41–50 of 165 posts
Given how precious and valuable time is I don't really get the aversion to using Microsoft or something similar. Pricing has come down so much that it's less than people spend on coffee. If you are working on something worthwhile it doesn't seem worth the effort to avoid using mainstream, productive and cheaply available commercial software.
The usage experience on MSOffice is unpleasant enough to motivate seeking an alternative.
-the report generated by our laser alignment machine is in a 1993 ms write format. o365 says its no bueno.
-the diagnostic tool we use on some truck engines for valve calibration, advance and timing spits out an interactive doc in some esoteric ibm format I think? we edit the output in libre, feed it back into the tool, and it makes our adjustments.
-our shop floor uses libre because we don't have enough internet to run o365 without huge delays. we switched four years ago.
-our ancient jit parts order system will gladly handle lotus dif files, so libre does too
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a few IT people and Managed Service Providers I deal with that have become pretty adept at cutting over small and midsize businesses from G Suite to Microsoft 365. The office suite is better, the email client configurability is significantly better (from what they claim, I'm a Thunderbird on Linux person), and you get single sign on too. My firm uses our own mailserver (with DKIM and SPF), LibreOffice for d…
> the email client configurability is significantly better I'm gonna have to disagree on this one. Outlook 365 is ass-tastic. It doesn't even have feature parity with the web app, and is full of weird bugs and limitations. Just off the top of my head: - Moving old messages between folders in the native app requires downloading the full message then uploading it again - Calendar subscriptions sync from web client to n…
I got new computers for my parents and made the mistake of getting them Windows machines because that's what they're familiar with. I set up Office, but Outlook is so defective that it was literally unusable. The final straw was that it defies Windows's own system-wide font-size setting. I needed to make the font bigger so my mom could read it, but Outlook ignored it... leaving her In box totally illegible to her (and barely legible period).
I was pleasantly surprised when I installed Thunderbird (after not trying it for 20 years) and everything worked well. It even handled the 15,000+ messages in her AOL In-box (yep, AOL).
Beyond the E-mail issue, Outlook 365 continually stopped working and badgered both my parents for MY account credentials, so I shitcanned it and replaced it with LibreOffice... on my systems as well. I find it less reprehensible than Office.
I feel like the biggest blocker to modern adoption of LibreOffice is the inability to collaborate in ways that Google Docs enables. Are there open-source implementation of Docs, even poor ones?
> Are there open-source implementation of Docs Yes: https://cryptpad.fr/
- Lost modifications, a lot of times ("something went wrong, please reload" and then the last 15 minutes of changes are just GONE)
- Very frequent "synchronizing... please wait" screens that block you from doing anything for a few seconds
- Undo/redo not possible in "live editing mode"
- In "non-live editing mode", if you don't hit save manually and the TCP connection resets, you will lose all your changes
- Pivot tables do very weird things with formatting
And that's the experience of a solo user, there wasn't anyone joined in on the document at the time. I can only imagine how it would have been if were multiple persons working on that spreadsheet.
I do have a flaky Internet connection, but Google Docs handle it fine, and emacs-crdt works very well too.
I'm now refactoring the whole spreadsheet into a bunch of .csv files stored in Git, and a Python script that outputs a pivot table, because I've lost more types due to CryptPad bugs than the time it would take me to write that script.
I LAUGH at silly FUD like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", "You can't read documents ", "format compatibility problems!!", because that all is just FUD.
If I ever (rarely, maybe 4 times total) receive a price file or spec that is unreadable by LibreOffice, I just ask to resend it to me in some open format cause I lack the software to open their proprietary file. And I did received it in a PDF or .odt every single time I asked.
That said, I liked the software more in their OOo days. When it became LibreOffice it became somehow more buggy and ugly. OOo with the right icon pack was very neat and had a superior interface to MSOffice. LibreOffice icons got uglified and are no longer pleasant to look at, and combined all looks... Worse.
Their online efforts are also disastrously bad. LibreOffice Online is based on a flawed idea to run LO on a server and deliver rendered images to a user. It works super shitty bad. They should have just made a web-first editor for OpenDocument file format, with concurrent editing. (Maybe when I'm finally done with the XMPP I'll look for funding to make just this. ... )
We're a ~40 person wholesale distribution company and I moved our company to LibreOffice. We also use Google Suite. The issues I face with my company are usually accountants/bookkeepers are used to using Excel. LibreOffice usually can handle anything they are wanting to do. It just means a little extra time googling/playing around with it to work the same way. I try to keep everything on Google Sheets however. That s…
Have you done a cost analysis of what the sum of that "little extra time googling" adds up to? If it's >$10 a month, then youre company is flat-out worse-off. Especially when LibreOffice / Google Sheets just doesn't even come close to the ease of use or power that Excel provides.
It's like giving a brick to a carpenter that has used a hammer for many years. Sure, the brick is okay at smashing nails in, but it flat out can't pull nails out, it creates ugly work, has no "user experience guard-rails", and is less efficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately Office is no longer "the thing everyone knows." It has become a hideously dysfunctional mess, primarily because of UI-design defects. Style management stands as a particular example. Now you must wade through dozens of unwanted canned styles to find the ones you've set up... if I remember correctly. For the style mess and other UI regressions that I haven't taken the time to catalog, I switched to Libre…
Personally, I’ve found the new UI in Word to be a massive improvement. The ribbon is way easier for me to navigate and find functionality. Then again, I’m using the macOS version. It still has a menubar for less common functionality.
Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard…
Yeah, I am curious why the OP is wanting to avoid Microsoft here. It is one thing if you just want to use open source and maintain that ethos, but if the reason is to save money it makes no sense. Spending $400 a month for a 40 person startup is going to be a negligible cost. If it adds even a few hours a month of extra effort across your entire team, the cost savings are already gone. Use the thing everyone knows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately Office is no longer "the thing everyone knows." It has become a hideously dysfunctional mess, primarily because of UI-design defects. Style management stands as a particular example. Now you must wade through dozens of unwanted canned styles to find the ones you've set up... if I remember correctly. For the style mess and other UI regressions that I haven't taken the time to catalog, I switched to Libre…
Personally, I’ve found the new UI in Word to be a massive improvement. The ribbon is way easier for me to navigate and find functionality. Then again, I’m using the macOS version. It still has a menubar for less common functionality.
The "ribbon" was widely mocked when it came out; I'm curious as to what you find easier about it.