German council ditching OpenOffice to go back to Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

German council ditching OpenOffice to go back to Microsoft

computerworlduk.com

39 pointsEdwardQ70 comments

Do any of you technical types still use a word processor on a regular basis (apart from to read documents others have sent)?

I just can't remember the last time I created a document in one.

If I want to communicate, a plain text email is fine.

Want to collaborate on a document? Wiki or git versioned text file is better.

Want to publish something for others? Wordpress or straight HTML is better.

Want to make a posh looking document? LaTeX generated PDF is better.

Want to collaborate on a document?

Want to make a posh looking document?

I'd like to live in this world of yours, where everybody is comfortable with Wiki, git, and even LaTeX.

Seriously, even most technical types cry out in dismay when they try LaTeX.

LaTeX is one of those things somebody helps you with. Check any professor's book and there will be a dedication to the guy who helped them put it all into proper LaTeX.

This is only true of very senior faculty these days, at least in Econ, Statistics, Math, etc.

have you even tried lyx? http://www.lyx.org/

If you install pandoc [1] you can write in Markdown (or any of a number of formats) and publish in LaTeX, PDF, RTF, HTML etc.

It's the bee's knees.

(You may want to tweak the default template (some examples are linked at [2]) to improve the default LaTeX rendering.)

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ [2] https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-Extras

I use Apple's Pages when something needs to look pretty. The thing creates wonderful pdf's. They make angels weep tears of joy.

Of course as soon as you need to include a formula somewhere, LaTeX is pretty much your only option.

Oh and because I'm lazy I use wordpress's editor to make a blogpost nearly every day. It's clunky and I would prefer markdown, but the annoyance of switching to a markdown-enabled blogging platform is just too much.

re Wordpress and Markdown: I've been use 'Markdown on Save Improved' for a while now. Works nicely for me.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/markdown-on-save-improve...

Of course as soon as you need to include a formula somewhere, LaTeX is pretty much your only option.

http://www.chachatelier.fr/latexit/

I used LaTeXiT for some time when I used Keynote for presentations.

If your formulas are not very complex, use Apple's Grapher.app (in /Application/Utilities/ folder). Write your formula there, command-c it and paste it in the Pages document :)

I sometimes want to make a "posh looking document" on a WYSIWYG environment. If the content is only text, and maybe a few images, I use LibreOffice rather than start LaTeX; there's also less overhead to start writing the text.

(Also, LaTeX is rather annoying if you are writing in a language with widespread use of tildes or some other symbols)

I wouldn't say I use one on a regular basis, but they do have their uses. For a longer document, things like footnotes, internal cross-references, and an auto-generated table of contents are pretty darn handy. For something like a book, add endnotes and an auto-generated index. These things are painful to do in raw HTML/Markdown/whatever. No LaTeX editor I've ever used, and I've used several including Lyx, is much better. They get a little better with something like a WYSIWYG HTML editor, but that's really a word processor too. It's just a lame one, hobbled by the lack of abstraction between the interface and the output format. Really, word processors do this job better than the alternatives because it's what they were designed for.

BTW yes, it is possible to write longer-form documents like this while remaining technical. Junior folks can focus 100% on code. More senior folks still code but also get asked to teach and explain stuff, and after teaching or explaining the same stuff a dozen times putting it in writing starts to seem like an excellent idea.

I used to use Word daily when I was in college, but since graduating, it's an usual week if I open an Office app more than once a week. I've switched 100% to iWord for the times I need Office stuff, but 99.9% of the time, a plain text editor is all I need.

I was tasked to fill out an employee self review form (after being with this company for 2 years now) and I was sent a word document. I have always used google docs to view / manage documents (I'd guess I have a new document in my life once every 2 weeks?) and so I figured that's what everyone does. Turns out even at the company I work (an internet company) most people have word and use it. I'd always assumed that google docs have long replaced the desktop word processing needs for most. I guess we tech people live in some sort of word-less utopia.

You live in a bubble. Word is legion.

Step in to any law office, for example.

MS Office, (especially Excel and Word) is some of the best software ever developed. Excel is a fantastically powerful and flexible system and honestly, beyond basic spreadsheet/word processor use, nothing comes close to MS Office.

I was kind of hoping that OpenOffice use in Germany would be a success but really can not see how it can compete with MS Office, except on sticker price.

No, it's the most genius software product ever because it is like a drug -- it attracts newcomers with a seemingful ease, then sucks all their life juices into managing larger documents, finally lefts them with a load of experience, skills and already made docs that only work in Office and cannot be possibly replicated (Office formats and algorithms are build purely of quirks and leaking heuristics).

