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.
Good the world needs less PowerPoint
Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
61–70 of 169 posts
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#62I 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.
Google Sheet's limit of 400k cells sounds like a lot, that could be as few as 40k rows with 10 columns (probably lot of them would be dimensional). As someone who works with large amounts of data and business users, it sounds nice to say everyone should learn to code and query, but in practice the business users can get a lot done with a big spreadsheet with fewer errors and less training. I frequently hold classes to teach SQL, and even that is pretty tough for a lot of people to learn and do correctly.
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#63It 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 .
There is 'should' and there is 'does' :-) When IBM acquired Blekko they were moving people over to the web based version of Lotus notes at 1,000 employees a month (give or take) and with 450K employees that was a 30+ year timeline (it got faster as they worked out transition kinks but still) the point is that at certain scales these things are a lot more difficult for enterprises than you might expect.
The biggest challenge (as I saw it) was making sure that everyone could email everyone else all through the transition because if email stops, the company stops in that portion.
All of that to say that even though Airbus is one less than a third that many employees (133K vs 450k) its organization complexity is up there. And keeping complex organizations functional and efficient as possible during a large transition is often addressed by keeping the rate of change manageable (aka slower than you would expect).
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#64It 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 .
People need to be trained, documents moved and converted, business processes adapted, ... In addition, solutions will have to be found for documents that exceed GSuite’s capabilities. 10 years? No, but 2-3 years for sure.
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#65How to choose between two evils? Guess privacy were not on that list.
What sort of loss of privacy would an Enterprise account experience in Office or gsuite?
Google or Microsoft makes their money on analytical data. In other words; we are the product. Not the software.
So what I ment is that they traded one evil for a another one.
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#66Hopefully, this will start a trend away from MS Office to other office programs. Preferably open source solutions.
In what way is G-Suite open source? The same way as Android.
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keyboard shortcuts are huge. Also I’m used to the ribbon which I don’t think they copied yet
The ribbon has a software patent, if I remember correctly. Although it's a UI element, so I'm not sure if it's enforceable?
I am thankful that the ribbon UI is patented, it prevents that terrible experience getting more widely implemented
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#68Earlier 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.
Long have I wished for an open source spreadsheet tool built on a database backend. I don’t hear the stories as much these days but for ages it was common for contracting firms to come into a place and find they’d been running the whole operation as an Excel spreadsheet and they had a very poor understanding of how complicated it would be to grow their system. Basically a complete rewrite to a DB model. I thought for…
That was exactly my experience around two years ago. The brand of the company was far, far more valuable than their internal processes or capabilities as a result, and it was a painful migration (still is, from what I hear).
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#69I 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…
I think it might have been a Joel on Software story that talked about how when they did a review of what people actually used Excel for they found that a ridiculous number never went beyond "making lists of things".
By that measure, I bet that Google Sheets is likely overpowered compared to most people's use.
I try to keep this in mind when I see things like AirTable (and their recent big funding raise) - because it looks so "listy" and like something people would actually use [1].
Maybe the real differentiator is the ability to easily put checkboxes and pics in a row and much less dependent upon having advanced statistical functions, pivot tables, etc.
Re: Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sort of loss of privacy would an Enterprise account experience in Office or gsuite?
Google or Microsoft makes their money on analytical data. In other words; we are the product. Not the software. So what I ment is that they traded one evil for a another one.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Don't just repeat cool sentences that don't apply here.
You're wrong here, ESPECIALLY with microsoft.