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 state institutions consider classic desktop apps and web apps distinct tools for different tasks and don't want their desktop to depend on cloud.
It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice became much better since the time the discussion began.
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.
You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it. The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake. I've yet to meet anyone who appreciates ms office UX changes that happen every 5 years and move everything around.
> 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? My recollection is that it hitched its wagon to Java for no good reason that I could see.
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 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 managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring
I tried and found it the weirdest language (BrainFuck aside) I ever seen. Sure you can copy-paste-modify it to do something similar to what everyone does but doing anything atypical seems prohibitively hard.
I really miss a modern (first-class Unicode to begin with, also more intuitive while more rich and less verbose than HTML+CSS) human-oriented typesetting language. Perhaps it's time to invent what MarkDown is to HTML but to SVG.
> As for cloud we just send PDFs around
Can MS Office make hybrid PDFs the way LibreOffice does (embed the source document into the PDF)?
A lot of the office stuff can be handled by templates that allow only editing relevant parts - there's not really a need for majority of office workers to have access (and needing to know) all the features of an Office suite.
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.
Probably because it’s misrepresented every single time. The headline is “Germany is moving to X” and then you click the link and it turns out it’s a single state.
This is the equivalent of “South Dakota is ditching Microsoft”. It’s 30k users which isn’t nothing, but it is VERY different from the German federal government moving away from MS.
It will be interesting to see how long that remains true.
Management of resources is the enemy of profit for both sides in the market. Businesses lose out on money by spending time that they would be using on their core competency for managing software licenses, versions, data backups, servers, etc. And of course cloud providers lose out on you giving them more money than their cloud services cost them to deliver.
Azure now makes up the largest percentage of Microsoft's revenues. Obviously the business model scales very well. It likely scales better than Office does. Eventually the less-profitable thing starts taking up internal development resources that could be going to more profitable divisions, and that gets someone mad.
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 guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
> 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.
For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
This is true. Among other things, I do a lot of label printing and the tools in MS Word are miles more mature. You get these same types of responses when people list off all the alternatives to Photoshop. Just not the same.
Yes, my pet peeve is printing as pdf. You can control line thickness, size, placement of row borders to pixel perfect in Excel & it will get printed to pdf or paper exactly as it is. But not from Google Sheets or Excel Web, even same excel sheel imported in these & then printed will have slight difference in what you see on screen and what gets printed. I understand its because of browsers limitations to place stuff on pixel scale.
Mostly because of network effects and wanting software that will be supported for another three decades potentially and can open my document long-term. Google cancels products all the time and has practically no vision.
In that case, they can use FreeOffice, whose office suite is indistinguishable from MS Office and works on Mac and Linux! (Granted, I say that as someone who very much does not live in those tools except as a rare hardship imposed by normies society.)
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 devil we know than the one we don't.
I don't think that the decision is being driven by bad company A v/s bad company B, and it's implicitly technical.
All of us here probably will know when to jump out of spreadsheets and have some knowledge on how to approach things then, so a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs is fine for us.
The problem outside, is that they are somewhat locked on the spreadsheet and have to stick with it, so more advanced features are welcome even though it comes with the price of the so called evil company according to the other group.
And is Office really better than Google's Spreadsheets? Idk, I don't care about small differences, but they surely annoy hardcore users, plus no one really got fired for buying IBM
Google is definitely the devil I know of those two, still I would not like it if one my main tools were provided by Google. Currently they seem to manage to both lack in innovation AND be unreliable.
I generally don't see people recommending teams, typically business users seem to prefer zoom while the ones who use teams are forced to because it's bundled with other Microsoft products.
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.
>and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.
These must be paid shills. While it's actually quite understandable why real people and businesses would want to use and recommend MS Office, no one in their right mind actually thinks Teams is the best video chat tool in the world. Any serious business uses Zoom, Slack, etc.
I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
Word and Excel, like Photoshop, are dominant because of their maturity as well as the muscle memory of their users.
People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.
