem by your IT department. It is really no surprise that automatizing things using Excel is absolutely forbidden in many large companies.

Re:Writer is fine...

[Idou]

Calc doesn't come close to Excel

This is a feature, not a bug. After spending nearly two decades with Excel, I found the optimal way to use it to be as follows:

- Your data should be separate "data sheets" (hopefully pulling from an actual DB table,view, or query)
- Your pretty report should be a separate sheet that uses the same "smart copied" formula (usually with the index function like sum(if(...(if...(if... etc. . .
- If you are capturing data, that should go into a table (I ended up using a custom VBA for this for the MS world)
- Modern SQL with analytic functions is superior to anything in any spreadsheet application. You can easily nest SQL into an Excel data connection
- Pivot tables are only for Ad Hoc analysis

And, guess what. . . the above is not just for Excel but works for Google Docs and probably any other spreadsheet application out there. If you are locked into your spreadsheet application then YOU ARE USING SPREADSHEETS WRONG AND BEING EXTREMELY UNPRODUCTIVE. I actually prefer Google Docs to Excel because of the overflowing and gems like "query()".

I have seen endless people using spreadsheets in the time consuming, error prone ways. . . they are the ones who will bitch and moan the most because switching software has a huge impact on their unproductive task filled days. I say, let the people who can use software productively take over their tasks. . . It would be cheaper to pay the army of copy/paste mon. . .erh. . . "knowledge workers" to stay at home. . .

Re:Writer is fine...

[gweihir]

Very much so. It may even become a critical component that your IT department does not know about, has no documents on, has no fall-backs and emergency procedures for and that creates security problems. Automatizing things with Excel may be fast initially, but it is _not_ smart.

Re:Writer is fine...

[vicm3]

Well not libreoffice but I prefer Gnumeric... but for the use cases exposed I believe they are MS dependent.

Re:Writer is fine...

[GNious]

Pretty much every large company I've ever seen has had core business logic built in Excel :)

Re:Writer is fine...

[amicusNYCL]

It's the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer..."

You think Excel abuse is bad? Most of the time when I ask my customers for a screenshot they send me a Word document with a picture in it. A picture which has been resized to a lower resolution than the original, thanks to Word. The ridiculousness is that saving an actual image file is the exact same number of steps:

Press PrtSc to take a screenshot
Click the Start button
Click on the program (Word or Paint)
Press Ctrl-V
Press Ctrl-S

But no, I never just get a damn image of what they're looking at, it's always a document with an image in it, and the image doesn't even fit the page of the document.

Re: Writer is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that most developers have no idea what the actual role of Excel is. Any dev that would say 'that should be a database' probably doesn't. They are right, in a sense, but Excel flourishes because databases simply cannot handle user's use cases. Excel is like a mix of a data ide, allowing a non-technical user to manipulate data, and a data exchange format, allowing users to combine all datasources (regardless of technology or format). That last is a real failure on IT's part.

Re:Writer is fine...

[KGIII]

By your comment, I'm thinking you must know. But, for everyone else, have you *seen* the things people (somehow?) manage to accomplish in Excel? WTF?

Over the years, I worked with numerous municipal and private enterprises. I got some of the strangest shit in spreadsheet format. "You wrote me an email in Excel, including adding images and attachments, and I'm supposed to do what with this?"

Re:Writer is fine...

[bluefoxlucid]

Let's fix our Office Administration education, then. OFAD is a field I take seriously, seeing as I was like 3 credits away from a degree in it once upon a time. I am surrounded by such mooks who call themselves customer-oriented contractors, but can't even write a fucking report in Word because they can't keep their formatting straight because they create headings by return-return-return-bold-22pt or it winds up bold/underline or 24pt sometimes or intented weird or whatever. You have no business communicating to a customer if the shit you send them looks worse than what a child might make with crayons.

The answer is teaching these people to do their jobs, not blaming them for being treated like typewriter operators.

Re:Writer is fine...

[mattventura]

I got the reverse once. Someone sent in a resume, where they had written it in Word, then taken a screenshot, and then made a PDF out of the screenshot.

Re:Writer is fine...

[thegarbz]

You use Excel for math?
Shit I thought it was a database built on a scripting engine that rivals SAP both in functionality and ability to completely bog down a system while manipulating data.

No seriously I've yet to work somewhere where Excel was used as a basic spreadsheet and calculation tool. My current company uses an excel spreadsheet as an all in one hazard analysis tool complete with report generation and auto-filling online databases. I even worked for a small biscuit bakery that used Excel as the master "database" for employee timekeeping.

I can only imagine the horror that must exist when the government accidentally hits alt+F11.

Re:Writer is fine...

[ericloewe]

Press Start
Type Snipping Tool until snipping tool is suggested
Take screenshot
Save

Re:Writer is fine...

[amicusNYCL]

That's pretty handy, I didn't realize they added that. Because, you see, the only thing I know how to use is Paint.

Re:Writer is fine...

[Gussington]

This is a non-sequitur that Microsoft likes to throw into arguments it is losing, and is the last refuge of the desperate. This is a particularly shallow argument, as new versions of Office have required extensive retraining due to major user interface changes.

Crap. Office 2010 had a bit of a shift, but having worked in many corporate environments for 25 years, I've never worked anywhere that trained their staff in Office.
Incumbency carries weight, and no amount of hating will change that.

Not counting training costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like LibreOffice and use it a lot, but I can hardly claim it doesn't have issues. My work recently forced my boss to use it, and it has been a disaster costing far more than the cost of a Microsoft Office license. When all your old files are written in Office, and your employees are all used to using office, switching costs are significant.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[LichtSpektren]

Just curious, what was the retraining costs when you switched from Office XP to Office 2007/2010 and had to learn the new ribbon and re-write a lot of VBA?

Re:Not counting training costs...

[ichthus]

I think you're full of shit. If you liked LO and used it "a lot", you'd at least provide some reason as to why it's been a "disaster". I'll counter your stupid, shill anecdote.

I like LibreOffice, and I use it a lot. I'm an engineer, and part of my work oftentimes involves having software tools interface with embedded systems, read data, and generate CSV files to be opened in a spreadsheet. Excel never opens the file correctly and, if you make a change to the file, excel totally kills the formatting by screwing up the delimiters or changing them (from comma to tab) altogether. LO Calc, on the other hand, always handles the CSV files properly.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

I second your sentiments. I'm an engineer who migrated to OpenOffice ten years ago. It had some issues back then, but they have disappeared.
I also own MS Office, but I can't find a reason to use it. I much prefer the perennial look and functionality of OO.o and I find that Styles work consistently better there than in MS Office, contrary to some sentiments here. Especially since I made my own templates tuned to my preferences.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[fluffernutter]

Try opening an xls document that was built with complex macros in LibreOffice. Enough said.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

As I said, I use it, I'm a developer, and it does what I need. I've had those same problems with Excel and CSVs.

However, my boss is not a developer. She makes slide presentations and writes papers. The problems she has with Libre Office tend to be font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats. Are these insurmountable problems? No. But considering her salary, it only takes 1 hours of fiddling with issues like that to have Libre Office cost more than a Word license. The costs of having your highly paid scientists and managers diddling with fonts and trying to find a features add up VERY quickly.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I wasn't working with her then. But she doesn't use VBA anyway, so that doesn't apply.

Are you claiming that LibreOffice has better VBA support?

Re:Not counting training costs...

[ichthus]

Try opening an XCF file in Photoshop. Enough said.
Try opening a WPD file in Word. Enough said.
Try opening a ODS file in Excel. Enough said.

Try opening an XLS file from Office XP that was build with complex macros in Excel 365. NOW, enough said.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, try that with a document made for Office XP, using the very latest version of Office.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[chipschap]

I don't argue the point that some people should stay on MS Office. If you're in a shop that's been on it for a long time and you use the really deep features of some of the components, it will be hard to switch, and expensive in terms of doing rework.

