Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS.
LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....
LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....
"The Wall of Shame for the Worst Excel Errors" - https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...
It sounds like you are picturing in your head that all spreadsheet work is greenfield. Do you have any idea how much Excel code is embedded everywhere? Very often made by people who are no longer around. You can lecture all you want, but this is the situation. I don't like it either.
Did not intend to be smug...honestly..not really. :-) In my defense, I have more than 20 years corporate experience in tech AND finance domains, in more than 25 countries. And in the cultural domains of the five different languages I am familiar and whose grammar I regularly brutalize. Can't recognize the problem you are describing, as the mountain that would stop any company from start using LibreOffice.
All that logic in Excel sheets is just a serious governance problem...
"How an Excel error cost JP Morgan $6 billion" - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eriklidman_how-an-excel-error...
Oh, BTW. Nextcloud is also nice. Very nice.
Edit: Looks like Owncloud guys have arrived (just joking, I like them equally).
Setting up access for my wife was easy. Adding "apps" to my nextcloud instance was easy. Sharing storage, playing with a Kanban board, editing documents, it all just works.
I'm very impressed with nextcloud, I had no idea it was so good!
It updates nicely too. I'm managing one for ~4 years now, and it's painless.
Nobody calls for me for support either. I think this is, good?
Today MS Office is still broken in a number of crazy ways. One of the most annoying ones is that if whoever packages and deploys Office to our computers use localization for the user interface, suddenly all formulas are in some broken local language variant making it next to impossible to search for it.
If I know the solution with standard Excel language it is doable to translate it to this broken "Norwegian BASIC" language, it is just really really annoying.
A quick and easy solution then is to write it in Libre Office Calc, export it to xls and import it and done.
With Libre Office I can also choose if I want cute "Ribbon" menus or easy-to-use menus.
List probably goes on, this was just the things from the top of my head.
[1]because it felt almost impossible to do in an efficient way in MS Office even if I had significantly more experience with it)
IBM mainframes do the same thing with COBOL because modernizing core code means having to notify and test all the downstream users that have their own code to deal with the legacy issues in the current stack. I was once explained by a retired COBOL programmer (who spends his summers contracting for maintenance) how this tangled mess of thousands of banks feeds in all the way to the US central bank to determine interest rates - in some extreme cases, IBM still has to emulate hardware bugs as to not change expected behaviour. This is not something you just migrate away from or fuck around with. There's a reason IBM still sells mainframes that runs code from the 1960s.
But for other uses of Excel, I can say it can be easily exchanged. This is why I used 99.99% percent, but not more nines. The remaining "three nines" are the niches you're talking about.
It's like how we say "Nah, it's a small set of matrices. just 2, 3000x3000, double precision floating point matrices, and a couple of vectors and some multiplication (i.e. in a range of a couple of billions)".
Libreoffice Calc also supports the same thing over ODBC AFAIK.
It's true I'm not a spreadsheet power user - but not many people are.
I forget about it myself as I've worked for modern tech companies since 2008, but outside of that world is a very different place where old ways of doing things stick around. Anecdotally, about 2 years ago I got a cold email from a co-op job that I had in 2002 for a manufacturing company that I wrote a perl script for asking for help modernizing it. The perl script consolidated raw EDI(1) files coming into some ancient HP-UX machine, then exported it...to an excel file, MS Access DB, and a SAP DB so that the accountants and the manufacturers could simultaneously get work processing the order. When I started people were inputting these all manually.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange
Most people working in software understand this as a huge chunk of software projects are "let's get these people off of their spreadsheets!"
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
Citation very much needed :-)
Excel on the other hand is barely usable for anything that involves formulas for us who are forced to used the localized version.
In fact if one is stuck with a localized Excel the easiest way is often to write in LibreOffice Calc and then export it to xls format.
Reminder LibreOffice for most things is better than Office - Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
[1] "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even lead developers as represented in that community..."
[1] https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...
Can we go back to '90 and relay on sending documents by email?
Building an alternative, even on the level of Google Docs, which has editing capabilities on the MS Word 2.0 level, is not gonna be simple, although I am surprised that European Union is ready to spend a lot of money on adjusting caps to bottles (this costed billions), but is not able to invest into its own capabilities in terms of IT infrastructure.
A peanuts project of 100 million EUR ( basically one Microsoft Global Customer Contract...) could get something like this or similar going within 24 months:
https://www.collaboraonline.com/
As long as it would not be managed by EU bureaucrats. Otherwise the tenders would take 18 months....
I have yet to see a solution that has a chance at comparison, especially considering performance and features.
Are you expecting people to shuffle around single files to each other every time something is changed? Is that what we consider perfect?
Are most companies having three or four employees working in the SAME document at the SAME time? Maybe while singing Kumbaya over Teams? That would not be very efficient...
Or just use: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
Collaboration can be managed by offline servers that facilitate that. Not everything needs to be in a web page.
Samba existed long before google docs and already did this.
We only use google because of the convenience of having everything in one interface. I think this is the real issue, we are all so lazy we would rather give away our freedom for a little bit of convenience.