MS Office is fantastic software. It is very full featured.

Most people don't need nearly all of those features. Most people would be okay using Abiword. The people who need more than Abiword could be using LibreOffice.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are very good packages, but they do still need a bit of work. I hope that they don't focus on duplicating MS Office functionality but on bug fixing and 'feel'. This will make LibreOffice "good enough" and then "better" than MS Office for most users. The esoteric stuff that MS Office does can be left to MS Office, or to other open source projects, or to LibreOffice plug-ins.

Another thing that Microsoft has is the MVP scheme. The MVPs are variable quality, but the MS Office MVPs, especially the Excel MVPs have been excellent in promoting Office and providing help and support about how to get the best out of it.

Strange that if you create a Word Processing format so byzantine that even the combined might of IBM, Sun, Google and the open source community can't reverse engineer it, (and that you yourself struggle with when porting to Mac OS X or Win 8 RT) that the result is people considering you the safe option for their government data.

It's not just the format. MS Office really is better than Libre Office. Even Apple's iWork suite is better than Libre Office.

And now that everything is becoming mobile. What choice do you have? The only office suites that work on mobile devices are Office and iWork ...

>The only office suites that work on mobile devices are Office and iWork ... //

Under a very narrow definition of "mobile".

Isn't that where VNC's come in. In a corporate environment why would you attempt to duplicate apps on a mobile device rather than simply securely tunnel to a local instance running all the standard apps on the internal network?

I guess one answer is: to use the cloud. But are corps really putting their faith and critical/sensitive docs in the trust of cloud based apps already?

Sorry if I am wrong, but as far as I know, Office Open XML specification is public since 2007, precisely the version referred in the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

The binary formats are open too. Mind you, both OOXML and the binary formats are quite tightly coupled to Office's inner workings and implementing them is probably not easy either. But documented they are.

Microsoft Office do not produce or read Office Open XML files as defined in the OOXML ISO standard. They produce something that looks similar but not quite right. The same thing happens with the older formats, they are not produced or read in the way it is written in the published specifications.

[1] http://techrights.org/2010/05/31/formats-red-herring/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Application_su...

The same thing also happens with OpenOffice/LibreOffice and the ISO ODF spec. In practice, this is not a big problem with either OpenOffice/LibreOffice and ODF, or Microsoft Office and OOXML, because the deviations from the spec are minor. For instance, almost all the deviations in Office from OOXML transitional are due to last minute changes in the values of some attributes.

BTW, don't cite techrights.org. They are one of the most unreliable sources of information on the net.

Microsoft's Office file-formats are now public.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx

At least in principle. Not sure if there are critical omissions that might hinder interop. Devil's in the details, and such ..

From a practical perspective, I'd say the open formats have, at least, improved the situation. I don't have much experience with the word processing document formats, but every tool I've used that worked with the old Excel BIFF8 format failed hard. BIFF8 was never officially released as a standard, so everyone's work was the result of reverse engineering. The results were really bad.

We recently started the transition from the old Spreadsheet (Ruby) gem, which targeted BIFF8 format, to the Axlsx gem, which targets OOXML format. The results are so, so much better. Spreadsheets generated with the old Spreadsheet gem work presentationally, but features of Excel are broken when you open the resulting documents. We also ran in to issues when generating very large documents with lots of formatting. All of these problems are gone with Axlsx.

glad to hear you are happy with axlsx. If you are doing excel, libre office, numbers or even google docs from Ruby, give it a spin.

I can't thank you enough for the work you've done with axlsx. The API is very similar to a wrapper we wrote for Spreadsheet. I think it speaks volumes for software when you find that it works exactly as you expect it to.

You are talking about past. And here's a good read for you http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

It's much better nowadays with docx format that is open and is used by default (for a few years).

I use LibreOffice on my own computers. If I ever had to exchange documents with anyone else, I don't think I would.

A friend and I were trying to pick a format to use for some files we're jointly working on via Dropbox, and .docx was not sharing well between multiple pieces of software. I don't know whether Pages on his iPad was more of a problem than LibreOffice, but either way, we settled on Markdown. It's simple, has 100% compatible editors on all platforms, and works just fine for simple documents.

If you are working with people using Markdown editors built on top of different libraries, they might not really be 100% compatible. John Gruber's spec leaves quite a few ambiguities.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/faq.html#what-are-some-... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markd...

I'd been editing the markdown directly in MarkdownPad, which seemed to behave as I would expect it with nested lists. Not sure what's available in the way of iPad clients (since I don't have one), but that's disappointing to hear that they might be inconsistent.

