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Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by aaronarduino on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:06PM (#16601540)
Hopefully, this will start a trend away from MS Office to other office programs. Preferably open source solutions.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by maxxxxx on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:23PM (#16602256)
If the result is that we have moved from MS straight into the arms of Google we have won nothing. I wish LibreOffice would get more dev investment from big companies. As of now they are unfortunately way behind MS Office in terms of usability and design.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by severino on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:07PM (#16603176)
> If the result is that we have moved from MS straight into the arms of Google we have won nothing

We would have won, at least, the freedom to use the operating system of our choice. Microsoft software means you eventually need to use theirs.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by Sylos on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:28PM (#16603344)
Instead, they force you to use their browser. It's not terribly different.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by severino on Friday March 16, 2018 @06:08PM (#16604350)
That's not true, but I bet it takes a little more to install a new OS in your computer than to install a new browser.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by themacguffinman on Friday March 16, 2018 @04:08PM (#16603656)
How? G Suite works on all mainstream browsers.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by Sylos on Saturday March 17, 2018 @12:56AM (#16605660)
Hangouts didn't work for a long time on Firefox. They fixed it around a month ago or so, but that's pretty much three years after they knew that this problem would arise (deprecation of NPAPI plugins in Firefox).

For other parts, for example GMail, I've heard that they don't work as well on Firefox.

And to some degree, this is also just what I expect to see more of in the future, as outside of G Suite they're not exactly known for treating other browsers well either. Android Firefox in particular gets bullied by Google a lot. Last time I checked, the Google Custom Search that webpages can embed, just straight up returned a 404 when contacted by a browser with Android Firefox user-agent. And they serve some age-old version of google.com to it.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by jenscow on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:38PM (#16603436)
Much much better than being forced to use an OS that you dislike.

Installing an additional browser is a nice sacrifice.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by em3rgent0rdr on Saturday March 17, 2018 @01:10AM (#16605682)
Unfortunately MS keeps changing their doc format, so LibreOffice always has to play catch-up simply to maintain compatibility.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by scrumper on Friday March 16, 2018 @11:19PM (#16605444)
And moving slower too. Office at least has fairly regular upgrades. Google Apps has barely changed in years.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by golergka on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:12PM (#16601586)
I'm yet to find a single decent alternative to Excel. It's an excellent data modeling and analysis tool.

And yes, I've learned Python, R and SQL, but these tools are not a replacement for the Excel workflow.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by matwood on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:15PM (#16601623)
I was coming here to say this. Nothing compares to Excel. The problem with replacing Excel is that it has thousands of features, and every user seems to use a different subset of those features.

With that said, a large majority of users can probably get by with what GSuite offers.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by rileymat2 on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:19PM (#16601657)
I still have basic problems sometimes with trying to copy out of google sheets. It is unpredictable.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by hinkley on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:32PM (#16601747)
Long have I wished for an open source spreadsheet tool built on a database backend.

I don’t hear the stories as much these days but for ages it was common for contracting firms to come into a place and find they’d been running the whole operation as an Excel spreadsheet and they had a very poor understanding of how complicated it would be to grow their system. Basically a complete rewrite to a DB model.

I thought for sure when Oracle bought Sun that this would be forthcoming but nothing came of it.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by zdragnar on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:13PM (#16602155)
That was exactly my experience around two years ago. The brand of the company was far, far more valuable than their internal processes or capabilities as a result, and it was a painful migration (still is, from what I hear).
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by legitster on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:32PM (#16601749)
It's hard to describe why Excel is so good at what it does. The only way I can think to describe it is "the most amount of power for the least amount of work."
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by WDCDev on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:30PM (#16601735)
I agree. I have been using it for over 20 years now, and use it almost daily in many different capacities. Excel along with the entire MS Office suite of applications is ubiquitous across almost every enterprise.

I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by karambahh on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:59PM (#16602044)
They are big enough for their contracts to enforce usage of something other than the de facto standard.

Not only are they big but a lot of their suppliers are SMEs which in effect are economically dependent to Airbus (even if they carefully avoid dependence to them in the legal definition of the expression).

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by arbie on Sunday March 18, 2018 @09:38AM (#16611870)
The more likely outcome is continued use of Office at vendor interfaces.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by patrickaljord on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:27PM (#16601711)
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by aaronarduino on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:17PM (#16601638)
It is true, Excel has a wonderful workflow. Something open source with excel workflow combined with R and SQL would be nice.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by braderhart on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:15PM (#16601616)
What features are lacking specifically that LibreOffice, Google Sheets, or some other cross-platform solution doesn't have?
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by dspig on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:19PM (#16601654)
execution speed would be a big one
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by braderhart on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:20PM (#16601659)
Do you have any performance benchmarking to show the difference between Excel and LibreOffice Calc, because my experience LibreOffice is much better on resources. I would like to see what tests you are using so that I can run them myself.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by bko on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:18PM (#16601644)
Keyboard shortcuts are huge. Also I’m used to the ribbon which I don’t think they copied yet
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by copperx on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:39PM (#16601799)
The ribbon has a software patent, if I remember correctly. Although it's a UI element, so I'm not sure if it's enforceable?
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by paulie_a on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:12PM (#16602149)
I am thankful that the ribbon UI is patented, it prevents that terrible experience getting more widely implemented
[dead]
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by sctb on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:00PM (#16602046)
Please stop breaking the guidelines, like we've already asked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by bko on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:26PM (#16601702)
> I am wondering which Microsoft PR company you work for?

