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Comment by louischatriot | Hacker News Reader

While it is true that LibreOffice still cannot compare to Microsoft Office (esp. Excel which I think is an impressive piece of software), I think LibreOffice fills the French civil servants' needs fine. It's not like they're consultants or bankers making the most out of Excel or Powerpoint, and the savings are significant. With the debt we have, these kinds of moves go in the right direction.

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Frankly, I find your comment insulting. Why would a civil servant be expected to perform any less than a consultant or a banker? After all, many civil servants do the job a consultant could also do, albeit at a lower cost. I'm not talking about the people picking up the trash, I'm talking about the people designing city expansion policy, the people writing requirements for government IT systems and the people drafting laws.

Admittedly civil servants in many countries have the image of doing these jobs less passionately than someone working in business would, but this does not change what is expected of them.

Cutting on the productivity on an expensive workforce very seldomly leads to actual cost reduction.

I didn't mean to be insulting and surely didn't say civil servants "perform less" than consultants. I don't think that performance can be measured by the amount of time you spend on desktop software :)

Let me clarify my point: most people (civil servants being only one example among others) don't use even 10% of MS Office capabilities (esp. on Excel, I've never seen anything but basic formulas, no array formulas, no macros and so on). For these people using a tool that performs reasonably well on these 10% is not a stupid choice.

Of course, MS Office is better than LibreOffice. But LibreOffice is absolutely no shitty software and most of the time it gets the job done.

As a French civil servant I can say it doesn't fill our needs. We have difficulties to work with documents we receive sometimes created with LibreOffice, sometimes Microsoft Office. Documents are full of errors from bad imports and exports. I know many people loosing tons of time trying to fix the documents. An average French civil servant has many documents to write every month.

I agree, document conversion is one hell of an issue. But it doesn't bite everytime you open a MS Office document (at least it very rarely happens to me). I think that the lost productivity is made up for in terms of savings, which we do need.

We can hope that this issue gets solved if more heavily invested in. The "10% of savings go towards developing free software" rule is promising.

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