I do argue that LO will do the job for 95% or more office workers. And I'm including Calc and Impress here. Both of them are adequate for most things.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[AthanasiusKircher]

However, my boss is not a developer. She makes slide presentations and writes papers. The problems she has with Libre Office tend to be font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats.

Well, I have had MANY problems with "font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats" in MS Word over the years. Open a document on a Mac, then on Windows... see the problems. Open a document from two MS Office versions ago... see the problems.

Personally, I've seen LESS of this when going between computers and OSes with LibreOffice compared to MS Office. If you're complaining about formatting problems going between MS Office AND LibreOffice, well, that's hardly all LibreOffice's fault, since MS Office does a poor job of rendering LibreOffice native documents too.

Are these insurmountable problems? No. But considering her salary, it only takes 1 hours of fiddling with issues like that to have Libre Office cost more than a Word license. The costs of having your highly paid scientists and managers diddling with fonts and trying to find a features add up VERY quickly.

Obviously. I completely sympathize with this argument. However, I would counter that if a SCIENTIST is wasting time "diddling with fonts" and formatting, she/he is using the wrong software. MS Word AND LibreOffice are bad choices for a consistent layout engine. If your boss really wants professional-looking output, she'd be better off with LaTeX or a dedicated commercial layout application (e.g. InDesign).

Way too many people seem to complain about stuff that could be more easily solved if they knew what they want. Word and LibreOffice were never designed or intended to create publication-quality output. Formatting is not consistent because that's not what they are primarily focused on. You want to do desktop publishing? Choose the right tool (which will reflow things and make reasonable layout decisions as necessary). Otherwise, stop getting hung up on your font choice.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen a problem with doing that. Even opening Office 2000 documents hasn't been a problem. Maybe you're just incompetent and shouldn't be allowed to use a computer.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[fluffernutter]

I'm not aware of Excel being 100% compatible with ODS files, so I would never open an ODS file with Excel. On the other hand, my place of work has XLS files floating around with macros embedded that have been used for ten years or more. I am talking about basic Excel macros here have have been around forever. Since it would be too much trouble to rewrite those macros in every file that has come to be reused over time, we cannot switch to LibreOffice until those macros work in LibreOffice. I do not call it 100% compatible if there is an XLS file that has been the same since Office 2003 that works in current Excel but that doesn't work in a new version of LIbreOffice.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[fluffernutter]

Most of the documents we have floating around our office were made with Windows XP, or Windows 2003 at the latest.. and they still work fine with newer versions of Office.. So I am not really following you.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[MeNeXT]

Try to open an excel document in photoshop. What's your point. If you use proprietary software you will always be required to use it. That's not a reason why you would use a standards based system. The best example I can show you is that standardized html pages written back in 1995 open correctly in modern browsers. Pages written with proprietary tags/plugins don't. If you want to avoid this problem then get off proprietary software.

As far as I can see is you make the OP's point. I've never had an issue with standards based documents. De facto is not a standard.

Re:Not counting training costs...

[fluffernutter]

What do standards have to do with anything? We're talking about one piece of software being compatible with another. A type of document created by application A cannot be used with application B, therefore they are not completely compatible. Standards don't matter to me when I get a spreadsheet with a button I am supposed to press to perform a validation of the data I have entered and the button does nothing.

Italian keyboard layout...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only one in the world with a dedicated "Panic" button, colored red for ease of surrendering.

Re:Italian keyboard layout...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you simply commit suicide and free the world from the (obese) burden of your existence?

What are they going to do with the savings?..

[mi]

Italian Military To Save Up To 29 Million Euro

Ukrainian military could, probably, equip several infantry brigades with that money... For the Italian that may cover the amount spent per year on office-supplies and coffee-makers.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. That's why last year the US-backed Ukrainian military was easily humiliated and wiped out of Crimea and Donbass by a group of 10-20K local miners.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll. They're not even remotely US backed militarily, and the lack of effective supplied combat units was already called out and supported by your own point. And, apparently, s/Russian troops/local miners/ in your book. Try again.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[fph il quozientatore]

To be fair, coffee-making is a serious business in Italy.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not even remotely US backed militarily

Yes, they are: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

Not to mention that the so called "maidan revolution" was planned and financed by the US itself:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/n...

And the result was roughly the same as the US in Afghanistan and Syria: utter military humiliation. Plus a sovereign default and a massive recession. A gorgeous welcome to the "free world".

Surely Donbass people were helped by Russia, I don't deny that. I guess they simply chose better friends.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[tlhIngan]

To be fair, coffee-making is a serious business in Italy.

They designed and built an espresso maker for the ISS. That was complex enough. But they also had to design cups that work in space because you don't drink espresso out of a bag. Without gravity, a traditional cup doesn't work too well - the current solution uses a specially shaped cup that uses surface tension to hold the liquid inside it, with a special spout that lets you suck it in like you drink coffee normally.

There's a photo of it near the bottom.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/ISS_Sci...

Coffee is serious business.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[Anonymous Coward]

they're rounding up migrants from the sea... I know USA is very far from Europe but you could educate yourself, dude...

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[Anonymous Coward]

Russian "perdaks" (assholes) will be ripped wide open with unlubricated mortars. You have been warned.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[thegarbz]

I once commissioned a project in a petro-chemical plant in China. In the control room of the plant in the corner was a very dusty but incredibly nice commercial espresso machine, monster of a thing which looked like it hadn't been used in years.

I asked one of the Chinese operators about it. Apparently the original engineering / construction contractor for the plant was an Italian firm. They brought that with them to keep their workers happy. Once the plant was up and running they left it behind and no one had the heart to throw it out. Next to the machine was a well maintained green tea station.

Re:What are they going to do with the savings?..

[redmid17]

So let's get this straight, the US running joint combat training with Ukraine -- which they do with dozens of other countries in the world -- 19 months after Russia invaded and occupied the Crimean peninsula is evidence that the US was backing Ukraine during the conflict?

To top it off, your next link produces these gems: "This was the first outright nazi action ever undertaken by any American President. Ever. "
"The nazi United States Government today is ideologically, by its nazi actions, at war against the democratic United States that, by its democratic actions, had fought and shed blood to defeat Hitler’s Nazis in World War II. "

What the fucking are you smoking or ingesting? Pass it my way

Re: What are they going to do with the savings?..

[untoreh]

Maybe the government doesn't want to give them the funds for the pesky little f35s and they are doing this as an act of good will... or maybe a few generals decided it was time for a raise... :p

Shadows and smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

Shadows and smoke to get a better deal, just like the Germans did a few years ago. MS Office is the de facto software in the corporate world. It's not about what you do internally but about exchanging documents with other parties--if you're not compatible with the rest of the business world then you don't exist.

Re:And they saved even more...

[jawtheshark]

Ok, so I opened LibreOffice 5 (which comes with Ubuntu 16.04LTS), created a new document, went to Format/Page, selected the radio-button "Landscape" on the "Page" tab, clicked "Ok". Then I went to www.lipsum.com, generated 5 paragraphs of "Lorem ipsum" and copy/pasted that in my newly created document.

At this point, I hit Control-P, followed by Enter, which gave me a totally fine landscape printed "Lorem ipsum" text, as it was displayed on screen.

So, uhm... what's wrong?

Headline: MS gives Italian military big price cut

[Registered Coward v2]

I wonder if this is just a ploy to get MS to negotiate a better deal. That seems to be what happens after an announcement that some major government organization is dumping MS Office.

Ugh

[kamapuaa]

LibreOffice kind-of works in a pinch, but it fucking sucks for easy little one-person projects, and is basically broken for an organization. How much is Office on a big license? $75 a year? How much are the salaries they pay? $37.50 an hour? Using a much higher quality product will save an employee more than two hours per week.

