Having had the delight of reformatting thousand page documents, each paragraph of which had somehow acquired its own formatting, I remain convinced that MS's ideas about WYSIWYG were a real disservice to both casual users and those who write for a living.

How long did it take before styles were easy to implement? And why are they not the default operating mode?

Is the use of these tools taught in school (it's half a century since I was at school) or is it simply expected that people will work out what they need to do; will know the limitations and possibilities of the software by osmosis? If the latter, there seems very little reason to stick with MS[1] rather than Libre products.

[1] In the good old days, you had hierarchical menus through which you could discover functionality - if you could understand the names. Since the Ribbon interface, that's all gone the way of the Great Auk.

WYSIWYG in MS Word and its competitors were a major upgrade to the markup languages previously available. Who remembers runoff, unless like me they have bitter memories? Latex was another cross I had to bear for a time.

But WYSIWYG alone leads to large documents that are inconsistent, as the article and Mr Barnes both note. Styles and themes are a major upgrade to WYSIWYG. As others have noticed, however, few people know how to use styles and themes.

I have also met spreadsheets where the author inserted a hand-calculated total rather than using the spreadsheet to add things up.

... but see you all back on El Reg in two years where they just couldn't make it work and slinked back to 365

Why would they not? Times have changed. Nobody in Denmark is going to take a US company's shmoozing seriously these days. There's no reason why they wouldn't be able to make it work. If there are edge cases in the form of really complex spreadsheets they might have to take a look and replace them with properly written and stable solutions.

Ask Munich. If I recall correctly, it made a lot of noise about going full Open Source twice, and failed miserably.

My understanding, at the time, is that it was just a move to get Redmond to lower license costs.

You are definitely right though, times have indeed changed and the blind trust the world has given to the USA for decades is now pretty much gone.

I will be very interested in seeing what happens with the Danish.

They're not particularly known for making bold statements without following them with acts.

Munich didn't fail miserably. The politicians who took the initiative for migrating to Linux got a lot of bad press from the billionaire controlled mainstream media, in the elections their opponents got massive support from unknown sources.

In the end, such projects get slowly get killed by bad press and the will to continue gets worn down by the constant pressure imposed by US Big Tech calling the shots.

In a world where MS would disappear magically from one day to the other, transitioning to Linux and Libre-Office based solutions would be a quick operation for most people.

Check "Requiem for the American Dream" if you don't believe how much control these companies impose on our societies.

...I'd say that in year or two some high ranking official will come in and throw a fit about how they want Office back and everyone else needs to be using it for "standardization", when the real reason is the glass marble they have for a brain can't process that their settings have been slightly moved around, even though all they ever use is a letterhead template and the Underline button. And because this is a person you can't just say "no" to because they can quickly replace you with someone else who will say "yes", it just ends up happening.

The US overplayed their hand and stepped on the wrong toes. Now they see their world crumble one small piece at a time, accelerating as it goes along.

that were along the line. They can do whatever they want with their friends and allies, same with all those who have smaller balls.

Goof news. But the English language article cited contains this remarkable passage:

But changing to user-driven open source systems is also not without challenges, Damsgaard noted.

“If you don’t have a member of staff who can develop the system, you can’t implement it,” he said.

This is FUD. That would only apply if they need specific modifications. It's something that FOSS makes possible but with a mature product such as LibreOffice this is unlikely; after all they've been using MS products without such modifications for years (I'm guessing here but it seems a pretty sound guess).

But users will still complain about not being able to find this or that. Personally, I'd say bite the bullet for something that more closely resembles what they know (and maybe even love) – say Softmaker Office – so you've got more time to work out how to replace the real officeoid (not proud of this): Exchange and Outlook because then users won't just complain, but go a viking!

I've moved a couple of private e-mail accounts to [1]OpenXChange and the in-browser office suite is okay. Not ever really had to use Outlook and Exchage, I can't say how the "collaboration" – shared mailboxes and calendars work.

[1] https://www.open-xchange.com/

Surely divide and conquer? Most business users have such low levels of MS Office expertise that they don't touch (or need) 98% of the capabilities of the software, and the same can be true of the OS. My wife still hasn't spotted that the household Chromebook is now running full fat Mint, and my 80+ mother got on splendidly when I put Ubuntu on her desktop.

Identify this large group (at a guess 85%) of basic transactional users, transfer them all to Open Office (or whatever) ignoring any squealing, and then deal with the "I can't find..." queries by nominating some power users who have been trained to support a two month transition. Then tackle the 15% of people who are (or think they are) power users - a similar segmentation approach to as to what their needs are, so look to take out the 10% of power users whose needs can be met (with better support to transition and train these people), and then concentrate on the 5%.

Finance will be a big part of this 5%, all clinging desperately to Excel's shitty charting and bloody pivot tables - we all know there's NOTHING that any business needs that REQUIRES Excel. Offer any diehards voluntary exit terms, or bulldoze their office over a cliff, you know it makes sense..

