Hacker News Reader

Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

I love Linux, and love Windows too (especially for games). It does make me happy to hear about Linux deployments like this.

That said: Everyone who switches one way or the other claims savings. Their breakdown of savings raises questions. They have 15,000 machines and TFA says they'd be paying €280 a seat for Office upgrades and €173 a seat for Windows upgrades. I have worked for Windows companies with less seats, in the commercial space, that paid less.

I also want to know what the workers think. I've tried OpenOffice but find the spreadsheet unusable compared to Excel. My low productivity in OpenOffice makes Office a bargain.

View on HN

Power Excel users use the keys (rather than the mouse). The new Office button bar forces you to loose all spacial understanding of where obscure menu items lie - fortunately, Microsoft retained key-compatibility with previous versions (even though those keystrokes no longer make any sense w.r.t. the visual interface).

The debate that Microsoft has on cost per seat is dwarfed by retraining costs - which may actually be lower for LibreOffice than the transition onto the ButtonBar in Office 2010. Of course, Windows is going to move to Windows 8, and Linux desktops will be more familiar than ever...

Personally, I've moved over to LibreOffice, writing a Python addin to get Bloomberg compatibility. My users are on LibreOffice for word-processing (practically no-one has noticed), for spreadsheets I'll let them flip back to Microsoft Excel if they have 'power user' problems/mindsets - but often find that they are taken aback by the button strip anyway.

I didnt't seriously start using Excel until the 2007 version, but I must say that the Ribbon is much better than the old system. The discoverability of keyboard shortcuts are much higher when you only have to press the alt key to reveal them.

Of course I also use some other shortcuts that are not on the ribbon, but that's just a bonus.

Excel 2010 is certainly more novice friendly, but I'd take 2003's interface back in a flash - customising/grouping shortcut icons doesn't seem nearly as friendly in 2010 and it's a big drawback. I also find it much quicker to scan lists of vertical text when looking for a menu item than to scan horiztonal lists of icons/text.

They aren't shortcuts, they're replacements for mouse clicks, and you have to do the same number of key presses as mouse clicks.

I don't have Windows open in front of me (still the holiday weekend). In Word, to paste text from the clipboard, unformatted, into the document by "pressing the alt key to reveal" the so-called shortcuts go something like this:

- alt

- H (I think, to further reveal or expose the Home "shortcuts")

- V (to expose the paste functions)

- S (because we want to paste Special)

- U (unformatted)

- and maybe U again to get the other flavor of Unformatted.

That's five or six keystrokes, and that's not a shortcut. It feels like passive aggressiveness on Microsoft's part: "Oh, you don't like clicking? ... There, I fixed it."

    CTRL + V
    CTRL
    T

Yes, those are shortcuts, but the thing you enable with the alt key are not.

As an aside, I'm guessing the Python add-in you mention is just wrapping the C SDK. You'd probably be interested in the Python SDK which is now maintained by the API team as part of BLPAPI v3.5 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com