Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials Suggest

Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by forkandwait on Saturday July 10, 2010 @07:39PM (#1504545)

I work in an analysis shop for state government, and the minority of us who do "sophisticated" analysis (which is really just basic numerics and trending plus making maps), could go to a Unix/ FOSS world and increase productivity in no time. However, it gives me the shakes thinking about trying to explain CSV's to 100s of local jurisdictions, much less the less sophisticated 50% of OUR office. But when I say "send me an excel spreadsheet of X, Y, Z" EVERYONE knows what I mean; so we won't be installing Ubuntu on our desktops any time soon, unfortunately.

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Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by pbhjpbhj on Saturday July 10, 2010 @08:07PM (#1504573)

>But when I say "send me an excel spreadsheet of X, Y, Z" EVERYONE knows what I mean; so we won't be installing Ubuntu on our desktops any time soon, unfortunately.

For real? OpenOffice.org and KOffice (that I know) both output XLS files. OOo in fact is more compatible with more versions of MS Office than MS Office is AFAICT.

There are some esoteric differences between OOo's spreadsheet (called Spreadsheet) and MS Excel so you'd want to do some testing first.

There used to be StarOffice (not sure if it's still around) which was Sun's payed for version from which OOo was extracted and also Lotus Symphony based on OOo - both commercial offerings; like I said I'm not sure of the status of these now.

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Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by forkandwait on Sunday July 11, 2010 @12:49AM (#1504973)

OOo, umm, still sucks. I don't know about Koffice, and I really love Gnumeric. It is more that the government is in world of not very savvy users (ahem), and getting out of sync with one's colleagues/ customers/ etc would be a huge productivity hit, even though personal productivity alone on projects would be fine.

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Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by pbhjpbhj on Sunday July 11, 2010 @05:09PM (#1506134)

>OOo, umm, still sucks.

I'm curious. I've come across some things on more complex forms (PAYE+NI calulators for example) that differed from the MS Excel way but not much/often (but I don't use it much).

Can you be specific about what your colleagues are doing in MS Excel that OOo Spreadsheet can't do or how else it sucks?

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Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by ams6110 on Saturday July 10, 2010 @10:25PM (#1504783)

OOo does a decent job with XLS files (in my limited experience) but butchers PPT slides (also in my limited experience)

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Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by rbanffy on Saturday July 10, 2010 @10:35PM (#1504799)

Last time I was asked to send an Excel spreadsheet, I used "Save As" and chose XLS. For good measure, I attached the OOo version with a brief explanation. The other side responded he was also using OOo.

I still call presentations "PPTs", even when made in OpenOffice.

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Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by narrator on Sunday July 11, 2010 @12:32PM (#1505727)

Yeah, when you're using Open Office you can always ask the person your sending the spreadsheet to to download OpenOffice to read it. Especially if they are someone you're paying money to, like a consultant or an outside firm. It's free after all.

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Re:Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials S... by rbanffy on Saturday July 10, 2010 @10:59PM (#1504828)

Weird moderation on an article that could be interpreted as an attack on Microsoft... Why am I surprised?

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