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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Is there an overview of this thing that doesn't require me to watch a video?

("A photo tells a thousand words", but I can read at 300-400 words/minute while a video typically conveys roughly 100 wpm. I don't like wasting my time and bandwidth.)

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The video is just someone using LibreOffice in a browser. It's got file versioning and sharing and local sync that looks a lot like Dropbox. They also bolted on email and calendar features which look familiar but I can't place them. Quite impressive for a tech demo but hardly riveting. There's no narration at all.

Does it support multiple people editing the same document at the same time?

I don't think we will see that on Docx/Xlsx documents (or any other office doc) considering the way it works and the way it is stored.

That's notably missing from the video.

It always amazes me how so many people don't get that this is really the central feature or Google Docs. My workplace is evaluating "productivity solutions" in some arcane months-long process, and I'd have been happy to just pick Google on day 1 because the other "solutions," despite being "cloud" solutions, still only let one person at a time edit anything. Morons in charge.

My day-job went through a similar exercise...and they even got us excited by proposing a pilot where some numbers of employees would use google apps for a couple of months, while some other employees would pilot Microsoft's online offering. Then the higher-ups would garner feedback, and pick the one that most thought was productive, etc. We actually never got to test google apps, the pilot got killed. Word is that the MS office online solution will be implemented...to which i reacted like you stated, "Morons in charge"...and then someone in the office reminded me that sometimes in corporate world, tech decisions are not always about functionality but about existing (and potential) license agreements. Maybe the company's corporate software vendor or microsoft sales team offered a financial deal that was overall better (our corporate laptops run windows OS) for the company.

Microsoft's online apps allow simultaneous editing.

We chose them, having heard terrible things about Google's support (or rather, lack of it). Having experienced Microsoft's support, we are now surprisingly close to switching to Google on the basis that it can't possibly be worse.

Google doesn't really have human support, for pretty much anything.

Google's support is a little worse, owing primarily to the fact that there is none, but Google's software has fewer headaches. And after about 8 months on Office 365 I can tell you that the most common useful help I get from MS support is along the lines of "you're right, you can't do that in Office 365, you can stop futilely searching now."

Here is a fun thing with Office365. Let's say you want not just to edit a document concurrently, but to see everybody's changes. It doesn't work right in Word online:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Can-I-use-Track-Cha...

I was pretty shocked to learn this. Although it seems calculated to cause you to buy a premium license, so I suppose I shouldn't be.

From what we were able to tell you couldn't/can't simultaneously edit a Word doc in 365. But it's also possible that it's more complicated than we expected, I guess. Or that the feature's since been added.

Well... in our case it wouldn't actually cost us anything to use Google, but it will cost us to use other options.

On mobile so i cannot réelle élaborate but Google for 'onlyOffice'. The company I work for dévelops à sync server / web app that uses it for online collaborative édition

I agree, and that's a disingenuous quote in any case: "A photo tells a thousand words."

There are many cases when the reverse is true.

A photo tells negative one thousand words?

Or a word tells one thousand photos?

A photo requires a 1000 word explanation

I meant the reverse as "a word tells one thousand photos," or can in some cases. Many abstract concepts can be represented by a word in modern human verbal languages, but not so easily only photos.

I think the existence of Pictionary as a game is a decent example of this.

A photo may be telling a thousand words, but quite often a lot of those words have little value or relevance to the topic.

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