Denmark Is Dumping Microsoft Office and Windows For LibreOffice and Linux (zdnet.com)
- Reference: 0178015473
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/0335229/denmark-is-dumping-microsoft-office-and-windows-for-libreoffice-and-linux
- Source link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-denmark-is-dumping-microsoft-office-and-windows-for-libreoffice-and-linux/
> Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has [1]announced that the Danish government will [2]start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice . Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because Denmark wants to claim "digital sovereignty." In the States, you probably haven't heard that phrase, but in the European Union, digital sovereignty is a big deal and getting bigger.
>
> A combination of security, economic, political, and societal imperatives is driving the EU's digital sovereignty moves. EU leaders are seeking to reduce Europe's dependence on foreign technology providers, primarily those from the United States, and to assert greater control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technological future. Why? Because they're concerned about who controls European data, who sets the rules, and who can potentially cut off access to essential services in times of geopolitical tension.
"Money issues have also played a decisive role," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Copenhagen's Microsoft software bill has soared from 313 million kroner in 2018 to 538 million kroner -- about $53 million in 2023, a 72% increase in just five years.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), a Dane, inventor of Ruby on Rails, and co-owner of the software developer company 37Signals, has [3]said : "Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft-dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there."
[1] https://www.thelocal.dk/20250610/why-denmark-wants-to-cut-use-of-microsoft-products-at-key-ministry
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-denmark-is-dumping-microsoft-office-and-windows-for-libreoffice-and-linux/
[3] https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-digital-sovereignty-7736f756
Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score:3)
from the article:
For example, after the EU-based International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallan, for war crimes, President Donald Trump issued ICC sanctions. This order allegedly prompted Microsoft to lock the ICC's Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, out of his email accounts, according to reports.
Switching to libre office wont prevent this ?
there a whole on of backend infrastructure here, not just which office suite Sue from accounts uses to open the latest figures for June.
And on the topic of email, Gmail and ms mail have email locked down so hard that it's difficult for any sane person to do email now. ms and google control email to a large extent.
Re: (Score:2)
> And on the topic of email, Gmail and ms mail have email locked down so hard that it's difficult for any sane person to do email now. ms and google control email to a large extent.
Please explain what you mean by this. Anyone can set up an email server - there's not much special that Google or MS bring to that - and email clients exist in spades.
Re: Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is two fold. Free and low cost cloud instances crank out spam at high rates. MS Outlook and Gmail blacklist large subnets to cut down on spam. If your private server resides at Hetzner, digital ocean, etc, your private email server can end up on any of dozens of blacklists... so interoperability between private email servers and the big boys is very often not functional.
Your private server can receive email, but your replies are blocked. This requires your sendmail to be relayed thru a send server with a "good" reputation. And the fun begins.
Re: (Score:2)
You do know the Danish government actually has enough money to afford to self host its own email server - that is, obtain a /24, have it routed to them, and host the server on that, right? You know, like 99% of businesses that have more than ten employees did until Office 365?
Digital Ocean? Why the hell would the Danish government need a fucking VPS?
(Incidentally I run mine behind two cheap VPSes and have had no problems with either incoming or outgoing email, so not even your complaint would be right, even
Re: (Score:1)
. Anyone can set up an email server -
Try it and let me know how many people receive your emails.
Re:Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have been self-hosting my email since 2000. No deliverability issues.
Sure, you have to abide by best practices such as setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but that's generally a set-up-once-and-forget thing. I also enabled DNSSEC for good measure.
Re: (Score:1)
How many hundreds of thousands of mailboxes do you host, manage and secure? Denmark will have more.
Re: (Score:2)
I host a small mail server, just for me.
However, for 19 years, I ran an email security service. We hosted about 100K mailboxes including outbound mail for about 10K of those. Our largest client probably hosted a million or more mailboxes (on its own hardware) and I don't recall them having deliverability problems.
I suspect small mail servers and huge mail servers will have fewer deliverability problems than medium-sized ones. Small ones because you fly under the radar and generally don't have abusive
Re: (Score:3)
Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.