To be fair, or maybe only in my opinion (but i had a teacher who agreed with me so :/), from at least 2008 until at least 2012 (So from when i discovered how nice it was until after i quit using word/openoffice entirely and only used Latex), OpenOffice/libreoffice templating features were more powerful than word's, although less intuitive.
Gdoc is shitty however and i don't see how/why i want to use it over any competitors. I think i prefer Nextcloud's editor, even without the privacy/data mining consideration, and i really think that could be improved.
Gdoc is better than Jira and Confluence editor though, and better than the standard redmine editor froma few years ago (the non-markdown one), so that's nice.
> 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.
My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember.
Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website.
Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.
There are a ton of very specific pieces of functionality that are built into Microsoft Word that caters to business edge cases. Features that have worked the same way and have not been touched for years for compatability reasons and are not duplicated in other software/services. Word is a bloated mess, but incredibly feature rich.
Office is Final Cut Pro. It is brimming with features and power.
But lots of people aren’t working at some corporate office. Mom and Pop can get far with the iMovie option like Google Sheets and Docs.
Actually now that I say that… what I want is a LibreOffice equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets and Presentations. Google is the only bad part of my Docs experience.
The popularity of all these paper emulators seems odd to me.
Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?
I love the question as I'm constantly faced with the absurdity of user-hostile software. It was supposed to be built to help humans. Instead it creates PTSD.
> 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.
Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.
> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.
Microsoft in a nutshell… I swear they offplanered their ux people to the moon where they couldn’t do anything. Or they have no ux people. Or their ux people have no effect.
They do, and right below the file names is its path. However, the elderly relative had never opened the file on the new computer/Office install, and likely never had any idea where they'd originally saved the file.
I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's the same reason I still can't get into IntelliJ.
Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse.
The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it.
I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.
> 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 see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.
Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)
> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening
You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.
> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.
You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.
I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"
And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?
Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.
The pros you mention above are true for the desktop versions, but most definitely not the browser versions, in my experience. The browser versions feel squishy and feature incomplete and the interface is different enough to be annoying enough for me to avoid it like the donut with a hair on it.
Mine is a very Excel-centric view. I wouldn't miss anything else in the office suite.
Very hard for me to understand why as the owner of a computer you want to put precious data on someone else's computer. Especially someone that has no customer service, a history of killing products with no good options for their users and frequently breaking laws.
Office has become a bit of a UX mess in parts, due to the cloud and web integration, but the overall functionality and integrations are still unmatched. Many people also continue to prefer native applications.
Their offering strikes a decent balance between the two. The fact that it is a native application really helped me when I traveled internationally, where my connection was spotty at best. I had a minimal slow connection on my phone that I couldn’t tether, and otherwise, I had to offload periodically where Wi-Fi was available from my PC. In places where you can assume to have a strong, always-on connection, they don’t make much difference, but in situations where I can’t count on it, Microsoft’s structure, which can tolerate offline usage, is very useful.
I use MS Office and Softmaker Office, both native and with perpetual license. Works fine for me. Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse
Honest question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I never used Outlook, and I use Thunderbird daily so I wonder what I miss [1]. It also picked up development a bit and got some nice improvements, maybe check it out of you didn't recently. But I'm really curious why is it bad.
[1] I'm pretty sure outlook users miss good GPG support, at least.
Ironically, we used thunderbird at at old job, because it was easy to screenshot for QAs instructions on how to check both the HTML and Text versions of sent emails.
On macOS/iOS I like Apple's suite of apps (and its desktop-mobile integration), and arguably Google's advantage is that it's web-first so it works well on cheap ChromeBooks that you don't think twice about replacing when they are lost or broken.
outlook has a gazillion things that are far far more of a joke than those lacks in thunderbird, those are just things people accept because they cant change it, and impose a 1:1 feature/bug requirement on a new thing, or its "not ready"
Yeah, they got it so fucked up that the average user has no idea where their files are. It is absolutely unbelievable how user hostile it is. Typical software designed for the goals of the creator. The world of computing has truly descended into hell for the average non-technical person.