That’s really unnecessary.

I don’t have any of the alternatives available to me right now but if you’re honestly curious I could take another look this weekend and see if every widely used function has a shortcut. But from what I remember many don’t. I would love to see a plugin that maps excel shortcuts to either libre office or open office

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by legitster on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:28PM (#16601722)
> I am wondering which Microsoft PR company you work for?

What an, awful, terrible sentiment. "The only reason someone could ever disagree with me is they are a paid shill".

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by golergka on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:33PM (#16602344)
Good products are not just a collection of features.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by gaius on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:10PM (#16602139)
In what way is G-Suite open source? The same way as Android.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by aw3c2 on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:38PM (#16601796)
There is nothing comparable to Powerpoint's ease of layout in the open-source world sadly.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by paulie_a on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:07PM (#16602106)
Good the world needs less PowerPoint
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by r00fus on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:57PM (#16602014)
Are you serious? Basic animations were super easy to figure out in Google slides, whereas I still stumble in Powerpoint.

Perhaps it's because there's less functionality but I'm only making slides for internal consumption, so it just has to hide/show the relevant info.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by aw3c2 on Friday March 16, 2018 @06:49PM (#16604523)
First of all Google slides are even less free software related than Powerpoint (can't use them offline etc) but more importantly I said "layout" specifically. Aligning stuff nicely just works very well in Powerpoint.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by crispyporkbites on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:10PM (#16603198)
Never put animations in your PowerPoint decks. Ever.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by arbie on Sunday March 18, 2018 @09:36AM (#16611866)
I started following this religiously for recurring decks, and the results have been outstanding.

If you want to hone your communication skills in general:

* Do not add animations * Do not use themes * Force every bullet point to fit on a single line * Points need not be grammatically complete * Use a font size that you can read from more than nine feet away * Talk about - don't read from - the slide

And now, some unconventional advice:

PowerPoint can absolutely replace Vizio, and you should disregard all the rules when you create product announcement decks where style can trump substance. Some of those slides have over a hundred animations and must be split up into three or more pseudo-slides (initial state, N keyframe slides, final state) seamlessly.

PowerPoint is an extremely versatile tool, and its success and failure modes directly mirror the user's.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by Analemma_ on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:09PM (#16601562)
Why would you assume moving to GSuite is indicative of a trend toward open-source? You have even less control than with Office.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by granttimmerman on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:30PM (#16601728)
(Disclaimer: I work on G Suite Open Source) I open sourced our developer samples this week: github.com/gsuitedevs

There's an increasing amount of things you can do with G Suite, almost all our products have APIs and Apps Script libraries.

If there's something missing in our APIs, feel free to let us know.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by icebraining on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:38PM (#16602383)
Microsoft Office has plenty of COM and VBScript APIs as well. It has really nothing to do with the product being open source.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by threeseed on Friday March 16, 2018 @02:53PM (#16603064)
Not sure what your point is here.

Almost every single company I've ever seen for 20+ years has open sourced their developer SDK examples. It literally makes no sense what so ever to do anything else.

This has nothing to do with what the OP was talking about which is open sourcing the core app.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by granttimmerman on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:47PM (#16603511)
The comment was about trending G Suite into open source.

You've got to start somewhere. It starts with developer samples, moves into tools, languages (Apps Script), then sub-products.

If you're asking for Google to open source it's products in one big blow, I don't think that will happen without smaller steps. I'm on the team that would probably best start the conversation of considering G Suite in open source. Would love to hear proposals.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by ocdtrekkie on Friday March 16, 2018 @08:01PM (#16604863)
I'd be truly excited if Google was prepared to state it had any intention to open source it's actual web apps. But everything I know about the company says that isn't even an option. What you open source is the same as most of the other things Google open sources: The things that funnel you into Google's proprietary services.

Even suggesting that Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides might be open source someday is as unbelievable as suggesting Google's considering open sourcing their search algorithm. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by ggg9990 on Friday March 16, 2018 @09:47PM (#16605189)
You are reflecting very poorly on your employer because you are proving that they hired someone naive enough to think that he could try to open source G Suite.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by aaronarduino on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:13PM (#16601601)
I'm not assuming, I just hope that would be a trend.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by folbec on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:14PM (#16601606)
As a massive POC, I'm happy it happens ... in another company than mine.

Time will tell if it works. If yes prices will go down for everybody.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by braderhart on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:13PM (#16601596)
That is simply not true. Google has been a much stronger supporter of open source. Ever heard of Android? What about Kubernetes? Chromium?

Also, Google Docs supports exporting to ODS and other document formats... in addition to automatic conversion into Google Drive.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by freehunter on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:21PM (#16601676)
>Google has been a much stronger supporter of open source

That's debatable. According to GitHub, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open-source-...