Not that running large systems is necessarily easy , but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is sava
Re: (Score:2)
Every company I've worked at including my current one run their own smtp servers. Never any delivery issues. I run my own personal email server with no issues.
Re: (Score:3)
> Try it and let me know how many people receive your emails.
I have been running my own email servers (both personal and for my micro-company) for 19 years. The biggest problem I've had was figuring out how to configure SPF so Google (and probably others) wouldn't reject my emails. Once I got SPF configured properly, all my outgoing mail flowed freely.
Allstate is the only clusterfuck I've encountered. They can receive all my email, but I get frequent letters via snail mail saying they can't send me email -- even though I get monthly billing emails and other emails fr
Re: (Score:2)
Providing you have control of your DNS, it means using DKIM , SPF or similar measures. I've been self-hosting email for three decades, and it ain't complicated.
Re: (Score:2)
I self host my own email. Have *you* ever tried it?
I'm not saying the situation is great, but even before I set up SPF and DKIM this year (this year!) my emails were going through to everyone I wanted to communicate with.
And organizations like governments tend to have a few people on their staff capable of standing up an email server and keeping it maintained. You do know that until Office 365, virtually every business in the world had an email server, right?
I know I shouldn't expect much from the "I can't
Re: (Score:3)
> Switching to libre office wont prevent this ?
I suspect the thinking is one or both of the following:
1. Switching to LibreOffice and GNU/Linux is part of a general switch away from Microsoft technologies, preventing Microsoft from abusing their power in future. And while neither may be email clients or servers, any move to them is going to imply a move to technologies that work under GNU/Linux - Microsoft Office, including Outlook, only "runs" as a set of web apps. In practice, it implies a switch to ne
Whole EU should do it (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now.
Why paying MS for Windows and M365, and deal with their spying - pardon me - telemetry?
Re: Whole EU should do it (Score:2)
How entire countries and continents have allowed themselves to become hostage to.... any thing , any one... is beyond me... who hasn't seen this coming for years and decades ? Including hostile countries! That's a remarkable testament to lazy stupid groupthink of humanity everywhere.
Yes! Yes! Sad stupid governments, grab the steering wheel !
Will they contribute back? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps after the initial rollout headaches, Denmark can direct some of that IT budget back into these open source products they'll now be using for free?
Re: (Score:2)
If only. I know many companies (and work at one) that spend hundreds of millions a year on proprietary software. To be fair, only a small percentage is licenses, the vast majority of spend is support and professional services. However, you have no control on your software, and sometimes you have no choice but pay that one company for all support and services (so guess who can dictate the price).
I'm sure there would be pain moving to open source, learning new technology, training your folks, etc., but I ca
Ob. Could this be the year... (Score:2)
Could this be the year of Linux on the Denmark ?
seen this movie before (Score:3, Interesting)
how many times have municipalities etc tried switching to openoffice/linux/gnu/foss only to backtrack in 5 years? its pribably more expensive just from lost productivity of staff nit being familiar with the apps; because people dont learn how to figure things out anymore they are taught this exact step by step process they are poor at adapting to changes in software
Re: seen this movie before (Score:2)
Pretty much what I was going to say
Re:seen this movie before (Score:5, Insightful)
The geopolitical situation is different this time around. Countries rightly see reliance on US-based services and US-based closed-source software as a national security risk. So the amount of inconvenience they're willing to tolerate will likely be much higher than before.
Re:seen this movie before (Score:4, Insightful)
How is chosing not to be beholden to foreign interests a political statement? We (the US) have made it clear the rules are wildly variable and you can't trust that what we tell you today we will do tomorrow. It would be foolish to depend on us to provide software your government runs on (or cloud etc). This the sovereign movement.
Big providers see this which is why AWS and even MS have sovereign clouds in the EU ran only by citiens of EU nations and seperate from their US counterparts.
Countries shouldn't see using US-based software and services as a national security risk, they should KNOW it is a national security risk. Hell isn't that the point of removing our reliance on other countries in our manufacturing?