LibreOffice (with OpenOffice before it) is one of those projects which has had great potential and is about to be usable for like ten years now.

Re:Ugh

[Calabacin]

LibreOffice (with OpenOffice before it) is one of those projects which has had great potential and is about to be usable for like ten years now.

I see these kind of comments all the time and barely ever anyone actually says what is wrong with it. I've been using LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before that) for a long time and I agree it had its issues at first, but it's been years since I ever had any problem with it. As a matter of fact, when a file is slightly corrupted MS Office will never open it, but LibreOffice will, and after saving it again the file becomes usable again.

I am honestly interested in this, I'm not trolling, so could you please give a few examples of "great potential but little usability"?

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent question - mod parent up

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice kind-of works in a pinch, but it fucking sucks for easy little one-person projects, and is basically broken for an organization. How much is Office on a big license? $75 a year? How much are the salaries they pay? $37.50 an hour? Using a much higher quality product will save an employee more than two hours per week.

LibreOffice (with OpenOffice before it) is one of those projects which has had great potential and is about to be usable for like ten years now.

The main problem I see with Microsoft Office is that it is made for Windows.
With the amount of phoning home Windows does I can see why the Italian military would like to move away from it.
A military has to be functional during a war and can't be reliant on a private company overseas. They need the source code so that they can maintain it themselves. (Not an unusual requirement when the military purchases software, they need to look for backdoors anyway.)

LibreOffice might have issues, it is probably easier to work around those issues than to make sure that you can take control over Microsoft in the case of a war.

Re: Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 complaint is how LO cant format documents the same way, often with some formatting completely nonexistent.

#2 complaint is lack of outlook.

Re: Ugh

[LichtSpektren]

1 is a problem with MS Office's proprietary standards.
2 is a blessing.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

It just shows you don't know how to use it.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I mostly use Office for presentations, but also text documents and spreadsheets. I've also published a book that was in multiple languages where I (stupidly) used Libre Office writer before just giving up and moving it to Word. I find that Office does a good job with intuitive formatting, whereas LibreOffice forces me to work against the system to get the formatting I want. I've actually tried to Google basic formatting issues and still been unable to resolve them, and as a Computer Science major I may not be a genius at computers, but I'm certainly far ahead of average enough that my word processor shouldn't be giving me technical issues. And it's unfair, but I also find that in a world where Office is the de facto file standard, LibreOffice will mis-interpret relatively simple documents. Libre Office is fine for very basic documents and maybe school projects, but at a certain point it obviously lags behind and time=money.

Re:Ugh

[LichtSpektren]

Another anonymous coward lauding MSOffice and talking about how LO just doesn't cut it without providing any examples of how this is the case.

Does Microsoft pay you by the hour or by the post?

Re: Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, lack of Outlook is a complaint?

Re: Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

2 is a blessing.

People who have not used properly managed Outlook+Exchange in a large organization often have no idea how lacking the alternatives are in comparison, Fx for scheduling. I had fairly low opinions of Outlook and all the faults and frustrations I could point to until I changed jobs to an organization using Google Docs. Now I miss Outlook-Exchange so fucking much. Google Docs is not a step back, it is a series of pole vaults back.

Re:Ugh

[fluffernutter]

I've never been able to open an excel spreadsheet with macros in LibreOffice and have it work. Have an excel spreadsheet where someone has set up filters for ease of use? Doesn't work.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the advantages that the Truly Evil enjoy is that people will defend them rabidly for free.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a little confused. I have examples - I wrote a book with problems and regularly have problems with formatting, in addition LibreOffice has problem handling Office files, which are the de facto file standard. Are you suggesting Microsoft pays people to post to Slashdot to make it pro-Microsoft? They're doing a pretty shitty job if that's the case, don't you think?

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been able to open an excel spreadsheet with macros in LibreOffice and have it work. Have an excel spreadsheet where someone has set up filters for ease of use? Doesn't work.

To be fair I have plenty of problem opening excel spreadsheets with macros in excel.
They don't even have the same macro names over multiple languages which makes it almost unusable in a multi-language environment.
It would not be that much a problem if excel allowed you to switch language on the fly but Microsoft barely wants you to be able to switch language at all.

LibreOffice works a lot better over all. It only has issues with loading certain proprietary files.

Re:Ugh

[LichtSpektren]

Are you suggesting Microsoft pays people to post to Slashdot to make it pro-Microsoft? They're doing a pretty shitty job if that's the case, don't you think?

Couldn't agree more.

Re: Ugh

[rubycodez]

every place I've ever worked in the last 15+ years has multiple incidents where Exchange+Outlook spread malware all over the company, or just seizes up and becomes useless because of malware.

What about that insecure and dangerous pile of crap do you find so alluring?

Re:Ugh

[HelpTheNewOverlord]

For the people I know, the main problem are macros. It is almost impossible to develop macros in Libre/OpenOffice. The language seems to be a mix of vb/java or python/java that makes it necessary to understand at least two languages to be usable, the API is HUGE and complex, and so on, and on.

On the other hand, it seems to be going in the right direction: Upcoming PyUNO improvements in LibreOffice 5.1 Matthew Francis

If it continues like that, it may soon be *easier* to write macros for LibreOffice than for MS office as python is much better/easier/powerful than VB

Re: Ugh

[LichtSpektren]

2 is a blessing.

People who have not used properly managed Outlook+Exchange in a large organization often have no idea how lacking the alternatives are in comparison, Fx for scheduling. I had fairly low opinions of Outlook and all the faults and frustrations I could point to until I changed jobs to an organization using Google Docs. Now I miss Outlook-Exchange so fucking much. Google Docs is not a step back, it is a series of pole vaults back.

I'm sure Red Hat, SUSE, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Canonical all have a Microsoft Exchange server in their back room. It's their dark secret; they don't want anybody to know that nobody can hack together a usable email server except Microsoft.

Look, I'm sure Exchange is the "right" solution for some organizations (I'm not going to surrender much ground there, because any company or government interested in keeping their emails private and secure are insane if they're going to use a closed source email server from a country where any tech company can be served national security letters--but I digress...), but let's not lose our minds here and say that there's no real alternatives.

Re:Ugh

[LichtSpektren]

If I use MSOffice, I'm tied to a specific version of Visual Basic for Applications that breaks between the different versions. LibreOffice has a compatibility engine for VBA (works pretty well in my experience but I haven't used it too much), PLUS they offer Java and Python as alternatives. That's a great reason to avoid MS right there.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, I'll bite. Use case: you are writing a manuscript that involves more than, say, 8 embedded images at print resolution (300 PPI). Scrolling through your document becomes excruciatingly slow. Dragging images around with the mouse (let's say you want more than one per page) causes text to reflow improperly. If it takes you a week to complete the doc, fighting with this behavior alone will pay for an Office license assuming your time is worth 20 dollars an hour.

Another source of continual frustration is the organization of the styles. Headings especially. There is a default "Heading" style -- which by the way you should never use. It is the template from which all Headings descend (Heading1 through Heading10, Title, Subtitle, etc.) The child styles are disaster of organization. Title and Subtitle are given absolute font sizes. But Heading1 is given a relative size -- 130% of parent. Heading3 is specified as a mind-melting 101% of parent. By the time you get to Heading4, your headings are actually smaller than the default paragraph style.

You might try to fix this by getting it right once, then simply importing your styles from another file. Go ahead and try this, see if you can get it right on the first try. Hint: you have to seek out the "Overwrite" checkbox before you even see a file chooser.

Here's a fun one for Calc. Go find some product number on a website, then paste that in to a spreadsheet. Notice how it pick up the formatting? That looks terrible. So let's see if we can paste the number as plain text. Right click context menu... and "Paste Only" says that "". Under edit, "Paste Special" is grayed out. But not every time - often you can Ctrl+Shift+V to paste it as plain text. The only thing that works 100% of the time is paste into the formula bar.