The obvious problem I think, notwithstanding the fork of OpenOffice, is that MS Office is the de-facto standard and it's not in the interest of MS to have the compatibility gap closed. The critical issue with OpenOffice is rooted in Cat String Theory. Compatibility with MS Office is the driving force for development and it's not producing the best UI/UX experience.

I think LibreOffice needs to step out of the shadow of MS Office.

Not surprising. Been through many MS -> OO and back again with various organisations throughout the years. OO is good if -everyone- uses OO.

In most organisations you get some genius who develops a fancy-smancy spreadsheet, visio diagram or word document with linked data which will be dependent on the MS access runtime, this gets distributed to all the OO users and it just doesn't work.

"Numerous statements concerning LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are incorrect or outdated," they said in the letter, adding that the support of LibreOffice and OpenOffice is at a professional level these days. "The assessment of the evaluation that compatibility to Microsoft Office cannot be reached in the next few years, is also wrong," they said.

This is not the best way to respond to losing a customer. Though a lack of customer relations is in favor of participation in an ideology is one of FOSS's great weaknesses.

The Council changed vendors. They had no choice because Open Office was killed off.

I wonder why SoftMaker doesn't push itself in its home market hard enough. They are at least not worse than Open/LibreOffice.

On a different note, it surprises me there doesn't seem to be any effort on a LyX-like editor, probably less tied to LaTeX (LyX already has to do a lot itself, it even got at least one renderer (LyXHTML) that doesn't involve LaTeX at all).

That would be a word processor I'd use (otherwise it is as jiggy2011 says).

I see a lot of comments here, decrying the decision based on a mere word processor. Do also note the problems with the spreadsheet part which, as quoted, is much worse.

I can completely sympathize with being forced to abandon Linux itself because of its inability to compete with Excel. There simply is no compatible alternative to excel

I'm willing to bet that it was a bigger factor than word processing.

Since then, the city noticed that it has been far from ideal to use only OpenOffice for digital correspondence. Microsoft Office for instance is the standard for external communication, the council said.

Well, ur doin it wrong. There are vastly superior alternatives to the workflow I think this implies (e-mailing attached documents around).

Such as?

For sending out "letterhead" documents, embrace the medium instead and have some nice HTML email templates made. If you must, send PDFs.

For collaboration workflows, use wiki-style platforms.

Considering public institution are using taxpayers' money, I think all of them should be using open source software, for both budget reasons and in principle (to help grow the public open source community, and then benefit from it in the long term).

The problem here also sounds like somebody was trying to use Microsoft Office docs in an older version of Open Office. So they were the ones locking themselves in before, and now their solution for having hassle-free work is to reward Microsoft for it, and lock themselves back in? It's like a drug addict who thinks withdrawing is too painful, so might as well continue taking the drugs.

I've used both OpenOffice and MS Office for extended periods and I can honestly say that MS Office is significantly better.

Yes you can do pretty much anything you need to do in OpenOffice but if you spend a significant amount of time using them then the little bits of polish in MS Office really add up and for a tool you use a lot that's a big deal.

And that goes directly to the budget reasons you mention. As a developer I wanted the best tools for the job, I didn't want the cheapest tool, I wanted the ones that allowed me to be most productive because that saved money. I don't see any reason why my standard as a tax payer should be different - I want people working on my behalf to have the best tools for the job, so they can do the best job for me.

I'd love it if Open Office was as good as MS Office but it isn't and until that changes, it's a bit more complex than you're making out.

And your anecdotal account of OpenOffice vs MS Office is supposed to mean something to the rest of us?

It is one persons opinion, are you a recognized authority in usability of desktop applications? Can you provide non-biased large scale research studies with clear and concise points of why MS's solution is better?

Here is my counter point. I have been using office suites since 'Display Write 4' for MS-DOS in the 80s. I have taught classes on advanced document production using open source software. I have converted hundreds of users to Linux and the only complaints I get about office suites are why are MS formats so incompatible with everything else.

I believe opinions are welcome here.

I want to live in whatever world these people are in where they can just throw up their hands and say, "gee-wiz, why can't EVERYONE just use open source software?" Usually that "incompatible" industry standard document contains real information that needs to be presented accurately. OpenOffice just brings headaches and unnecessary phone calls/e-mails.

We're (open source advocates) a niche inside the software world and I don't think basic computer users, including government officials, even care about any argument or cause based on principle. People are just pragmatic, they want something that works, that uses minimal brain-power and that's it.

"I think all of them should be using open source software, for both budget reasons and in principle."