Re: (Score:3)
Selecting software that is controlled by a potentially-hostile nation-state is simply poor security practice.
And since January 6, 2025, many US allies have come to see the US as a potentially-hostile nation-state.
Re: (Score:2)
Office software is the tip of the iceberg. I agree that it's one of the least important part of your IT stack, but it's probably the easiest to change, so why not change it?
What Europeans and others need to do is seriously consider any alternatives to US software providers. Businesses fully depend on their IT systems nowadays, and operations will grind to a halt due to a technology hiccup. Can you afford to use software (or cloud services or whatever) from the US, when those companies are bending the knee
Re: (Score:2)
Selecting office software so that you aren't held digitally hostage to a government that is, say, threatening to annex a significant proportion of your territory, is both eminently defensible for operational, security AND political reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
> Selecting office software is not a political statement
That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.
It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
> The geopolitical situation is different this time around. Countries rightly see reliance on US-based services and US-based closed-source software as a national security risk.
You must be new to this. This kind of sentiment has existed since computers have become prominent around the globe.
Re: (Score:2)
I think Munich has switched back and forth a few times. They kept finding that FOSS was ultimately more expensive because of training and compatibility issues.
About (Score:2)
time.
The amount of taxpayer money ... (Score:2)
... my government has spent on shitty proprietary software is patently absurd. This being Germany were people should know better but deciders and their digital culture are still stuck in the steam age. Maddening. Germany and Europe as a whole is way to slow in appointing FOSS as it's primary source of software.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Teams (Score:2)
Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Teams are the typical use cases for MS software.
My experience is the first three can easily be replaced by something like Librefoffice, Teams is a different story but although the company I work with uses it extensively I would not miss it.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yes, and then I forgot Outlook...
Re: (Score:2)
Teams is nothing special, you have slack (which is better but still controlled by a foreign corporation) as well as several self hostable options like rocketchat and mattermost.
The only reason people use teams is because it got bundled with other MS services they were already paying for. As an actual product it's not very good.
Early in the process (Score:5, Insightful)
Dane here. This is indeed a positive move, but it's very early in the process, and we're likely to run into bottlenecks regarding expertise, because most IT-professionals have little experience with open source. Denmark is the almost quintessential Microsoft-country, more so than neighbouring countries Sweden and Germany. Up until recently, among decision makers and a IT-professionals alike, Microsoft was seen as "professional", "trustworthy" and the obvious default choice.
Many people are simply convinced that this shift can't be done, and that it's impossible to do professional work outside the "Office 365 universe" (yes, I've had people tell me this with a straight face). We can hope for the best, but don't expect any revolutions from Denmark.
Re: Early in the process (Score:2)
Maybe not impossible, but there is a learning curve that does make switching office suites (of any type) impractical for most considerations.
Internally, switching probably will not cause any major concerns - but it is the edge cases of dealing with outside entities that carries the most risk. Having to pay 4 people a few days work to figure out why a spreadsheet from a consulting company will not open properly is not a desirable outcome for most.
Re: (Score:2)
> Internally, switching probably will not cause any major concerns - but it is the edge cases of dealing with outside entities that carries the most risk. Having to pay 4 people a few days work to figure out why a spreadsheet from a consulting company will not open properly is not a desirable outcome for most.
I'm not sure this will to be the major stumbling block. This is the "Ministry for Digital Government" after all, and some of the interoperability issue can be "dictated away". I'm more concerned by the sheer lack of IT-professionals with relevant experience with open source, so that they simply won't know what to do and how.
Re: (Score:2)
Plus, we've read this story on Slashdot many times before. It usually ends with Microsoft "Generously" offering discounted or free Office licenses to the next IT executive in order to bring them back into the fold.
Re: (Score:2)
> It usually ends with Microsoft "Generously" offering discounted or free Office licenses to the next IT executive in order to bring them back into the fold.