Re:Ugh

[HelpTheNewOverlord]

I really agree with you, but I already know Java/Python/VB/VBA so it is not that hard to jump from one to another.

On the other hand, performance was a bottleneck while running scripts outside LibreOffice process and it seems to be solved in 5.1(also in the PDF that I linked)

Re: Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

every place I've ever worked in the last 15+ years has multiple incidents where Exchange+Outlook spread malware all over the company, or just seizes up and becomes useless because of malware.

What about that insecure and dangerous pile of crap do you find so alluring?

Well, first off I seem to have been blessed with a better IT department than you, because that has never been my experience. And as I tried to say I didn't really find Outlook+Exchange "alluring" before moving on to "modern" companies that had different solutions, like Google Apps. One thing O+E is extremely effective on vs alternatives I've tried is scheduling, fx finding first available time for a meeting for 10 busy people across different divisions, locations and time zones, with a video equipped meeting room for all, video conferencing link and lunch served to the various meeting rooms -- all found and booked in one fairly quick Outlook operation. Or seeing directly in Outlook that the contact on an email thread is online, or if you want to know who this person is, or who alternative contacts are, there is an up to date org chart available directly from the name in Outlook, etc. etc. (Not to go into the horror that is web only clients like Google Apps).

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

I use only Libre Office, but I agree it has problems. V. 5 PDF exports were distorting embedded images in DOCs. The latest version fixed that, but for awhile I was fiddling with a PDF editor to make it work. Lines: Why can't I make them black? I select black. It reverts to light gray-blue. There's no excuse for bugs like that.

      But it's not just LO. Office software in general is poorly designed. Using MS word or similar should not be a resume item. It should be a basic, easily learned skill.

Re:Ugh

[LichtSpektren]

Fuck you, Nazi cocksucker. He just told you why he doesn't like LibreOffice (typical gay FOSS name) and no matter how detailed it is you'd claim it still wasn't valid. Many of us ACs have been using Slashdot long before you carved out your first swastika on a university table. We know the Slashdot userbase has a disturbingly pro-FOSS slant. So, when we say LibreOffice sucks dick, which it does, no matter how detailed or descriptive it is, it's likely a shitstain like you or one of your butt-buddies will modbomb it out of spite. Microsoft, nor any other company, gives a flying shit about what people post on Slashdot. It's not as popular as you think it is.

I'll give you one of the reasons I don't like LibbermanOffice, aside from the stupid name. The UI is dated shit. Why? Because it's basically the same one OpenOffice was using. If GIMP has taught us anything, it's that few FOSS applications actually have a decent UI that's being actively developed, because as it turns out people who can code lack usually lack the creativity and style to actually design and implement a UI that doesn't resemble a partially aborted fetus. But, we know it's good enough for you, because it's FOSS.

So, am I a Nazi that sucks cocks, or am I a nonpartisan that sucks specifically Nazi cocks?

Re:Ugh

[tibit]

Wait, you're complaining about default styles as if that somehow constrained you? Yes, it's a problem with the defaults, but if you really expect to be productive in LO.org, you should have your own styles, made from scratch.

Re: Ugh

[rubycodez]

You are wrong in thinking it has anything to do with IT department, it comes to users who click on certain things and get their company OWNED by malware because of inherent flaws in Microsoft's shoddy wares that in 20 years has seen no end.

Don't know what horror you are referring to with web model, Microsoft is going to that too as the way of the future.

Re:Ugh

[jbengt]

LibreOffice API is Huge and complex, like you said. (MSOffice API is also big and complex, but a little easier to follow & understand.) On the other hand, most of of the macros I've written in spreadsheets are math/engineering functions that are called from a cell the same way the built-in functions are, so I don't really need much in the way of understanding the spreadsheet object model. Based on that, I've found it to be about the same effort writing macros in Calc and Excel, with Calc occasionally facilitating something that I couldn't easily do in Excel.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Libre Office Draw has a bug that causes images pasted into it to disappear without warning. The images show up with a little broken image icon and cannot be repaired except to paste them back in and hope for the best. The only other possibility is to put the images in as a link to an external file. I would say this qualifies as a game breaking bug.

Re:Ugh

[KGIII]

Well, you know... It's 2016. You don't really have to put a hard and fast limit on it, do you?

Note: I have no idea what the AC is on about.

Re: Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

not true about redhat - i'm pretty sure they have exchange instances but it's more likely for testing than as a production mail server. google uses their own gmail infrastructure for internal mail services. Sure you've not heard of large companies moving their entire email to gmail? client is secondary in this particular discussion and I suspect on Outlook you maybe right; there are very few mail clients that are as good and the OSX one sucks onions.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason to avoid Office. Most people don't even use them and I've had issues between different ms versions. One time I was in a situation between cheap owners and difficult management company. Had to use gnumeric to get in the file. Remove the password and finish the spread sheet. The only thing the macro did was get in the way.

Not to mention viruses.

Re: Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know what horror you are referring to with web model, Microsoft is going to that too as the way of the future.

As it is now:

1. Very lacking (if any) offline functionality. Fx, flights and commute used to be perfect opportunity to get some email backlog done, reading and work on mail-attached documents etc. And some calendar planning.

2. Lacking responsiveness compared to native application. It probably will get better, but currently I hate the "feel" of working in a web app compared to native application. And, what idiot at Google thought that it was a good idea for backspace to leave whatever you are doing and go to the previous web page when you thought you were backspacing within a text box (but had lost that focus).

3. Not nearly as practical for working across several applications and documents open simultaneously with drag and drop between them etc.

4. Lack of unlimited undo history. Quickly backtracking a deep undo nesting (and back again) is sometimes really useful.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Can Excel open a Calc spreadsheet with macros and use those without issues? If not, by the same logic Excel has usability issues too. But I wouldn't call those usability issues, I'd call them compatibility issues.

Re:Ugh

[Gussington]

I see these kind of comments all the time and barely ever anyone actually says what is wrong with it.

Interface familiarity
Add-in compatibility
More WTF the moments
Those are show stoppers for most.

As a matter of fact, when a file is slightly corrupted MS Office will never open it

I've never faced that problem, but if I did, I'd simply grab the previous version which your file server should be keeping (right click, restore previous version). I've only dabbled with LO from time to time, along with Ubuntu, Linux Mint etc, because I really would like to get off the MS treadmill. But the simple fact is that Win/Office are the least worst options for most people.
The stuff just works most of the time, and whenever you go to a new place/computer/company/school/hotel they also have it so it's always a smooth(er) transition

Time is free

[Anonymous Coward]

Shitty companies and countries always count time as being free. In this case, the loss of productivity is not being taken into account. Another example of why Europe is going down the tubes lately.

Re:Time is free

[LichtSpektren]

You mean the loss of productivity whenever you have to retrain all your office workers whenever Microsoft has a brilliant new ribbon/metro every other release? Or the loss of productivity when VBA macros lose compatibility and have to be rewritten?

Re:Time is free

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the Ribbon came out, I have not seen any MAJOR changes in the versions, including in 2016. Not sure what you have been doing, or if you changed the UI, but I call BS. Beyond that, when you actually use Excel as its intended, not sure that Libre can keep up. Not talking simple addition or subtraction, but real formulas and such. Think along the lines of what a real finance department would be doing. If you just wanted to type a pretty document, you could use lots of tools for free (some even have a RIBBON, OMG).

Re:Time is free

[LichtSpektren]

Another anonymous coward that talks about how great MSOffice is and how LibreOffice just can't keep up, without any specific details to this being the case.

Re:Time is free

[Eosi]

Well, I cannot comment for the AC, but I agree that the Ribbon has not really changed since it was introduced. As for Excel, I use it to do some calendars and cost tracking at home and user several functions to auto fill cells based on numerous other cells. The last time I tried Libre, it could not use some of the formulas that had 15 or 16 IF statements in one line. (Think of calculating base cost of something, based on what was used in its build. Where it looks at cost of packaging (which was a formula itself), cost of casing (which was a formula from another sheet), cost of hardware used (Could be one piece or 20), etc.) All this while tracking the part numbers used in each item. Libre could not do that, but Excel could.