Try editing a 200 page document in Google Docs. Last time I tried I had to give up. I detest MS Office too, and Google Docs is perfectly fine for a whole lot of my use cases, but it's not a complete replacement, and that'll be a problem for a lot of places where some subset of users will need other applications anyway if you pick Google.
The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...
We'll have to see how long it takes, as it did with LiMux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) when Microsoft Germany headquarters magically moved to Munich and everything got back to running on Windows again.
> The city reported that due to the project, it had gained freedom in software decisions, increased security and saved €11.7 million (US$16 million).
That's kind of nice. An org that I worked for gave everyone LibreOffice installs by default and if you needed any of MS offerings you could just ask for a license for those. Most people were just fine with LibreOffice. Depends on what you're doing with said office suite, though.
It's a German of Schleswig-Holstein which is like the state of California or the state of Kentucky in the US doing a change like this. And it's only the state government and not the municipalities in the state.
I imagine the tide will lift and fall over the years. Some applications (new and old) will only run on specialized platforms. Exceptions will exist in a large enigh environment.
I like this conspiracy theory as much as the next person but in fact they moved only around 10-15km south, to be in Munich proper. Yes, I know, that would be irrelevant regarding possible tax breaks or bribes or whatever. But physically it was not far, same people working there without relocating, etc.pp
The relevant part is that they moved from another city to Munich, which means that certain company taxes would be paid in Munich instead of Unterschleißheim (the city where the HQ was located previously).
This means a increase of tax revenue for the city of Munich of tens of MEUR/yr from this tax alone, without even considering secondary effects.
The small physical distance just means that this would be quite cheap for Microsoft to implement, compared to trying to pull the same stunt with another city.
I'm sorry, what year is it? Am I posting on Slashdot still? Is this year finally going to be the year where Linux desktops become something for normies?
When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s. Now we're going to do it all over again with a different, much poorer, German state?
Schleswig-Holstein is not poor. It is next to Denmark, and it is really nice and well developed.
I think transitioning to a different platform is mostly an organizational and political, rather than technical problem, and the main roadblock is educating users and altering processes to migrate away from MS Office.
That said, modern Linux distributions like NixOS or Guix could be great to manage large fleets of computers, keep them up-to-date, and upgrade things without fear. In my experience, that is the main technical issue administrations are experiencing.
And of course, running free software is great because it brings freedom to change things.
As a long time Linux user, I think problems are partially technical. For example:
* A lot of software used by them is certainly Windows only (they will have to find alternatives, change their workflows or invest in some windows virtual machines)
* Windows tooling for organizations is much more mature. There's a reason virtually everyone uses AD.
* Linux is very focused on user freedoms. This is not usually important in the office. But freedom to configure things is a freedom to break thinks, and cause admin headache.
The problems are solvable, but it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Oh and I love nixos, and I always wonder how realistic would it be to use it in a company for management of thousands of desktop machines. Sounds like it would be perfect for it, but i don't know any stories.
According to wiki here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_cities_by_GDP) Munich in 2021 had a per capita GDP of 86k euro. According to wiki here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_p...) Schleswig-Holstein had a per capita GRP of ~42k euro in 2022 (note that the years are different). So these figures suggest that Munich is roughly twice as rich as S-H, which they list as below average for the BRD, as the 8th richest of Germany's 16 Lander.
I took German in high school (back when I was on slashdot), I actually had tests on where all of the Lander were, I know a few things!
> October 2013 — Over 15,000 LiMux PC-workstations (of about 18,000 workstations)
> December 2013 — Munich open-source switch was "completed successfully".
> September 2016 - Microsoft moves its German headquarters to Munich.
> November 2017 - The city council decided that LiMux will be replaced by a Windows-based infrastructure by the end of 2020. The costs for the migration are estimated to be around 90 million Euros.
> May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.
They've still got a website up where they say some stuff about it, which itself is hosted MIT-licensed on GitHub with pretty regular commits:
> Our strategic guidelines also provide for this:
> > If economically and technologically or strategically sensible, LHM prioritizes the use of open source solutions, in particular to avoid company dependencies. LHM pursues this approach in both the application and infrastructure areas.