True. That is certainly a pattern we've seen a lot. A reason why this may be a bit different (may be. I'm not at all sure how it will pan out), is that this is a very visible organization in the public sector and that we (in Denmark) are in a bit of a squeeze regarding our relationship to the US. Besides the general cost and vendor lock-in considerations, we now have to consider if the US is an adversary, and the dependency on Microsoft as a US company is becoming a national security threat.
Re: (Score:2)
I work for a government agency in Belgium.
If Donald Trump signs a paper that Microsoft and its subsiduaries cannot provide services to us because of sanctions, my agency will not recover. Complete shutdown and rebuild from scratch as if we never existed.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd assume the decision was made after some sort of study. I had a look at [1]https://www.english.digmin.dk/ [digmin.dk] but couldn't find anything relevant. If you happen to come across something I'd grateful for a link (danish is fine).
I guess that the grammar/spell-check in office 365 is better than libreoffice and that this is cause for concern but I'm very happy to be wrong about that.
[1] https://www.english.digmin.dk/
Why open source is better (Score:1)
The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can. Commercial software, on the other hand, is driven by the need for profit and so is made as cheaply as possible; they do the least they can that the consumer will tolerate.
Re: (Score:2)
> The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can.
Maybe it was that way one time, but most of the major projects that we rely on are written more by professional developers with decent to large paychecks that depend on them writing good software. LibreOffice is not immune from this, with Collabora providing a lot of the development output because their business depends on moving L
How about a new phone too (Score:2)
Not android and not iphone. [1]https://news.itsfoss.com/liber... [itsfoss.com]
[1] https://news.itsfoss.com/liberux-nexx-community/
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the first time we've seen this idea. The others all failed for a simple reason: no compatibility with the Google or Apple app stores. Without that, it just won't catch on.
Didn't Germany try (Score:1)
...something similar? I believe they had too many compatibility issues such that they abandoned it, or at least scaled down to niche use. Some suggest MS sabotaged it by spreading F.U.D.
Re: (Score:2)
The biggest problem was finding people who knew how to manage Linux and Libre Office. Lots of admins take MS courses, few take Linux ones. Same with the users, they come in with MS experience, and have trouble transitioning to the Linux world.
Theyâ(TM)ll eventually switch back (Score:2)
Nothing against Libre Office but Microsoft has a full ecosystem system that is too hard to compete with in the business world and especially in government environments.
Countries do this every few years (Score:2)
And it's usually to bargain for lower licensing fees. The problem is always the training costs because people can't adapt to new software.
That said there's a lot of tension between America and the rest of the world right now so who knows maybe it'll stick this time but I'll believe it when I see it. Wake me up they are still using Libre office in a year or two
Re: (Score:2)
> The problem is always the training costs because people can't adapt to new software.
Then replace them with AI.
But seriously, I kind of hate this kind of argument. People can learn new things and be trained to use different tools. They either aren't offered the opportunity to learn, through their employer or school. Or choose not to learn. It has nothing to do with "can't"
Re: (Score:2)
>> The problem is always the training costs because people can't adapt to new software.
> Then replace them with AI. But seriously, I kind of hate this kind of argument. People can learn new things and be trained to use different tools. They either aren't offered the opportunity to learn, through their employer or school. Or choose not to learn. It has nothing to do with "can't"
I don't think anyone's arguing that you cannot train people on new software in the sense that it's literally impossible, but that it's time consuming and therefore potentially very expensive to do at scale. More expensive than Microsoft's license fees? I suppose that's the big question.
Re: (Score:2)
The "training costs" are usually an excuse. Shifting between different versions of the same software also incurs significant changes, and yet training is very rarely provided for this - users are expected to just suck it up.
You'll get a few delays, complaints and additional support calls at first as people get used to the new version. Eventually people adapt, and discover workarounds for the inevitable new set of bugs.
Digital Freedom (Score:2)
What stops Microsoft from locking down Office? Nothing, absolutely nothing. What stops LibreOffice, OpenOffice, OnlyOffice, from locking down? Nothing, but, you can fork the project and continue on. That's an enormous deal because, it means you're never stuck if things go sideways.
