Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to my Google Research Google Workspace has 19.2% marketshare and Office 365 65%.
I wouldn't call 20% "a small insular bubble".
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Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
101–110 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Not really a FUD if you're dealing with Excel spreadsheets from other companies, especially those that uses integrations with Excel. However PowerPoint/Present compat is a hit-or-miss bother but not world-shuttering like with Excel though, and Word comp…
When I used to work on publishing government reports we used to run into strange formatting issues if we didn’t stick with the Windows version of Office 365. Could we have worked around them with multiple versions or LibreOffice etc? Sure, but it would take time and at at $150-$350 and hour per contractor its not worth it. Just provision the licenses and be done with it.
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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not macOS here but I've crashed LibreOffice products (usually Writer) countless times on Debian by doing such things as moving/resizing line drawings, attempting to add basic charts, attempting to adjust wrap settings for images, replacing images with other images, and setting tab stops when there are things other than pure text in the flow. I can live with most of these, although they are annoying. I just wish I had…
Do you run Wayland, by any chance? Last I tried Wayland, Libreoffice simply crashed on startup.
I don't think I do, no. I'm really a fairly novice user, since I've only used Ubuntu here and there since 12.04 (I think) and not committing until 18.04, then switching to Debian Jesse with... I think it's GNOME. So basically the same thing as Ubuntu? I do wish I understood more about the underlying tech and window managers and such, because I know I could get more out of it all, but I really just follow poorly written blog tutorials for settings things up until it's "good enough". I am scared to play around much more for fear of everything becoming unusable, since that's been my experience in the past with the ALSA/Jack/PulseAudio mess and with video card drivers.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think maybe people are talking at cross purposes here and using the word 'college' differently, because I (in the USA) never even heard of a college that offers such a course, much less requires it.
FWIW, I'm Australian, and I'm talking about our local Universities. Doing a BSc myself, Msft Office training wasn't a requirement for my course, but many of the Bachelor of IT courses did have it as a requirement. Talking to my colleagues, they also had it as a requirement.
FWIW, I'm Australian, and have never heard of such a requirement.
Swinburne seems to offer such courses, but they're not credited, and not compulsary, and they're one day things designed for students who have never even turned on a computer before. They're definitely not part of a Bachelor of IT.
MelbUni, VicUni and FedUni don't even offer anything like that, at all.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#105The total cost of having Office 365 from everyone in the business will probably be less than 10K a year. There are 20 times more features than Libre Office or any other would offer+ things work fairly smoothly.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The thing that everyone knows these days is Google Docs, not Office.
I wouldn't want to have anyone on my team who couldn't pick up either in a few days. An average user isn't expected to run some complex analysis or create complex dashboards.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#107What kind of startup are you? Where do you want to use office? Who creates most of the content?
I have worked at a company that started with Googledocs and ended with Markdown (paper / design docs) and reveal.js for presentations. And that is something I can take recommend. Why? Because it is simple text that can be stored in a repository and you gain the ability to compare versions. It is easy to change and you can convert it to almost anything. The most important target is obviously pdf to communicate with customers. Nobody wants odt, docx or other strange formats that require more than a browser.
Convincing the technical people was not necessary or done quick. Non coder like the CEO did like the suggestion least, but it was a revolution from the base and people who code where mostly creating content or talking at conferences.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to my Google Research Google Workspace has 19.2% marketshare and Office 365 65%.
As the the children using it in schools grow up the percentage will probably change in Googles favour. Cheap Chromebooks and G-suite for schools was the entry to try breaking Microsoft monopoly on an Office suite we will find out if they succeeded in the next decade.
> we will find out if they succeeded in the next decade.
I'm worried that Google ADHD strikes Workspace, to be honest the reason many still stick up with Microsoft is that they understand the proposition of enterprise software, but assuming Google didn't touch Workspace like it did for its messaging and payment solutions it could be a 50/50 split.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#109I've never had a problem using LibreOffice or OpenOffice to replace Word/GSuite. I've had some compatibility issues to open PowerPoint files, but that was usually limited to editing them. Creating presentations in LibreOffice or OpenOffice was harder than GSuite or PowerPoint as well, precisely because the latter two treated me more like I was an idiot and I'm not good at designing slides.
To be clear, as your edit says, your CFO and other modellers are probably going to have to use Excel. There are just things that work in Excel and nowhere else.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?
#110My company hasn't used anything but Open/Libre Office since its inception. No problems.
The only slightly related issue has been the one client who continues to send email attachments from Outlook as winmail.dat.