Well, it's not just about "FOSS" or whatever, is it? As a German state, you're better off not relying on making payments to a North American company.
LibreOffice specifically was indeed decommissioned eventually in Munich (just within the last couple months!), though:
> LibreOffice was used as an office package as part of Limux until the end of 2023.
Though the Microsoft headquarters do make this seem like possibly a special situation, and as another commenter said, surely they don't need a national headquarters in every German state…
Those articles for sure, but my memory is that it came up an awful lot in most linux slashdot discussions: Munich was cited the proof that this now was finally the time that normies would use desktop Linux, it was just turning the corner, this time definitely. Definitely remember going rounds with people over whether OpenOffice would be the spear to destroy the evil MS/Wintel monopoly (this discussion was definitely before the LibreOffice fork and Oracle murdering original flavor OpenOffice) and Munich was the main example to discuss.
Of course, nowadays there are more *nix based GUI's in the world than Windows: between all of the various Apple products (XNU) and Android (Linux) you have the vast majority of the consumer GUI's in the world. Because most of us wasting our time in the linux slashdot forums missed how the world was actually going to change.
Any resemblance to us now sitting around on Hacker News is purely coincidental I'm sure.
Mobile devices may be well-suited for chatting and general entertainment but I seriously doubt that many people could do effective work - more than a couple quick changes - with the mobile versions of Word or Excel.
In the diesel repair shop I work in, I managed to convince the suits to switch out ms office for libre office. 90% of our stuff is now libre by default...only 2 users have full office suites and theyre both in the bean counting department. We print our BOMs, labels, envelopes and invoices using libre. Compared to office it runs like a scalded dog and never crashes.
Windows for the majority of machines (we already own desktop licenses) but i keep 3-4 old laptops with ubuntu we nicknamed "crap outs" in case someone's PC dies, someone needs a laptop ASAP at a jobsite, or the IT gang needs to get fix someone's main PC. Our shops big label maker and 3d printer machine is currently 100% Ubuntu and is a favorite for a Lotta guys on the floor.
I've tried LibreOffice, periodically over the years. The same thing always sends me back to MS Office. MS has really sweated the details of their UI in ways that can only be done by maintaining a huge army of coders. When I use LibreOffice, the lack of responsiveness is immediately noticeable, and actually makes the software physically laborious to use. I've also noticed something like a 10x or even 100x difference in the time to recalculate a large spreadsheet.
Odd comment. The UI has nothing to do with recalculation speed. Anyway, the MS ribbons continually move stuff around - it's a pain for the casual user. Maybe people who use it all day long get used to it?
Regarding spreadsheets, yes, that is one area where LibreOffice genuinely has not overtaken MS-Office.
While I work for msft, I'm all for open source, even more in this space - consumer and office apps - however, my government has tried this and rolled it back a while later in some branches, while others just suffer with it.
Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see the reverse news a few years later.
> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.
Germany is investing in improving free software, see https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. Though not sure if this is linked to that state switching.
I think LibreOffice is riddled with loads of small "paper cuts". Basically loads of small issues that make it annoying to use. I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign. So hopefully the investment (ensuring additional developers, UI/UX people, etc) increases as they use more free software,
>Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.
For a fraction of the money spent on these sorts of enterprise contracts you could hire dozens of full-time developers to improve LibreOffice. Clearly something easily within the capacity of the EU, if they were capable of good strategic decisions.
> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives
Bullshit. The only reason to use Microsoft Office is compatibility with Microsoft Office files. What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word? Nothing. There are some new bugs that didn't exist before, but no advancements. That's what lack of competition gives you.
Objectively there have been an absolutely enormous number of "improvements" to MS office (including Outlook and Word) over the last decade. The biggest is probably cloud/simultaneous editing capabilities. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/sto... .
Interestingly, there is a decreased emphasis on the file format- the opposite of your point. In addition to cloudy used on mobile devices, sharepoint, etc; since 2007 or so Word has used docx, which has better cross compatibility with other suites, even Google Docs: https://www.howtogeek.com/304622/what-is-a-.docx-file-and-ho... .