Look at Windows 11, how many times has Microsoft handicapped that OS? From locking out local accounts on set up, through to enabling bad encryption, forcing TPM, Secure Boot, Recall, Edge restrictions, you name it, it's abus
Re: (Score:1)
> What stops Microsoft from locking down Office?
Commercial interests. If MS betrayed the trust of the customers, that brazenly, it would not be good for business. MS is an international company, they do work for, or represent the USA.
BTW: I am no fan of MS. Far from it.
I wish (Score:1)
I wish my company would do this.
Yes, I realize there are some tiny niche-functions that the open source products don't serve but 99.9% of people probably don't need them anyway and my god I'm sick of MS's constant tweaking of things and now shoveling AI shit at me.
Impress does not compare to PowerPoint (Score:1)
I hate to say it. I have used Linux as my primary desktop for 20+ years. I am using Linux now.
Most of LibreOffice is more than adequate for what I do, but Impress leaves a lot to be desired.
Excel is way better...but it doesn't matter (Score:2)
I used Excel heavily, with longish macros, do be able to program at all (in Engineering, not IT, not allowed any development tools), and was able to write a lot of what (were not then called) "apps" - specialty programs that did one thing. Custom reports and updates, mostly; A button would refresh a pivot table directly from Oracle database; another would put changes back in to Oracle, after data filtration.
Calc is pretty lame at many things that Excel really had nailed down well, 20 years back. Casually
Despite (Score:5, Interesting)
For all the crybragging of the faithful, the open Office suites work just fine. I've helped people migrate from Microsoft office for years now, no one is complaining. And it is compatible between Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Of course, some in here will say how they have a use case that requires that they only use Office 365. My sympathies.
Re:Despite (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.
Re: (Score:2)
For me, Outlook was the first to go: It was slow and unstable, with a rigid UI. I'm surprised it's still popular.
One doesn't have to use OpenOffice much to find incompatibilities: I wouldn't say 'power user', just a different UI that makes some steps more difficult.
I prefer the competing products (IE. MS Office clones) that are much more compatible. Doubly so, now that Microsoft Office uses HTML or JPEG, not text or RTF: MS Office has become the enemy, since once-simple editing can no longer be pe
Re: (Score:2)
> For me, Outlook was the first to go: It was slow and unstable, with a rigid UI. I'm surprised it's still popular.
They force you onto Outlook - it isn't true popularity. I was forced onto Outlook, and what a mess. I ended up redirecting everything to another address, and only go to Outlook when I'm told my mailbox is getting full.
Re: Despite (Score:2)
Spot on, IT decides how you can access your mail. Not because they are jerks; it's because of security. M365 is the only viable path for a startup. $20 a month per employee for full office suite with desktop apps, web access, and mobile apps too. No infrastructure needed. Imagine 5 employees in a small company: $150 (fees + ?) and you have a full suite minus a public facing website. There's no other offering close enough to compete.
Re: (Score:3)
> Spot on, IT decides how you can access your mail. Not because they are jerks; it's because of security. M365 is the only viable path for a startup. $20 a month per employee for full office suite with desktop apps, web access, and mobile apps too. No infrastructure needed. Imagine 5 employees in a small company: $150 (fees + ?) and you have a full suite minus a public facing website. There's no other offering close enough to compete.
Hah! I have several different Mail addresses to several different mail systems. Outlook has nothing on them in manner of security, but You need to believe what you need to believe. And oddly enough, the People I've set up on OO variants haven't had any issues yet.
Re:Despite (Score:4, Interesting)
> I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.
Yep, biggest issue is learning a new interface. I've already switched to it at home. All the formatting oddities that used to pop up on documents have been sorted, at least on all of my documents.
BTW, I've been using Open and Libre office to fix dodgy MS Office docs for the better part of 20 years. Great when someone hands you their "all important" excel file that they have no backups of and they spent "all week" working on but all of a sudden doesn't work. Usually because of a dodgy macro or formula somewhere, OO/LO usually strips that right out.