Re:Time is free

[Eosi]

Oh, also forgot, I use some Marcos to merge several CSV files into one document at work in Excel, then put the outcome into Pivot Charts, Libre did not support them yet. Perhaps one day they can do all of this, but I do not believe that all users of Excel use complex formulas or Macros, so I could be in that 10% or so, that uses spreadsheets for more than basic expense reports.

Re:And they saved even more...

[Calabacin]

(Anyone who has used LibreOffice Vanilla, and tried to print a landscape document, will know what I'm talking about)

I print landscape (and non-landscape) documents all the time without problem so: What are you talking about?

Microsoft shills in full force today

[LichtSpektren]

Anybody that's used LibreOffice recently knows that it's equal or better to MSOffice in just about every respect; the compatibility with OOXML has been particularly good since version 5. But you wouldn't know it from the flood of slashdotters that came in here a minute after the story was posted to talk about how bad LO is, in vague and undescribed ways.

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[fluffernutter]

Have they fixed Excel macro support now? Admittedly I am not on a current version.

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[KiloByte]

Car analogy: if you're buying a Nissan, why would installing Ford extras be your primary concern?

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[Nunya666]

Anybody that's used LibreOffice recently knows that it's equal or better to MSOffice in just about every respect; the compatibility with OOXML has been particularly good since version 5. But you wouldn't know it from the flood of slashdotters that came in here a minute after the story was posted to talk about how bad LO is, in vague and undescribed ways.

Wrong. LO sucks at rendering XML documents from MS Office. Even version 5 sucks.

Disclaimer: I hate M$. I hope the crapware known as Win10 cripples M$ so badly that they actually start to provide decent products at decent prices.

LO can't even render simple tables correctly. I get both Word and Excel documents from both my university and my employer. The formatting of every XML document looks different on LO (even version 5) than it does in Office, regardless of how simple or complex the original document is.

LO sucks so badly that I tried to uninstall it from my desktop Linux distro, but I can't because "dependency hell" would uninstall the world. So instead I installed WPS Office, which does a MUCH better job of rendering XML.

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[Anonymous Coward]

Car analogy: if you're buying a Nissan, why would installing Ford extras be your primary concern?

It would absolutely be a primary concern if you needed absolute compatibility between a Nissan car and a Ford car.

That's why a car analogy makes no sense here -- as a practical matter, we simply don't need absolute compatibility between cars.

However, absolute compatibility is required between Excel and Calc. If Excel can do something that Calc can't, then -- by definition -- Calc is broken.

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[Potor]

I would use LO, and at one point had actually switched, but I need to use WordFast for my translation work, and there are really no comparable plugins for LO. (Don't bother listing them - the ones I have tried don't do what I need as efficiently as WF).

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[fluffernutter]

Because in order for the Nissan to be considered entirely compatible with Ford, it also needs to be compatible with all the Ford extras? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. In my workplace we have hundreds of spreadsheet documents floating around with macros embedded and we need to be able to run those macros just the same, whether we use LibreOffice or not.

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[KiloByte]

Uhm no, there are Nissan extras that Ford doesn't support either. Calc can do things Excel can't do, and for many things both are capable of, they're done in different ways.

If Excel can do something that Calc can't, then -- by definition -- Calc is broken.

That'd be true only if Excel got to set the standard. At present, a subsequent version of Excel often fails at compatibility with the previous version, too.

Re:Microsoft shills in full force today

[Gussington]

Anybody that's used LibreOffice recently knows that it's equal or better to MSOffice in just about every respect; the compatibility with OOXML has been particularly good since version 5. But you wouldn't know it from the flood of slashdotters that came in here a minute after the story was posted to talk about how bad LO is, in vague and undescribed ways.

Yet here you are. LO is better in vague an undescribed ways...

How many?

[jon3k]

the Italian Ministry of Defense announced that they expect to save between 26 and 29 million Euro over the next few years

How many years is "a few" ? 3 or 20?

Fight it again, Tony

[PopeRatzo]

Show of hands: Who knew the Italians had a military?

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4Pk...

Re:And they saved even more...

[LichtSpektren]

Why don't you report a bug instead of shitposting?

Re:Worthless and stupid

[LichtSpektren]

Heartbleed was patched. Even if it wasn't, OpenSSL is free and open source, so you could patch it yourself if you had to. On the other hand, how fucked are you if there's a critical bug in Windows or MSOffice and Microsoft says "lol just reboot"?

Could save 21.5 billion$

[Anonymous Coward]

By not having a military that it doesn't really need anyway unless they want to invade slavic countries again in the near future.

Hey, Microsoft Shill!

[Anonymous Coward]

How's this viral campaign working out?

I really wonder how much Microsoft dumps into making noises in sites like this.

Re:Hey, Microsoft Shill!

[amiga3D]

They don't need to. MS office has enslaved millions to the banner of Redmond. They're victims of vendor lock-in with no way to free themselves. The effort, expense and time required to change is worse than the entire effort to change from inches and pounds to the metric system in the US and with more justifiability. Don't hate them, pity them.

Re: Hey, Microsoft Shill!

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt they spend a dime. There are simply some Microsoft fans, some Microsoft haters, and some inbetween. Some are rational, some are irrational.

I like Write better than Word. I had to move my book to Write, because Word started failing handle the tables and graphics at around 50 pages. However, I think Calc is not competitive with Excel once you get to any advanced use.

Correction: That should have said Google Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot needs post editing

What sold it

[Opportunist]

The decision was made final when they noticed that the built-in translation tool allowed them to say "We surrender" in over 200 languages.

Re:What sold it

[Anonymous Coward]

The decision was made final when they noticed that the built-in translation tool allowed them to say "We surrender" in over 200 languages.

I thought we were talking about Italy, not France.

Re:What sold it

[Anonymous Coward]

At least France put up a fight. Italy just changes sides depending on who's winning at the moment.

Re:What sold it

[KGIII]

You laugh but that appears to be a perfectly valid strategy. "What, oh, that other guy? Yeah, we strung him up. We're on your side now." It does have a certain appeal.

Re:What sold it

[Opportunist]

Who's laughing? They did it TWICE. In BOTH world wars.

There's the old joke: We learned from WW2 what the perfect war is like:

German generals
British groops
US supplies
In Russian quantities

And Italian enemies.

Re:What sold it

[Anonymous Coward]

In the meantime, the Talibans are having fun reconquering most of Afghanistan, the Syrian Army is having fun wiping out US-backed terrorists (oh, sorry "the opposition"), and the Russians had fun wiping out the US-backed Ukrainian army last year in the Donbass and Crimea regions. And if we go back in time, the same applies to the North Koreans and the Vietnamese.

While you have fun joking about 70 years ago, the rest of the world is having fun seeing your obese, alcoholic, lurid imitations of "soldiers" being defeated and ridiculed basically everywhere RIGHT NOW. How many other wars do you need to lose before you start joking about yourself?

Re:What sold it

[Anonymous Coward]

Because no one with balls or brains has been in charge for the last 70 years.

3 years later..

[Anonymous Coward]

Italian Military ditches LibreOffice and goes back to Microsoft Office because it didnt work out.

Re:3 years later..

[gweihir]

More likely because MS started to bribe the right people, which they seem to have neglected recently.

Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Britz]

I am very much in favour of governments using free software. Governments are the heads of communities, after all. Public funds should benefit public software (e.g. free software or community software) wherever possible. And when communicating with the public via documents exchange or otherwise, it should be possible for the public to engage in that communication using free software, if possible.