For the budget, you're not calculating the entire equation, mate.

You're forgetting how much the time of an employee costs. Let's assume a single user license for Office costs $100 dollars (I'm not sure how much it costs, but I think that's ballpark). Now, if your employee is used to Office Word, and using the more streamlined MS Office provides him with a 0.5% increase in productivity over Open Office, how much money is that each year??

Lets give this guy a yearly salary of $45,000 and calculate 0.5 * 0.01 * 45000 = 225. => 0.5% of his work time is worth $225 each year.

Oh, wow, that MS Office package just paid for itself in less than six months! and that's by estimating only 0.5% work increase. And trust me, a lot of people spend their entire work day using Excel, and having used both Excel and Calc I can GUARANTEE you the increase in productivity is much, much higher than half a percent (for perspective, 0.5% of an 8 hour workday is 2.4 minutes)

Don't forget get this when you're arguing about how to spend taxpayer money. There's a reason why big companies / institutions pay for expensive software; it's actually cheaper in the long run!

That productivity decrease will only take place while your employee is getting to know the software. After a few months it should be about the same, but you still need to pay the license fees every so often.

In this particular case most of the employees have been working exclusively on OpenOffice for the last 4-5 years. Switching them to MS Office will probably decrease their productivity on top of the cost of the license.

Anyway, they didn't even try to claim that it will save them money. What they claimed was that 20% of their word processing cannot be done with open source tools. I am really curious what kind of word processing they do.

Excel is years ahead of OpenOffice spreadsheet. Having struggled with OpenOffice spreadsheet, and then reluctantly moving to Excel, I can tell you categorically that Excel is just not replaceable by OpenOffice Spreadsheet.

Agreed. On top of that, I wonder if the cost of the switch is lower than paying some company to implement that 20% over the next couple of months.

I have to say, I sympathize with them. I tried libreoffice, but I just could not keep it up. MS Word is annoying enough for me, LibreOffice adds that extra annoyance. I just wish we could move to a markup system like markdown or restructured text with split editors that generate the document on the fly on a different pane. Plain text! Plain text!

That sounds like reverting to the style of much older word processing software such as WordStar.

I've been doing all my editing in plain text (vim if you must know) for about 6 months. Then I use the wonderful PanDoc [1] to convert it to anything I need (usually PDF, sometimes .docx).

Everything's much simpler and much more peaceful.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

If you use a Mac I cannot recommend OmmWriter enough. http://www.ommwriter.com/

OmmWriter is on Windows too, and is especially great there since there's a dearth of plain writing apps on PCs.

Have you seen ReText? It's precisely the sort of split editor you're talking about.

Thanks! I was more lamenting for wide adoption! Myself, plain old LaTeX is good enough, but my collaborators get anxious having to markup pdf...

The frustrating thing is that people think that they have to use a word processor where a simple text editor would suffice.

Efficient text editor usage is still voodoo to anyone who isn't a hacker

Do you mean that formatting itself is superfluous or that everyone should learn something like Markdown?

I'm a geek and I don't particularly enjoy using Markdown. I know wysiwyg editors can be frustrating but solve that problem rather than reverting to the modern equivalent of Wordstar formatting codes in some fit of neo-ludditism.

I don't think most people really want to stare at a console output all day long.

LibreOffice is fantastic, give it a try

Why aren't we using HTML for documents yet?

Strange they didn't even consider Google Docs or web for the purpose. It is quite understandable that experience with OpenOffice is not as smooth as it is with Microsoft's word or Apple's iWork, but why not give web a chance and then decide this?

As it is Governments are supposed to explore all options and then choose the 'technically acceptable most economical' option? I think Google docs will be sweet and better in some ways for the council, considering that these entities are in dire need of more collaboration.

Just my 0.02 cents.

I doubt that many European government organisations would be allowed to use a SaaS app provided by a US company, purely for data protection reasons. There are rules surrounding where personal information may be stored - due to, among other things, the USA PATRIOT act, the US is not usually an option for organisations that deal with personal info.

Can't you run a private installation of Google Docs?

No, there's no Google Docs "appliance". It's their cloud or nothing.

In fact, I think Microsoft is trying to push into that niche with their Office 365 which complies with European Privacy law. An opportunity Google might just have missed.

They cannot. There are quite strict laws regarding usage and handling of personal data, especially for government and other state bureaucratic things and that pretty much rules out Google Docs or any other cloud-based provider. They're fine for personal use and companies might opt using them too (although depending on what they do, it could well bring them into legal trouble too), but for governmental work, especially in Germany it's a big no-go.

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