My personal use patterns- I use LibreOffice quite a bit, Google Docs rarely, and MS Office daily for work. Outlook and Word have changed a lot and continue to evolve (watch for copilot integrations).
Exactly. Especially for contract negotiations & track changes with a counterparty. Only MS can figure out their screwed up document formats. Office is terrible these days, it is so damned slow. I remember Office 97, so fast and responsive on a Pentium 90, now back in the dark ages of slow bloatware and network latency. It takes so long to open a document, I forget what I was doing the week I double clicked on the file.
> What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word?
Microsoft Search makes it much easier to find stuff. Word got near real-time co-editing (or perhaps that was closer to 11 years ago) and later (<10 years ago) got real-time co-editing. Which is such a huge game changer for users with complex documents that GDocs falls down on.
Lots of other improvements in Excel and PowerPoint, data access/visualization, various presenter modes, and then you've got that AI stuff all mixed in.
While I'll agree the "eye candy updates" may not be there (apart from marketing-driven AI additions and visual updates), there are some big features that aren't visible until you enter the enterprise space. For example, Purview Information Protection [1] and Data Classification integration [2] make data protection, audits/compliance a no-brainer, and are _extremely_ compelling arguments for an integrated suite at the CISO level.
(The downside of course is this is a single-source stack, which can be a risk in of itself)
I have no real background in Libre (apart from using it, which I enjoy), but from cursory searches, there doesn't appear to be equivalent features available (very happy to be wrong here FWIW). Are there alternatives in this space?
Readit News
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 state institutions consider classic desktop apps and web apps distinct tools for different tasks and don't want their desktop to depend on cloud.
It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice became much better since the time the discussion began.
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.
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.
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? My recollection is that it hitched its wagon to Java for no good reason that I could see.
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 tried and found it the weirdest language (BrainFuck aside) I ever seen. Sure you can copy-paste-modify it to do something similar to what everyone does but doing anything atypical seems prohibitively hard.
I really miss a modern (first-class Unicode to begin with, also more intuitive while more rich and less verbose than HTML+CSS) human-oriented typesetting language. Perhaps it's time to invent what MarkDown is to HTML but to SVG.
> As for cloud we just send PDFs around
Can MS Office make hybrid PDFs the way LibreOffice does (embed the source document into the PDF)?
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.
This is the equivalent of “South Dakota is ditching Microsoft”. It’s 30k users which isn’t nothing, but it is VERY different from the German federal government moving away from MS.
Management of resources is the enemy of profit for both sides in the market. Businesses lose out on money by spending time that they would be using on their core competency for managing software licenses, versions, data backups, servers, etc. And of course cloud providers lose out on you giving them more money than their cloud services cost them to deliver.
Azure now makes up the largest percentage of Microsoft's revenues. Obviously the business model scales very well. It likely scales better than Office does. Eventually the less-profitable thing starts taking up internal development resources that could be going to more profitable divisions, and that gets someone mad.
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 guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.
I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.
All of us here probably will know when to jump out of spreadsheets and have some knowledge on how to approach things then, so a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs is fine for us.
The problem outside, is that they are somewhat locked on the spreadsheet and have to stick with it, so more advanced features are welcome even though it comes with the price of the so called evil company according to the other group.
And is Office really better than Google's Spreadsheets? Idk, I don't care about small differences, but they surely annoy hardcore users, plus no one really got fired for buying IBM
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.
These must be paid shills. While it's actually quite understandable why real people and businesses would want to use and recommend MS Office, no one in their right mind actually thinks Teams is the best video chat tool in the world. Any serious business uses Zoom, Slack, etc.
Welcome to astro-turfing and shilling. A pretty commonplace occurrence since about 2014 or so.
You can only really rely on people you know and their experiences. always discount "what everyone says".
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I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.
Gdoc is shitty however and i don't see how/why i want to use it over any competitors. I think i prefer Nextcloud's editor, even without the privacy/data mining consideration, and i really think that could be improved.