Re: (Score:3)
> I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.
It has been a while since I've used Word, but I remember it was really good at propagating tiny changes through a document that made it important that you keep an extra copy around because some seemed to have no easy way back to what you wanted.
And it was always an adventure opening up a powerpoint on a Mac that was originally done on Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
> It has been a while since I've used Word, but I remember it was really good at propagating tiny changes through a document that made it important that you keep an extra copy around because some seemed to have no easy way back to what you wanted.
This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.
I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given
Re: (Score:2)
Same. There are edge cases where "power users" of Excel/Word can find short-comings, but for everyday folks there's really no difference. Powerpoint functionality is another story, but it has gotten better.
The only really sticky app left in MSFT's office suite is Outlook and that's mostly because people just don't want to deal with learning a new UI. Perhaps MSFT's latest tweaking of the UI to browbeat people into consuming copilot will get people over that hump.
Best,
Re: (Score:2)
> The only really sticky app left in MSFT's office suite is Outlook and that's mostly because ...
IMNSHO, Outlook is barely usable. It's email, FFS, so there's decades of high quality alternatives. People are stuck on it because we stuck them on it. Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.
FYI, with XOAUTH2 enforced for IMAP authentication, the email program itself has a certificate and the server must allow or deny that client. Exchange can allow any client, or a specific list, and it defaults to allowing only Outlook variant
JMAP (Score:1)
Do you really want copies of your emails on many devices?
Re: (Score:2)
> Do you really want copies of your emails on many devices?
What are you implying? I don't see the connection.
IMAP clients can (and often do) leave the mail on the server as-is. My client sure does (alpine).
Outlook, the app, will download copies of emails to a local cache. So using it *would* end up in the situation you are implying is a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
> Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.
Exchange admins are a dying breed because on-prem Exchange is vanishing in favor of M365. Microsoft is slowly making IMAP and POP3 less viable, removing basic authentication a couple of years ago. If your client can't do OAuth 2.0, it can't access M365 over IMAP. It will not be surprising at all to see IMAP and POP3 deprecated entirely in the next few years, requiring all connections t
Re: Despite (Score:3)
I don't know how it is for anyone else, but office seems to take a very long time to open a single document. If you are working with many documents I pull my hair out waiting for it to open all the time. And then to make matters worse, it insists on opening in "safe mode" which means every document needs to be opened twice if you want to edit them. LibreOffice calc opens much faster and is much faster ui-wise than office.
Re: (Score:2)
[1]https://www.techwalla.com/arti... [techwalla.com]
[1] https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-disable-safe-mode-in-office
Re: Despite (Score:2)
Security is controlled by my organization. Doubt I have access to change bthat.
Re: (Score:1)
It opens documents in a microsecond on my Mac Mini.
Re: Despite (Score:2)
Admittedly it is a slow laptop by today's standards but there is 'slower than a Mac Mini' and there is 'ridiculously slow for any modern machine'.
Re: Despite (Score:3)
It's psychological. Every one uses it. Don't think.
I've caught and trained quite a few senior federal employees and I can see that many of them really, when you come down to it, only barely understand ANY general principles, and based their entire career on ... let's call it "competency" on email, outlook mainly. They don't understand heirarchies like file systems, for instance. You are pretty severely limited in what you can do at the application level, if you have to be taught what a heirarchy is, in the
Re: (Score:1)
"senior federal employees " That has nothing to do with federal employees, that just senior (but I doubt it stops there) employees. Stop beating up on fed. employees and find some migrants or poor people to beat up on, they won't hit back so you'll feel good in your dark little heart.
Re: (Score:2)
Send in the next batch of washed up Feds. I'll be happy to beat them up, metaphorically, of course.
I get the impression, however, that understanding a file system, as rudimentary as that may be, is something that isn't limited to seniors. We're just talking about plugging in a USB stick and then having to go into long detailed explanations of what a USB stick is, how files are organized into directories, etc... the difference between "move" and "copy". Really how did you get this far in life?
