241–250 of 333 posts
> ...cites cost, security, and digital sovereignty... With the recent XZ Utils backdoor fiasco, I would really think twice with this decision. Might be worth sticking to MS for a little bit longer, who knows if the backdoor code has been reused somewhere else? Besides, wasnt it a MS employee who uncovered this backdoor?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a paid shill, but Until recently Teams had capabilities Slack was laughingly behind :-/ Biggest one for me was that I could A) start multiple chats with same audience and rename them - so I can have chat with thom dick and Harry on system architecture over a few days and separate conversation with them on performance testing issues. This is trivial in teams. I have to create awkward channels in slack to approxima…
Teams, as much as I may dislike it, seems to have more built-in features than Slack, including a files feature that supports editing MS Office documents in place, and integration with Outlook calendar and email and other Microsoft apps. I also think that Slack didn't have video conferencing until relatively recently? As with the IBM model, I imagine it's simpler for companies to have a single source and a single supp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google? If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.
I am exclusively Google office user, but... Out of the top of my head: * Google docs are uglier than Microsoft word documents. This matters when I prepare an offer that I want to send to a client, and it should look good. * Google slides are hideous, and the only reason I get away with using them is because programmers (including me) have no taste[1] * Related to the looks, I sometimes buy paid document templates tha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade. Yup I can remember (mainly via Slashdot) this being a thing going backwards and forwards for two decade or more. Back to the days of it being called StarOffice if I remember correctly. Sometimes it seemed the city or state was just doing some elaborate license negotiation.
I remember using the original StarOffice to write up some consulting work that I’d done, it just have been the early 00s at the time, and I thought it was excellent - a worthy competitor to MS office of the time. And then over time it felt more and more bloated and slow, to the point where I started to think I maybe misremembered how good it was when I’d first used it. Is it just me? Or did it fall deeply into a hole…
You have allowed the Dark Lord to twist your mind until you've become the very thing you swore to destroy!
Hell, I remember a time when Jira was responsive and people loved it.
I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade. This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German s…
As for libreoffice I throughly dislike it compared to MS software. I have opened reproducible bugs against it in bugzilla that have been there for over a decade with no solutions. I got fed up in the end and just walked.
Saying that I dislike office packages entirely. They are a Swiss Army knife. Lots of mediocre tools in an inconvenient format but simple enough for the lowest denominator of poorly trained staff to use. We can and should do better. I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring and dedicated software to replace spreadsheets (all open source tools). The only remaining spreadsheet I have is personal finance which I can’t find a better solution for.
As for cloud we just send PDFs around and collab on GitHub so O365 is dead for us anyway.
I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade. This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German s…
Of course, Microsoft did some of their... persuation of politicians and initially killed the project in 2017, but it seems that since 2020 it's back. I do think that LibreOffice could need some more full-time User Interface people to polish some rough edges (please none of the hackjob wanna-be UX people that ruin all modern apps by obnoxious popups), so that could be a good use of some tax money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade. Yup I can remember (mainly via Slashdot) this being a thing going backwards and forwards for two decade or more. Back to the days of it being called StarOffice if I remember correctly. Sometimes it seemed the city or state was just doing some elaborate license negotiation.
I remember using the original StarOffice to write up some consulting work that I’d done, it just have been the early 00s at the time, and I thought it was excellent - a worthy competitor to MS office of the time. And then over time it felt more and more bloated and slow, to the point where I started to think I maybe misremembered how good it was when I’d first used it. Is it just me? Or did it fall deeply into a hole…
I have colleagues who still use Libreoffice for study and have the same problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember using the original StarOffice to write up some consulting work that I’d done, it just have been the early 00s at the time, and I thought it was excellent - a worthy competitor to MS office of the time. And then over time it felt more and more bloated and slow, to the point where I started to think I maybe misremembered how good it was when I’d first used it. Is it just me? Or did it fall deeply into a hole…
It was always pretty laggy. It didn’t and still doesn’t scale to any reasonable size document. The last thing I wrote in libreoffice was a technical specification around 200 pages long in 2019. It crashed regularly, wrecked the document and caused me a lot of work. I literally cut and pasted the entire thing into word, applied styles and cleaned it up over two days and had no problems with that. This made me dirty so…
I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade. This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German s…
You don’t have to log in with O365 and office and windows can stand entirely alone and there is no requirement to be cloud connected. It all still works offline as a classic AD setup. You have to be an enterprise customer though. I literally have one of these on my desk. This is not a problem for state level organisations unless they are throughly incompetent at infrastructure provision. As for libreoffice I throughl…
Over two decades ago I was tasked doing a pilot with IBMs Document Connect for Lotus Notes - it was clear that it pretty much was an Alpha they've been selling us, but it was showing promise. In the end it went nowhere, probably because not too many other companies were interested in trying out a different approach at handling their documents.
Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years. They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them. The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guara…
So many microcosms with tech. I'm always reminded here on HN how terrible Office is and why we don't just use Google Docs. I hold this same opinion personally. However I go to other communities (I think the last one I remember was some startup subreddit) and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business. I assume it's just that we prefer the devi…
Excel on the other hand is still miles better than Sheets for non-trivial use cases and I've seen business users revolt multiple times if you try to force them to use GSuite. To a lesser extent that's also true with Word and to an even lesser extent Outlook.
I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom).
The interesting one is PowerPoint which I've noticed a lot of power users are migrating to Figma for. Also 10 years ago people would send nasty grams if they couldn't get Visio licenses but Lucidchart seems to have eaten that marketshare.