Mind you, those are all political reasons. I have researched this topic a lot. And I have to agree with Microsoft that licensing costs are a very, very small part of overall costs of software projects. Thus any cost savings could be offset by any number of slightly more cost effectiveness in another area that is costlier. Such as training, for example, where Microsoft argues that their monopoly in the Office software market lowers the cost of training. After all, a license of MS Office should not be more than a day or two of what a government worker earns, if you count correctly. And then there are all kinds of other nasty gotchas when converting from one office to another. Especially of not all government bodies convert. Because they no use partly incompatible office suites.

So I am not buying any cost argument. At least not for 5 years. After that, and if most of the government has converted, you get the benefit of not having to pay for the upgrade, and the next upgrade. But if you discount those future cost savings to the present, they become rather small.

Then again, politics is not about honesty and voters and the public don't understand community software or free software. So just keep using whatever questionable argument you want. For example the "Linux is more secure" one. Or this cost savings one. The other side is doing that too. Microsoft has spread so much FUD about Linux over the years. Ballmer himself compared free software to cancer. Just remember that it is all bullshit.

Do I sound jaded?

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Anonymous Coward]

Switching to Libre Office is the first step to switching to a Linux-based system. If you are a target of economical, political, and industrial espionage, then it will cost you money. What are the cost savings from not letting Windows vacuum every piece of information up from your organisation (which is what Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 now does) and having Microsoft share it with the intelligence branches of the U.S. government? And this is in addition to the cost savings from no longer being a target for the tremendous masses of malware existing on Windows.

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[OpinOnion]

That's just using an open document format, not using 'free' software. Public funds don't normally dictate what tools people prefer. Market trends do that. Like.. the government doesn't make everyone use special government funded phones. Government employees mostly use the same phones available from major retailers. The government doesn't have it's own special shovels either and while they are big shovel customer or a big software customer and they should get a say in things.. they don't have a right to dictate that simply because the taxpayers use those items via government. Government has no more right to dictate how software or shovels are made than individuals. If anything government has less rights than people, not more. Government should do what the market trends are doing unless otherwise directly legislated. If everything is using Windows, you use Windows. If everyone is using iPhone, you using iPhone. You don't fight the existing social patterns just because you want to make a name for yourself or your management skills. You will lose. If the government takes over OS and Office software, it has to maintain that code. It has to rapidly patch security holes or RELY on some group or service to do that for them. You don't just write opensource software and walk away because it's opensource. It's still filled with bugs and when used on a large scale it will require support. You can't get away with just user driven forums. You need to be able to provide people real support if they need it. Many businesses rely heavily on office software, maybe even more than governments. If government is going to push a scenario where it controls it's own software, then it's going to have to spend a lot of money to keep that software up to date or at least do private audits of the code often and review all new code. It's better to let private industry develop software and just force them to meet the public's demands occasionally. The idea Windows and Office cost too much is ridiculous. Your desks or cubicle probably costs a couple grand and it's just like junk wood coated with fabric. Your office probably spends more in K-CUPs per week than they spend on IT upgrades per month. It would be nice if Google would go ahead and makeGoogle Docs not suck by pressuring MS to make Office free. I think google knows that MS could just open the flood gate of free online office at any moment and crush all their hard work.. so Google Docs will remain mostly crap. Libre and Open are good enough, but you aren't saving anything. You lose one job or customer because of bad formatting or documents they can't open.. and you've lost a huge amount of that money you're pretending to save... by cannibalizing productivity and user happiness. Also every normal person who uses Office who comes to work for you now has to learn you special opensource way of doing everything... and when they leave they will probably not use the same software you made them use. I don't like how we aren't adding up the cost of forcing users to relearn all this stuff or fragmenting the market.

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Britz]

This is the "Linux is more secure" argument. There is valid reason to believe that Microsoft does not cooperate with the US government agencies on weakening their security or providing backdoors. Any discovery, which is bound to happen sometime down the line, since old copies of Windows are simply out there and can be analysed using future methods, would hurt sales so much, that the very survival of Microsoft as a company is threatened severely. US government agencies have other ways into systems. Which leads us back to the "Linux is more secure" argument. Not only US, but also Russian and Chinese, and possibly countless other government agencies and private entities can easily and stealthily access most computers connected to the internet. And there are ways to combat that. My point is that good security shouldn't rely on a certain operating system. The reason we often get to see the ugly fallout of large security failures connected to Microsoft is because Microsoft has a huge market share. Many desktop Linux systems also have security issues, but they don't matter, because no one attacks them. This principle is best proven by Apple. They have a horrible track record on security, yet there are no Mac viruses. And they have a much bigger market share than desktop Linux. Yet...

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Anonymous Coward]

>" There is valid reason to believe that Microsoft does not cooperate with the US government agencies on weakening their security or providing backdoors."

There is no need for back-doors. Windows collects everything there is to collect, and Microsoft shares it with gov because gov can make that decision, whether Microsoft confirms or denies it.

>"My point is that good security shouldn't rely on a certain operating system."

No it shouldn't, but in reality things are different. Windows is the least secure system, and is effectively self-inflicted spyware, because you installed it by your own free will.

Windows collects troves of information, Linux does not. There is no argument you can use to discount that.

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Britz]

When I say that governments should contribute, I meant by spreading the word about free software, sharing training materials and issueing bug reports. Government does not need to write office software. It already exists. They should simply become part of the community. Because public funds should benefit public software, which builds the common good.

Government usually also order special software to be written for special tasks. There is a huge backlog of this kind of software in use, which makes any transition, be it from Windows to Linux or from Windows XP to more modern versions very difficult. They could require all vendors that create software for them to license it under the gpl.

When I mean public software, I am also thinking about the "standing on the shoulders of giants" model. Free software distributions as we know them today are made up of thousands of little parts. When you want to create something new, you can build upon a lot of already created building blocks. This reduces duplicated efforts. Similar to how human knowledge works. Once one guy figured out how a wheel works, everyone benefits. This adds to the public good. By modularizing software and sharing as much as possible, governments can add to the public good, because duplicated efforts are reduced. Since so much free software already exists, governments don't even need to take the lead, as you seem to suggest in your comment. They only need to participate.

> If government is going to push a scenario where it controls it's own software

The Italian military does not control LibreOffice, nor will they ever. They also don't control the Linux kernel or any other part of the Debian distribution. Or any other government. But they could require vendors that produce software for them to use as much free software buildings blocks as possible and modularize what they write and host those modules as independent open source projects, hoping that other government entities, possibly even from other countries, or simply other entities will make use of those modules. This strategy indeed reduces the control the vendor has over the product and thus "increases" the control the government has over the software. But only in as much as anyone else in the public now controls said software. Though, again, this only applies to special cases where governments order software to be written for them, which happens a lot more often than you might think. And it insures the government against a lot of problems, including, but not limited to bankcruptcy of the vendor. On a sidenote: There are as many reasons for open source projects to exist as there are open source projects out there, but I have heard a small company (two people) that said they were required by their client (a rather large company) to turn their software into an open source project to guard against issues stemming from buying from such a small company. So this very thing is already happening in the private industry.

Though, again, my main point is not government controlling software, but merely government participating in community software. Which brings us to an argument that I haven't mentioned: Where the money flows. For US government bodies, this doesn't apply as much. But this is Italy. When "buying" free software, government entities have the option of spending the money locally, as opposed to giving it to a US company. Which also is a political issue.

Last but not least: Those are all political arguments. I agree with you about costs and I respect your opinion. People have different opinions about politics. I simply explained mine.

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Anonymous Coward]

> Not only US, but also Russian and Chinese, and possibly countless other government agencies and private entities can easily and stealthily access most computers connected to the internet.

No. That is simply not true. I have 4 computers here behind a router/firewall. Anyone can access my webserver on one of the machines and can see some web pages. They can try to access the non-standard SSH port on another machine (but won't get to login). There are no other routes that would give access.