Fake it 'til yo
Re: (Score:3)
My ex GF did not know how to save a file.
She quits word/excel etc. to wait for the "do you want to safe" dialog.
Even telling her to use ctrl-s from time to time was beyond her grasp.
Re: (Score:2)
I found LibreOffice to be ugly, harder to use, and less capable than Office. Every minute I used it I was thinking about how I'd rather be working in Word or Excel. Ick.
Re: (Score:3)
> I found LibreOffice to be ugly, harder to use, and less capable than Office. Every minute I used it I was thinking about how I'd rather be working in Word or Excel. Ick.
You are showing what I called crybragging. But you can collect your check from Microsoft now.
Did you know some people even if they use Microsoft office, keep a copy of Libre or other OpenOffice, because your so called more capable office suite can't open a lot of files, so OO opens, saves it in your very limited file capabilities so you can pretend that Microsoft Office is the only possible Office suite to use.
Re: (Score:3)
That's why MS has a subscription just for you. Just keep writing them a check and you can continue to work in Word or Excel.
I don't how people can like and use the ribbon interface in Office myself, but there you go. By the way you can switch LibreOffice from the conventional interface (you know the one that made Office 95 so usable) to a ribbon interface. View->User Interface and select "Tabbed."
Re: (Score:2)
> For all the crybragging of the faithful, the open Office suites work just fine.
I'm not faithful to any software, and I use LO for almost everything. But sometimes I try to load a big CSV into Calc for massaging and it crashes. Then I load the same file into Excel and it's fine, and not even slow. They clearly need to do fundamental work on Calc. Writer is already superior to Word in this regard, so this is not a blanket complaint about LO.
Re: (Score:2)
We already use Draw instead of $100 a year PDF editing suites like Nitro. Made post-training reference documentation in 1 day (in Libre Writer lol) and nobody has had a single problem with it.
Re: (Score:2)
> We already use Draw instead of $100 a year PDF editing suites like Nitro. Made post-training reference documentation in 1 day (in Libre Writer lol) and nobody has had a single problem with it.
Yup, I do all my work in LO, and even save it for others stuck on or believing that Microsoft's offerings are the only possible solution.
I do the same with spreadsheets, even those that have calculations in them.
I would caution people however, that the more complicated you make spreadsheets, the more likely you'll have issues.m In any Office suite. I've seen utter fails when the math didn't add up, but people were using the spreadsheet to make decisions for years. I triple check mine before release.
Re: (Score:2)
No idea about Denmark, but the UK government are heavily in bed with Microsoft. Lots of sharepoint, MS SSO, MS 2FA, and of course, Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel etc.
Getting the UK off Word and Excel alone is actually a pretty big job - sharepoint suddenly takes on a whole different meaning when you can't open stuff in the browser any longer, and I'd imagine training the tens of thousands of people who use MS Office all the time to use Libreoffice would also take some time.
After all that... you've still got Ou
Re: (Score:1)
Sorry, I gave up on Libre Office because it simply did not work just fine. Many many bugs, and many of those the developers refused to acknowledge.
Re: (Score:2)
> Sorry, I gave up on Libre Office because it simply did not work just fine. Many many bugs, and many of those the developers refused to acknowledge.
You apparently forgot about the Office bugs. And Outlook - I deal in real time with emails - Outlook occasionally decides they are spam or malware providers, and hides them for a while before telling me about them. Or maybe that's a feature for me to have plausible deniability when the SHTF?
Re: (Score:2)
It does not work "just fine".
It works and that's it. It is the same mess as office, just without ribbons.
Everything that was straight forward in a "advanced text editor", oh we call it "Word Processor" 30 years ago, is now a complete incomprehensible mess. It requires a training to be able to write document that goes beyond a letter. Ridiculous.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been using a mixture between Office 2013 (no subscription required!) and LibreOffice on another system as of late. Both work well on the systems they are needed on. I've not had a reason to dump Windows nor MacOS, just the subscription services.