A company paying millions for Microsoft Office would probably get better value if they paid some LibreOffice developers to fix the issues. Or just switched to use ODF format.
For personal use, I don’t care which tool I’m using - my use cases are simple enough it just doesn’t matter.
When I worked in almostMegaCorp, though, I had the freedom to push through whatever tools I wanted. With the exception of adding R and Python to my machine, the Office provided everything I needed and did so better than the competition. I don’t care, in that context, about pricing, competition, OS ideaology, etc. Setting up an in-house software division to throw bug fixes at OpenOffice to try and transition to a tool that is equal to or inferior for almost all of our actual uses?
Jfc why?!
PowerPoint rendered the images in the ODP poorly, like it jacked the contrast up to 100. Saving the document as a PPTX within LibreOffice and then playing it on PowerPoint fixed the issue. From my naive perspective MS Office seems to have issues with ODF just like LibreOffice has with docx/pptx/xlsx/etc.
But if you can't absolutely rely on it to be totally compatible, then it's a total non-starter. Not worth the risk.
Counterpoint: Google Docs. Its OOXML compatibility is for shit. Its adoption is HUGE.
Not one person mentions how amazingly shit its OOXML compatibility is, even for quite simple DOCX.
Almost nobody in an office uses the fancy bits of Excel. Spreadsheets are mostly used as flat-file data stores.
And Office is notoriously incompatible between different versions of itself.
In practice, I don't think the file compatibility objection to LibreOffice is real. It's just an excuse.
The actual competition is Google Docs, which is a shitty word processor and a shitty spreadsheet and a shitty presentation app, but absolutely brilliant at quick and convenient collaboration. That's why LibreOffice is working super-hard on the web-based online version.
This has never been my experience. Even if there's a more robust DB based system, someone will do everything in Excel.
Nowadays I usually tell whomever is asking for something in a "Word" format that I don't own a copy of Word, but I can send them a PDF, and they're OK with that, but when I was first getting started as an engineer I used to have to work with recruiters a lot, where they'd ask for my resume in a Word format so that they could insert their ugly logo on the top and break all the formatting. No one ever said anything about my files that were initially made with LibreOffice. In fact, for all the essays I've had to write for school (that I started again semi-recently), I've done them with either Pandoc+Markdown or LibreOffice (depending on how much formatting is required), and no one has said anything about the MS Word export, or me potentially breaking the teachers' templates that they made in word.
I'll definitely give it to you for Excel though. For simple stuff LibreOffice's compatibility is fine, but if you do any kind of elaborate Excel function, you're going to have a bad time, and things are going to break.
I think that's what they mean by external entity? I've also personally had problems with openpyxl in python
Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude who was mayor when LiMux was introduced (german): https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...
This is a really interesting interview, unfortunately it is only available in German so I translated (with the help of deepl) the part about the situation right after the switch.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Linux-Magazin: How big was the pressure afterwards?
[...]
Christian Ude: The most intense thing I personally experienced was a visit from Steve Ballmer, after all Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing holiday in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first of all praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was making a catastrophic decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to a taxpayer.
Funnily enough, he constantly made new financial offers during the conversation, he talked about what Microsoft would add for free, for the school department for example. On and on he reduced the price, one million and a another million and a another million and a dozen million cheaper than before. This is how important Munich - which is internationally perceived as an IT center - was to Microsoft as a symbol.
Would [Munich] walk a new path or repentantly return into Microsoft's lap? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 per cent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just make a price comparison, this was not important to us.
Linux-Magazin: Bill Gates also came to visit?
Christian Ude: He was in Munich because of a presentation of the "House of the Future", which inspired him insanely. With it, you could determine from your car how high the room temperature in each room is and whether the refrigerator should defrost a bit. On his way back to the airport I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I sat together with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van, which was luxuriously equipped inside, but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! That's incomprehensible!
Now that I'm not the hard-boiled IT specialist who could stand up to a Bill Gates in every detail, I just said:
"Please note, we're all about independence. We don't want to be dependent."
Then he said, "That's nonsense, who do you depend on?"
"Now that you are here [I can tell you]: From you, of course!"
That really made him collapse, and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology".
It was just politics 101. Their politicians when facing the choice "keep using Linux => bye bye huge Munich MS Offices", didn't think twice and axed the penguin. Admittedly, it wouldn't have been an easy pick even for FOSS enthusiasts as many of us are, if we were in Munich politicians shoes: letting one of the biggest corporations out there build their huge headquarters in your city doesn't just mean bribes but jobs (almost 2000 in the HQ alone). As long as you're being identified as the one who let all this happen, you have just won a huge PR boost for creating jobs, plus all those people -and their families- votes, not to mention strong ties with MS high profile execs which would be of use one day. Honestly, Linux would have lost no matter its convenience.
If I had to, I'd bet all my horses that we'll see finally one day Munich and other cities adopting Linux, although it will be Microsoft branded and mostly FOSS.