I might agree with you in principe, but experience and decades of studies of "change management" ( Who moved my cheese? )suggest otherwise. As do some migrations from, and then back to Office, because things didn't work as expected.

SWMBO is happy enough with OpenOffice on her machine instead of MS Office, but then I get called for anything unfamiliar such as, I don't know, copying formatting from one cell to another…

I actually think that moving people from Outlook to something else for e-mail and calendars wouldn't be that hard, because Outlook seems to break every known (and some heretofore unknown) rule on usability, but they will want to be able share calendars and, the pointy-haired brigade will want to be able to delegate their inbox to their assistants, and I haven't yet seen a client/server solution for this that I think looks acceptable.

But back to Office and I'm unapologetic that I think that many people will object to the look and feel of LibreOffice and it's not worth the fight over this. And it's the look and feel that matter. Other solutions including SoftMaker and OnlyOffice are available where most people, apart from the Excel junkies (and I've had to look and work with the source of pivot tables!), and the Powerpoint brigade, would hardly notice the difference. The Excel lot can probably be persuaded to switch to Jupyter Notebooks without too much difficulty, but I don't think there's much hope for the coloured crayon brigade: B Ark, or round the back of the house for them; and then shots might be heard. What an awful clusterfuck of a program. Of course, anyone wanting Access gets taken straight to the BOFH's basement, to get a special introduction to the new version.

"but I don't think there's much hope for the coloured crayon brigade: B Ark, or round the back of the house for them; and then shots might be heard. "

I'll order a big stash of tartan blankets, and a bolt gun (or I could use my Makita and a 5-flute auger bit).

It would be nice to see this work for them. People and organisations fed up with the Microsoft monetisation tactics.

MS: Look! Here's Copilot! We've burned through bi££ion$ to bring this out so you *will* use it.

User: But I don't want it....

MS: Too bad because we're baking it into everything whether you like it or not. Then we'll be recouping our costs.

User: But, but, it's unreliable, it makes stuff up, tells lies.

MS: Yes, well we know its a WIP but that's not important right now.

MS: No, you can't have on-premises servers any more because we don't want you to do that. We want all your stuff on *our* computers. We'll give you a huge range of tools and management options that will take you ages to fathom out - then we'll make a few changes so you have to fathom it out again. We'll bring features, deprecate features, take features you're familiar with and redesign them or make them more difficult to find because hey, we're Microsoft, you're our prisoner and that's what we do. Also, when we mandate that your desktop O/S is in also our cloud, we'll know when you take a toilet break, and what you did, and how many sheets.

And don't get me started on that attention seeking crap they call Teams - the bastard child of Skype and Sharepoint.

< I feel so much better now :) >

"And don't get me started on that attention seeking crap they call Teams - the bastard child of Skype and Sharepoint."

Let me help your blood pressure by reminding you of the lovely way that Teams and Sharepoint invade Outlook, with garbage ersatz emails "Your colleagues are trying to reach you in Teams", "Bob Craphead has added a comment to Longboringdocument.docx", "Mildred Dewspeckle has assigned you a task in "Documentyouhaven'treadanddon'tcareabout.docx" and the like.

No even China went that far (so far). And they have way more reasons than the Danish.

Greenland?

China have been developing their own OS's, including Harmony.

So, yeah.

May I remind you that China has it's own version of Linux (that it uses) ?

That, thanks to Trump and his crass ignorance of the slightest notion of diplomacy, China is now gearing up its own, homegrown semiconductor industry ?

That China has its own automobile industry, its own smartphone industry, and is going to be the first country in the world with a functional Thorium power plant ?

If there is one country on this planet that will have no problem kicking out Microsoft, it's China.

I seriously doubt that Bejing is using OneDrive to store its administrative papers.

> No, it won't be a perfect fit, an exact one-to-one replacement. That's literally impossible. That's the trap of proprietary software. But it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be good enough to do the job.

This is why power users are unhappy at work, doomed to be the edge cases.

"This is why power users are unhappy at work, doomed to be the edge cases."

Surely power users are simply prima donnas, unhappy in this mooted transition because they currently possess power and status by knowing things that other people don't (be that methods, or outputs). Their problem is that they don't want to learn something new for (misplaced) fear of losing their status. In reality, if they can do complex stuff on Excel, they will be exactly the same people who can do complex stuff on other applications.

I'll doff my cap to Charlie Clark for noting the "Who moved my cheese" aspects of change, and fully recognise the cultural and behavioural problems of making change stick....but having been through a hell of a lot of corporate change over my career, I now see change in more B&W terms, more Rentokil than "Who moved my cheese": As a corporation, decide what you're doing; tell people it is happening; then do it decisively. There's other employers for anybody who won't adapt, the world of work shouldn't be a care home for the change averse.

Just suppose that Microsoft were subject to a law that allowed certain parts of the US authorities to compel them to do things and lie about them after.

Just suppose that the USA elected a president who was very willing to use government powers beyond their intended limits to further his agenda.

Just suppose this president were focused enough to realise what he could do with this power over Microsoft against any countries, companies or possibly even individuals going against his agenda.