Gdoc is better than Jira and Confluence editor though, and better than the standard redmine editor froma few years ago (the non-markdown one), so that's nice.
But I don't like excel much either. If working with spreadsheets was a bigger part of my day job, I'd switch to excel
My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember.
Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website.
Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.
But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists?
Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat?
That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD
But lots of people aren’t working at some corporate office. Mom and Pop can get far with the iMovie option like Google Sheets and Docs.
Actually now that I say that… what I want is a LibreOffice equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets and Presentations. Google is the only bad part of my Docs experience.
Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?
Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.
> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.
Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse.
The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it.
I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.
I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.
Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)
> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening
You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.
> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.
You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.
I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"
And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?
Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.
Mine is a very Excel-centric view. I wouldn't miss anything else in the office suite.
But both of those can cut you off at any point with no recourse. Read the EULA carefully.
The only one that can't is LibreOffice.
I'm somewhat joking (obviously MSFT file formats can do a lot more than md if you need that), but I rarely need more complicated documents.
Thunderbird is (unfortunately) a joke, and web clients aren't as nice when managing complex folder arrangements and lots of mail.
[1] I'm pretty sure outlook users miss good GPG support, at least.
And Teams is a clunky Electron app.
You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.
The answer is in the first sentence of the article: data sovereignty.
Most governments don't want to store their data with a foreign corporation.
The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...
It's been interesting to watch because he's happy to embrace better tech but hates dark patterns.
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> The city reported that due to the project, it had gained freedom in software decisions, increased security and saved €11.7 million (US$16 million).
That's kind of nice. An org that I worked for gave everyone LibreOffice installs by default and if you needed any of MS offerings you could just ask for a license for those. Most people were just fine with LibreOffice. Depends on what you're doing with said office suite, though.
I read that same thing every 2-3 years “German state goes Linux/libre office”.
Then it turns out that it is not really true. Some parts yes then some other parts are already on it and some parts move back.
I do understand there might be different parts of rather big country doing different stuicf
The small physical distance just means that this would be quite cheap for Microsoft to implement, compared to trying to pull the same stunt with another city.
When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s. Now we're going to do it all over again with a different, much poorer, German state?
I think transitioning to a different platform is mostly an organizational and political, rather than technical problem, and the main roadblock is educating users and altering processes to migrate away from MS Office.
That said, modern Linux distributions like NixOS or Guix could be great to manage large fleets of computers, keep them up-to-date, and upgrade things without fear. In my experience, that is the main technical issue administrations are experiencing.
And of course, running free software is great because it brings freedom to change things.
* A lot of software used by them is certainly Windows only (they will have to find alternatives, change their workflows or invest in some windows virtual machines)
* Windows tooling for organizations is much more mature. There's a reason virtually everyone uses AD.
* Linux is very focused on user freedoms. This is not usually important in the office. But freedom to configure things is a freedom to break thinks, and cause admin headache.
The problems are solvable, but it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Oh and I love nixos, and I always wonder how realistic would it be to use it in a company for management of thousands of desktop machines. Sounds like it would be perfect for it, but i don't know any stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
> September 2006 — "Soft" migration begins.
> October 2013 — Over 15,000 LiMux PC-workstations (of about 18,000 workstations)
> December 2013 — Munich open-source switch was "completed successfully".
> September 2016 - Microsoft moves its German headquarters to Munich.
> November 2017 - The city council decided that LiMux will be replaced by a Windows-based infrastructure by the end of 2020. The costs for the migration are estimated to be around 90 million Euros.
> May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.
They've still got a website up where they say some stuff about it, which itself is hosted MIT-licensed on GitHub with pretty regular commits:
> Our strategic guidelines also provide for this:
> > If economically and technologically or strategically sensible, LHM prioritizes the use of open source solutions, in particular to avoid company dependencies. LHM pursues this approach in both the application and infrastructure areas.
https://opensource.muenchen.de/use.html
https://github.com/it-at-m/opensource.muenchen.de/commits/ma...