> My point is that good security shouldn't rely on a certain operating system.

You may well think that. This you use to justify using Windows ("all the others are just as bad"). But that is because you have no clue at all. Windows is insecure _by_design_. It is not that they wanted to make it insecure, they just wanted to make it convenient. Such things as automatically running programs on a CD or USB when it is inserted (eventually stopped). Or downloaded files being executable, or email opening documents and executing macros by just selecting in the email client. Or activex.

Yes, there may be vulnerabilities in any piece of software, but there also needs to be access into that for an exploit to work.
 

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm not anti-Microsoft.

See, these articles in /. trumpet fairly minor events and give them all kinds of meaning and exposure they don't deserve. Why? Apparently because they are hhhuuuuuuggggggggeeeee wins against the Evil Empire! Except they aren't.

If some city agrees to buy cars or trucks from this or that manufacturer, does that make the international headlines? No, it does not.

This kind of excessive boosterism speaks to a lack of maturity in the FOSS world. Customers are going to do what is in their best interests. And they define exactly what 'best interests' means. It frankly doesn't matter if you or I agree that they made the right choice, or used the right criteria, or spent the appropriate amount of money. Even if we have an opinion it isn't actionable.

The cheerleading for FOSS products and ideologies speaks to people identifying with and investing in those, at a personal level. How about, a little less self-identification based on these factors? It isn't healthy and speaks to a sort of religious fervor that is off-putting.

Compete, sure. Business is business. Build the best stuff you can and try to win customers over. Then at the end of the day go home to your family and leave the zealotry behind.

Re:Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not just the licensing cost
it's the cost of tracking which license was used where to make sure you are in compliance
and all the bugs in the license checking drm you inevitably run into every know and then

Re:And they saved even more...

[rubycodez]

no. no I don't. what the fuck are you babbling about?

portrait, landscape, reversed (cups option)...do it all the time

80%-20% problem on both products

[Anonymous Coward]

LibraOffice is good for about 80% of what office workers need, and very difficult for the remaining 20%
It is 100% free so cost is not an issue
MS Office is Vastly overpriced for about 80% of what office users need and a bargain for the remaining 20%
Nearly all users have been trained, so ease of use is not an issue.

It depends on what you want to pay for: Training and documentation, or massive bloatware.

Re:And they saved even more...

[gweihir]

Cannot reproduce this. I think you messed up somewhere obvious. Of course, if you have EPS with explicit orientation instructions in there, landscape printing will be broken. But that is a) not the fault of LibreOffice and b) you cannot even really import these files in MS office.

It will be like trying to cancel cable

[JeffOwl]

MS will offer a discounted or free license and maybe some free support for some period just to reduce the apparent benefit of migrating. Eventually they will ramp the license fee back up.

Re:Worthless and stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

They lose official support from MS [...] will have no insurance when a very important document will no longer be displayed because a bug was reported 4 months ago and nobody from the open source community bothered to investigate it

Who said anything about relying solely on the open source community? Consultants will still be involved, and they'll probably cost about the same as they do now, but they keep the money they would have given MS. We might even see contributions from them.

Out of NATO then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does'n that disqualify them from being a NATO member. Everyone knows MS word doesn't inter-op with LO!

Oh noes!

[Sloppy]

But.. but.. saving money is bad for the economy! Those Windows aren't going to break themselv-- oh wait, that's exactly what happens.

Re:Oh noes!

[bluefoxlucid]

No, no, it's not like that. What's bad for the economy is the concentration of income among high-income earners with a high proportional rate of saving. We can counter this by using progressive taxes, where a nominal increase at the top (back the fuck up, Picketty) allows a nominal decrease at the bottom; as the income gap widens (the *whole* *economy* gets richer, and the small high-income group collectively takes more than the large working-class consumer group), we leave the taxes as-is at the top and lower them at the bottom. That increases the amount of consumer take-home pay relative to employer wage-labor cost, which increases the amount of consumer spending relative to what the employers are paying to produce products, which increases the amount of labor businesses can employ, decreasing unemployment, increasing production per capita, and creating more jobs.

The broken window thing is a special case of inefficiency whereby someone gets paid to do something non-useful; it's the opposite of technological growth. Instead of requiring fewer people making product X and thus shifting them to making product Y, we slip a useless individual into the production of product X. This increases its price, leaving less money in the hands of consumers after they buy. The person added to the production cycle could get paid just as much making some useful product; instead, he gets paid for doing effectively nothing, thus leaving us all spending the same amount of money in total but buying slightly less stuff in total.

It's really complex.

Probably save 33% of that if they are lucky

[OpinOnion]

The problem is retooling does cost money. Libre and Openoffice do have plenty of bugs and lack features some users want. The biggest problem is that MS software just doesn't cost that much. Labor and hardware cost a lot, software is dirt cheap for how much you use it. If you want good software, stop trying to get it for free and instead just send feedback to the companies making the leading products. You can get the latest features without the things you hate this way. The the only real problem with MS Office is that there is no free home version, beside that it is a better office product and products like publisher or powerpoint are years ahead of anything in competing products. I've yet to see anything more compelling than WordPerfect and that did not win against Office then and probably won't for any professional uses now. There isn't any real money to be saved, relative to other savings, by switching to Linux and other open source and the security argument has only lessened. Linux has proven less secure than predicted over the last 5 years and Windows has proven more secure than predicted. Linux is losing the battle of compelling features. Other than paranoia about the NSA and backdoors in MS products, I don't see any real benefit other than general diversification. Users really can hate software changes and they are kind of being made into pawns in this silly battle over a rather small amount of money, often made on principle more than on dollar and ... sense. I would make sure I was doing what the users wanted, they are the ones expected to use the software and be productive, so they should have a pretty heavy say in things. I think this is not often the case and IT and management make top down decisions that they wind up regretting. Large scale changes like OS and office software or financial software transitions are not fun at all. You really want to be sure you're doing that for ALL the right reasons.

Stupid Excel Bug

[GrantRobertson]

Hereâ(TM)s a nice trick for you:

1. Open a new Excel spreadsheet.

2. Put a 1 in cell A1.

3. Copy that âoe1â down the screen by dragging on the dot in the lower right corner.

4. In cell B1 put the following formula: =SUM(A$1:A1) (Recall that the $ means absolute reference so the SUM will always start at row 1.)

5. Copy that cell down the screen in the same manner.

6. Notice how column B now shows a running total of what is in column A.

7. Drag select a bunch of cells in column A and move them over to the right somewhere past column B.

8. Notice how the running total in column B is correct in that it does not increment when there is nothing in the cell to the left of it.

9. Move that bunch of cells back to where they were. Do not just press Ctrl-Z.

10. Notice how the running totals next to those returned cells are now incorrect. In fact, they still show what was there before you returned the moved cells.

11. Click in an incorrect cell in column B.

12. Notice that the formula has been inexplicably changed. All the formulas in the cells next to the moved then returned cells (except for the last one) will have been changed. This means that you canâ(TM)t trust Excel 2010 to not change formulas on you if you ever move things around in the spreadsheet. Excel 2013 has the same bug, BUT LibreOffice Calc does not.

Please note: This is NOT a misunderstanding of the use of absolute references on my part. The cells with the formulas were not moved.

Re:Stupid Excel Bug

[bluefoxlucid]

If you move a cell, Excel tries to update all references to that cell to follow. I use the same feature in LibreOffice Calc, which is how I discovered it; it works in Google Sheets, too.

Re:Stupid Excel Bug

[wbo]

This isn't really a bug and more of a case of failing to use the INDEX() function in the formula.

When a cell is moved in Excel, there is a feature that attempts to rewrite formulas in any cells that reference the moved cell so that they point to the new location.

When it works, this can be quite handy and in my experience does the right thing most of the time. However, there are certain situations where it doesn't always do what you want.

