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Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

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Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#51
post #33

I love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets. I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc. IMHO this speaks to the fact that Off…

It is true that Sheets isn't as powerful as Excel. But it's a good substitute for 99% of users. And for people dealing with complex models/large amount of data, they should probably use a proper programming language (Python, R) and version control.

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#52
post #33

I love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets. I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc. IMHO this speaks to the fact that Off…

Frankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do. Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write…

I haven't used G-Suite in years so I can't really compare it, but I use Excel online (via Office 365) to collaborate in real-time on documents with other employees all the time and it works great.

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#53
Airbus became a big user of Google cloud some time ago. Airbus made a presentation on last Google Cloud Next how they migrated core technology systems for satellite imagery storage and analytics to Google Cloud.

Google Apps are a logical extension, as you can use same accounts for Google Cloud and email. There are some benefits of the integration - e.g. export BigQuery result as Google Sheets. They also had a CTO poached from Google.

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#54

It seems strange to use the present tense ("moves to GSuite", "ditches Microsoft") for a change that should take (at least) 5 to 10 years to implement. Also, the change should be to move away from Microsoft Office in favor of tools suited for the tasks at hand (databases, project-management applications, bug trackers, requirement management tools...) and only migrate to GSuite for the subset of tasks where having an…

5 to 10 years? I think you're vastly overestimating the time it takes to do such a move. Maybe 5-10 months.

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#55
post #40

Hopefully, this will start a trend away from MS Office to other office programs. Preferably open source solutions.

There is nothing comparable to Powerpoint's ease of layout in the open-source world sadly.

Are you serious? Basic animations were super easy to figure out in Google slides, whereas I still stumble in Powerpoint.

Perhaps it's because there's less functionality but I'm only making slides for internal consumption, so it just has to hide/show the relevant info.

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do. Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write…

I haven't used G-Suite in years so I can't really compare it, but I use Excel online (via Office 365) to collaborate in real-time on documents with other employees all the time and it works great.

For most uses, Docs and Sheets "work". It is extremely easy to create a basic collaborative table or document. So long as you aren't stressing the sync features, everyone is on the same page.

Where G-Suite suffers is in the random features that a small segment of power users swear by. The keyboard shortcuts aren't the same as what people learned in Word/Excel. There are many incompatibilities and rendering issues with the Excel and Word formats. But these concerns apply mostly to advanced users; for basic documents, letters, lists, and tables, G-Suite in 2018 works well

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#57
post #35
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm yet to find a single decent alternative to Excel. It's an excellent data modeling and analysis tool. And yes, I've learned Python, R and SQL, but these tools are not a replacement for the Excel workflow.

I agree. I have been using it for over 20 years now, and use it almost daily in many different capacities. Excel along with the entire MS Office suite of applications is ubiquitous across almost every enterprise. I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.

They are big enough for their contracts to enforce usage of something other than the de facto standard.

Not only are they big but a lot of their suppliers are SMEs which in effect are economically dependent to Airbus (even if they carefully avoid dependence to them in the legal definition of the expression).

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#58
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyboard shortcuts are huge. Also I’m used to the ribbon which I don’t think they copied yet

All of the apps I suggested have excellent keyboard shortcuts and options as well. So this is really about the ribbon interface to you? I am wondering which Microsoft PR company you work for?

Please stop breaking the guidelines, like we've already asked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's debatable. According to GitHub, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects. Sorry but this is so wrong, Google does not host any of its biggest project on github: Chromium and Android. There were articles written about this.

Yet android is distributed in a way leaves users with even less control than Windows.

So, is it possible to create your own forked open source Windows like CyanogenMod and tons of others in Android ecosystem?

Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do. Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write…

Office 365 is though. - Microsoft Teams is a [bad] Slack clone. - Microsoft Planner is a [bad] Trello clone. - Outlook.com instead of the [bad] Outlook Desktop Application - Sharepoint online for a CRM - OneNote online for a shared scratchpad. The offline versions of Excel, Word, and Power Point have no online rivals but for collaboration Office 365 is one to watch. I'd even argue it has pulled ahead of Gsuite in the…

I agree with your critique. This is just a hunch but I don't think they are ahead:

- Outlook.com must be one of the worst web apps there is. Compared to Gmail it's just plain awful.

- Sharepoint is decidedly one of the worst pieces of software ever built, that is if you are a developer. If you are an editor/content manager then it is possible it's just fine.

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