In addition, there are quite a few high-profile open source software packages directly from Microsoft.

https://opensource.microsoft.com

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by magicalist on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:28PM (#16602292)
FWIW, those numbers are based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" to a project in those orgs. So not really a measure of those companies' contributions to open source (it counts any action from any user, not just someone from those orgs), but companies also have more than one org (you can see the problem with all the articles covering this from the fact that both angular and google are in the top ten list...).
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by patrickaljord on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:31PM (#16601743)
> That's debatable. According to GitHub, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects.

Sorry but this is so wrong, Google does not host any of its biggest project on github: Chromium and Android. There were articles written about this.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by dec0dedab0de on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:42PM (#16601835)
Yet android is distributed in a way leaves users with even less control than Windows.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by riku_iki on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:04PM (#16602090)
So, is it possible to create your own forked open source Windows like CyanogenMod and tons of others in Android ecosystem?
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by seba_dos1 on Friday March 16, 2018 @02:30PM (#16602856)
You're proving the grandparent's point. Android's "openness" matters only if you want to build your own OS based on Android or you're a system integrator. For users buying Android devices, it's more often than not just as closed platform as any other alternative.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by riku_iki on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:08PM (#16603184)
what kind of extra openness you expect from android?
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by Sylos on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:31PM (#16603374)
For example:

- A way for users to prohibit internet access per application

- no forced installation of the whole Google Play Services, just to get access to the Play Store

- better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users

- less politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by riku_iki on Friday March 16, 2018 @05:01PM (#16603985)
> A way for users to prohibit internet access per application

For background data: https://ting.com/blog/ting-tip-for-android-control-which-app...

> - better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users

Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?

> ess politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.

So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google. How is this politics?

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by Sylos on Saturday March 17, 2018 @01:41AM (#16605742)
> Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?

I'm dead certain that some manufacturers would still not ship root, but I'm also dead certain that more would do than do right now, if it was officially supported.

> So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google.

They're not illegal. It was never trialled whether they're illegal. Google did not sue these app developers and did not have a judge confirm that they actually violate the YouTube ToS. They just threw them out of the Play Store, with the accusation pretty much just for PR reasons.

And I'm sure that they would not have won an actual lawsuit. The point in the YouTube ToS that they accused with, basically said that you're not allowed to separate the audio from the visuals of a YouTube video. Supposedly this was in there, to have something against people pirating music through YouTube.

If this were to suddenly be interpreted as it not being legal to have any way of just listening to YouTube videos without seeing it, then tabbed browsers would be illegal, any sort of multi-tasking-capable operating system would be illegal, it could technically even be illegal for users to not adamantly stare at their screen as soon as they click on a YouTube video.

No judge would push this through and no judge would rule someone guilty for not knowing that all these seemingly accepted uses were apparently different to offering background playback in an Android app.

That Google seems to not think much of their own rules would not have helped the case either.

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by seba_dos1 on Saturday March 17, 2018 @11:06AM (#16607266)
Android, as is offered to most of the customers, is basically a completely closed platform that just happens to allow you to side-load APKs. It's basically Windows.

For starters - have you tried to use Android without Google Play Services or its reverse engineered open reimplementation, microG? Android with F-Droid is like a completely different runtime platform than Android with Google Play. It might be a nice platform, but it's different - you can't just switch without extreme changes to your habits and apps you use, even if you don't mind installing closed apps. If you say "Android is open", you really mean something completely different than most of Android users think about when hearing "Android". When they hear or say "Android", they think "Google Play's Android".

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by dec0dedab0de on Friday March 16, 2018 @02:24PM (#16602808)
would you call anyone capable of creating, or even installing something like CyanogenMod a user?
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by onetimemanytime on Friday March 16, 2018 @12:45PM (#16601862)
>>Sorry but this is so wrong, Google does not host any of its biggest project on github: Chromium and Android. There were articles written about this.

I guess they are open source but they exist to line Google's pockets with even more money

Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by patrickaljord on Friday March 16, 2018 @02:10PM (#16602697)
Most of Microsoft contributions to open source are "how to make X work on windows or Azure" kind of projects such as linuxkit, node etc. There are a few exceptions though and it's getting better (yay) with really cool projects such as VS code and now many more.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by mrkstu on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:22PM (#16602246)
And that is different than any corporate open source project how, exactly?
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by braderhart on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:33PM (#16603391)
Did you know that GitHub doesn't equal the definer of open source, in fact in many ways they are the opposite, and that GitLab and many other projects operate outside the confinements of a commercial solution?
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by braderhart on Friday March 16, 2018 @03:21PM (#16603278)
Let me know when they open source their spyware OS and then we'll talk. Until then you are just continuing to campaign for exploiting educational tools by locking them down so that students can't understand why they are getting forced upgrades, always getting viruses, and having their shopping and browsing information sent to Microsoft Moscow or Mossad.
Re:Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite by arbie on Monday March 26, 2018 @10:48AM (#16679278)
Entirely too much FUD in your comment.