The proper way to ensure a forumla always references a particularity cell/location is to use the INDEX() function. This function is specifically designed for specifying cell references that should not be automatically updated.

Re: Stupid Excel Bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Excel obviously does not succeed.

Re: Tables

[rnturn]

Spreadsheets aren't tables. If only the people who insist on using a freakin' spreadsheet to write a document because they want to communicate some information that benefits from a tabular format would realize how much of a pain in the ass it is for their readers to read much less make contributions to it.

Re: And they saved even more...

[cyber-vandal]

One day an OSS zealot will admit that a lot of the software isn't up to the job. Then the universe will implode.

Re:I could save them even more

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! I thought this was funny anyway.

Re:And they saved even more...

[stooo]

No problem ever with landscape either.

But how?

[Anonymous Coward]

You said what you where doing when you had problems but left all the details out, so we do not know anything, beyond possibly style handling or direct formatting maybe. I, and I am guessing the parent poster, want details of the specific behaviour, what menus what features where you using, how did they "work against" where they buggy, hard to use, lacking in features, or bad in default behaviour etc. I wanted X and it was hard/broken is a non technical users way of describing problems, and is useless as an explanation.

cue the Italian Army jokes

[neaorin]

Q. How many gears does an Italian tank have?
A. Six. One forward and five reverse.

Q. Why do Italian tanks have such large mirrors?
A. So the tank commander doesn't miss any part of the action.

etc.

Re:cue the Italian Army jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean the same jokes that the Talibans and the Syrians are doing about the Americans right now? Not to mention the Donbass people, who wiped out the US-backed Ukrainian army with the help of the Russians last year. And if we go back in time, the North Koreans and the Vietnamese. Basically the US has kept losing wars since 1945.

How many wars does the US need to lose before it starts joking about its own obese, alcoholic "soldiers"?

Re:cue the Italian Army jokes

[david_thornley]

And, of course, the naval jokes: the British sailor drinks rum, the US sailor likes whiskey, and the Italian sailor sticks to port.

Re:Worthless and stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Heartbleed was patched after 2 (two) years. I was using it as an argument against the entire 'millions of eyes spot bugs in open source' doctrine, which clearly didn't apply.

You have no idea what you are talking about when you say that MS says "lol just reboot". For enterprise customers, where the big money is really at, Microsoft has a SLA with the customer and are forced to provide a fix. I've seen instances where MS offered a tailor-made Internet Explorer specially crafted to suite whatever needs the customer had. And that is exactly what the customer is paying for: safety and insurance ... exactly what you won't get with open source. Can you imagine the Italian military running into some bug in LibreOffice and having to revert to a forum to fix it? If you can, I really feel sorry for you.

Until next year

[sproketboy]

Until next year when it will cost them 40 million euro to roll back to M$ office because of missing features and maintenance costs. Been there - done that.

Re:And they saved even more...

[Anonymous Coward]

you didn't use enough business buzzwords!!

"select a committtee to actualize the present value of resources in the future going forward"

"We said it before, and we'll say it again"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I hope that you figure out that you're wrong eventually.

Re: And they saved even more...

[gweihir]

And one day a troll will admit to being clueless about the actual technical details of the matter at hand.

Incidentally, most FOSS software sucks, just as most commercial software does. LibreOffice is just not one of those. Still there? Then I must not be an "OSS zealot".

Doesn't LibreOffice Writer have a grammar checker?

[Anonymous Coward]

...this is the smartest choice a government institution can do.

Italy needs to put savings back into LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

If people think that libre is just about the cost they're sadly mistake. Libre is about the freedom. Otherwise it would be called GratisOffice. I'm tempted to create a GratisOffice just to make a point of how stupid it is to move to free software to save money. It may save money- but it's a bad idea unless you put some of that savings back into development. If you don't it's not going to work as well as it could/should.

Re: And they saved even more...

[cyber-vandal]

I'm not a troll. I'm a disappointed Linux user. I first installed Red Hat Linux in 1999 in the days where we were stuck with the appallingly buggy Netscape 4.7 and Firefox was only a distant dream. I used it almost exclusively for years. I set up my first wireless router using it long before you could buy them cheaply on Amazon. I used to love tinkering with it and it was streets ahead of the pathetic mess that was Win9x.

I gradually got turned off as it didn't seem to be improving as a desktop while Microsoft had fixed the worst of its flaws. I tried it again and again over the next 10 years to find that it had stood still or gone backwards. Wi-Fi seemed to be a particular problem.

I decided that I'd give it another chance this weekend and installed Ubuntu 16.04. At first I was impressed. All my hardware was detected and it installed really quickly. Everything looked really slick. Then I decided to install Chrome to see how Netflix runs.

Fuck sake. I double clicked on the icon, it opened the software manager and I clicked Install. Nothing happened. Clicked it again and nothing. That is garbage. I dropped to the command line and spent a while with really unhelpful circular dependency error messages before I figured out why it wasn't working. The install on Windows is just a double click and responding to a couple of dialog boxes. You may call me a moron or a troll but I'll post the console output if you want and defy you to tell me how that isn't really poor.

The software manager not giving any indication of success or failure is terrible and this has been my experience of a lot of OSS software. There seems to be this mentality that if you slap a GUI on a command line process that makes it user friendly when there's a lot more to it than that.

The fact that people would rather pay a fortune to Apple than use something that doesn't cost anything is very telling.

Re:And they saved even more...

[ilsaloving]

I just repeated what I tried to do before, and now the problem isn't happening anymore. I'm guessing the most recent update fixed the problem?

I had this problem consistently on two different macs, using both HP and Brother printers. And I wasn't the only one, cause if you googled for it, lots of other people had this problem, with no solution.

I'm glad it's now fixed, but this experience has seriously soured my perception of LibreOffice as being a viable alternative to Microsoft Office.

Re:And they saved even more...

[jittles]

Ok, so I opened LibreOffice 5 (which comes with Ubuntu 16.04LTS), created a new document, went to Format/Page, selected the radio-button "Landscape" on the "Page" tab, clicked "Ok". Then I went to www.lipsum.com, generated 5 paragraphs of "Lorem ipsum" and copy/pasted that in my newly created document.

At this point, I hit Control-P, followed by Enter, which gave me a totally fine landscape printed "Lorem ipsum" text, as it was displayed on screen.

So, uhm... what's wrong?

Obviously LO printing ONLY works with Latin. Try doing it in Cyrillic and see what you get.

All your Base belong to me

[DarthVain]

While I have been using the Word variant for some years, and it does have its issues, most of which are formatting and conversion related, I generally was OK with it.

I've also used the Excel variant and it did the small jobs I needed it to do.

However just this week I decided to foray into the Access variant (Called "Base"), and insofar as first impressions go, it was unusable. What should have been an easy task caused it to fail several times badly, prompting me to give up and just do it manually in a spreadsheet.

So I guess it really depends on what your usage is, which will determine how successful or easy a transition it will be. If your entire organization is going to be using it, then the formatting and conversion issues disappear, until you have to share something outside that is. However that said, my abit brief experience with Base was horrible. I mean Access has it's issues, but for small tasks it isn't too bad, but Base couldn't even do that apparently. Then again your "normal" office user probably never touches Access/Base anyway, so maybe a moot point. Some military IT folks might be smashing some things in frustration however for some simple DB type tasks...

Giving Back

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be great if all of these organizations would return a fraction of what they saved to Libre Office as a donation. That would also go a long way towards addressing many of the concerns about usability and bugs. A paid programmer is a lot more likely to actually spend time squashing bugs.

Rome

[NewYork]

All roads lead to Rome

LO is less than great

[Anonymous Coward]

LO is full of bugs and misfeatures, and when you make a bug report, some "volunteer" triage "expert" deems it your fault so it never gets fixed. Word has fewer bugs, more features, though just as many misfeatures. You can't really make a bug report, so it saves you time, because you don't have to make bug reports that they ignore.