Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#161

Post by pabs3 » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 4:39 AM UTC

gtf21 wrote: post #116

pabs3 wrote: post #96

To those who are using LibreOffice: Are you donating towards the cost of maintenance and development? If not, what changes could they make to convince you to do that?

If we go down this path we would donate as a company (and probably pay for support / fixes). I have no aversion to paying for good software, I'm just worried about switching an entire business over to bad software (I barely use office tools as I prefer plaintext formats and programming directly).

The great thing about LibreOffice is that you can try it before you like it and contribute with either company developer time or with company funds, depending on what you want fixed or if you just want to keep the project going.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#162

Post by _carbyau_ » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 5:23 AM UTC

gtf21 wrote: post #117

_carbyau_ wrote: post #68

I would argue that the office suite is less relevant than the data. Any suite only exists for it's output. If you use a generic format then you can convert to specialised ones as required. If you save in a proprietary format, be prepared for vendor lockin. Say HTML5 for docs, some form of CSV/YAML for spreadsheets etc you get the idea. Keep your data, then your suite decisions flow from that.

Yeah that's a nice dream and if I had my way everyone would write docs in LaTeX but I have sales people and ops people who need to be productive, and don't really care to learn to store things in HTML or CSV/YAML (the latter doesn't support the complicated models we run in Excel anyway).

I am not advocating a particular format - I agree with you that it is mostly a dream.

But consciously choose the file format first. Then the suite. The file format is where your info will be stored.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#163

Post by helloworld11 » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 6:29 AM UTC

MS Office is going in the same direction as GSuite as far as I can tell (despite no clear need to do that). It's becoming an increasingly online system that's steadily more hostile to offline work. Using a document creation suite that works like that, or in the case of GSuite outright refuses to work offline, strikes me as a recipe for disaster in some kind of business or connectivity SHTF scenario.

Then of course there's the whole parasitic, prying surveillance and snooping in the name of "helpful" user experience enhancement, telemetry and other bullshit corporate-speak for shamelessly sucking up your data. Another awful-smelling infection spreading among all the big corporate software players and making MS Office in its latest versions much more like the abomination that is GSuite (or anything by Google really). Do you really want most of the documentation being created by your business to be subject to perpetual viewing by these companies? I'd hope not.

Libre Office isn't perfect, but at least it has much less of all the above while still keeping most of what makes an office suite simply work across the board.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#164

Post by dontbenebby » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 11:06 AM UTC

>to be clear, our CFO will probably continue to use Excel, as will some of the team who build very complicated modelling sheets

Hiring someone to translate those "complicated" sheets in to a combination of python and basic CLI tools like grep to work with CSVs might be worth it in the long term, but for word processing and presentations, if you can export to PDF rather than be passing things in and out of the organization, OpenOffice should work well.

Your issue will be that ultimately, if you're not exporting to PDF or ODT but trying to export to Microsoft's proprietary format you'll always end up chasing some obscure bug on a deadline that will make the entire endeavor not worth whatever costs were present up until that point.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#165

Post by kcplate » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 12:27 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #159

kcplate wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately adoption is all that matters. If your new and better interface isn't an obvious game changer to the lowest common denominator user of your product to get them to see the value and not long for their comfort zone, it’s not really new and better. Ultimately a UI and UX needs the “U”

We all know that ignorance and inertia carry markets. That is not the topic.

If you rarely use a hammer, but change the way a hammer operates, claim it’s better, but the folks who use hammers everyday all day disagree, it’s not the hammer users who are ignorant.