Well, it's not just about "FOSS" or whatever, is it? As a German state, you're better off not relying on making payments to a North American company.
LibreOffice specifically was indeed decommissioned eventually in Munich (just within the last couple months!), though:
> LibreOffice was used as an office package as part of Limux until the end of 2023.
Though the Microsoft headquarters do make this seem like possibly a special situation, and as another commenter said, surely they don't need a national headquarters in every German state…
Munich Finally Starts to Embrace Linux, September 26, 2006
- https://slashdot.org/story/06/09/26/0236246/munich-finally-s...
Munich Reverses Course, May Ditch Linux For Microsoft, August 18, 2014
- https://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/08/18/2219253/munich-rev...
Of course, nowadays there are more *nix based GUI's in the world than Windows: between all of the various Apple products (XNU) and Android (Linux) you have the vast majority of the consumer GUI's in the world. Because most of us wasting our time in the linux slashdot forums missed how the world was actually going to change.
Any resemblance to us now sitting around on Hacker News is purely coincidental I'm sure.
Many, Many people use only mobile devices and the ones under 40 who still have computers have them for work.
Mobile devices may be well-suited for chatting and general entertainment but I seriously doubt that many people could do effective work - more than a couple quick changes - with the mobile versions of Word or Excel.
In the diesel repair shop I work in, I managed to convince the suits to switch out ms office for libre office. 90% of our stuff is now libre by default...only 2 users have full office suites and theyre both in the bean counting department. We print our BOMs, labels, envelopes and invoices using libre. Compared to office it runs like a scalded dog and never crashes.
https://themonticellonews.com/im-fixing-to-run-like-a-scalde...
lol. Glad to hear the solution's working for you.
I say the same thing about Windows. Why is its UI so sluggish?
Regarding spreadsheets, yes, that is one area where LibreOffice genuinely has not overtaken MS-Office.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
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At least Munich's bargaining chip seems a bit more friendly.
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Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see the reverse news a few years later.
Germany is investing in improving free software, see https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. Though not sure if this is linked to that state switching.
I think LibreOffice is riddled with loads of small "paper cuts". Basically loads of small issues that make it annoying to use. I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign. So hopefully the investment (ensuring additional developers, UI/UX people, etc) increases as they use more free software,
There can be enormous net savings (zero license fees), which is fantastic for the taxpayer.
Makes sense in principle, but practically speaking Germany would seem to have higher priority threats to address than software from the United States?
For a fraction of the money spent on these sorts of enterprise contracts you could hire dozens of full-time developers to improve LibreOffice. Clearly something easily within the capacity of the EU, if they were capable of good strategic decisions.
Bullshit. The only reason to use Microsoft Office is compatibility with Microsoft Office files. What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word? Nothing. There are some new bugs that didn't exist before, but no advancements. That's what lack of competition gives you.
Interestingly, there is a decreased emphasis on the file format- the opposite of your point. In addition to cloudy used on mobile devices, sharepoint, etc; since 2007 or so Word has used docx, which has better cross compatibility with other suites, even Google Docs: https://www.howtogeek.com/304622/what-is-a-.docx-file-and-ho... .
My personal use patterns- I use LibreOffice quite a bit, Google Docs rarely, and MS Office daily for work. Outlook and Word have changed a lot and continue to evolve (watch for copilot integrations).
Microsoft Search makes it much easier to find stuff. Word got near real-time co-editing (or perhaps that was closer to 11 years ago) and later (<10 years ago) got real-time co-editing. Which is such a huge game changer for users with complex documents that GDocs falls down on.
Lots of other improvements in Excel and PowerPoint, data access/visualization, various presenter modes, and then you've got that AI stuff all mixed in.
(The downside of course is this is a single-source stack, which can be a risk in of itself)
I have no real background in Libre (apart from using it, which I enjoy), but from cursory searches, there doesn't appear to be equivalent features available (very happy to be wrong here FWIW). Are there alternatives in this space?
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/information-protec... [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/data-classificatio...