Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice

Re:Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice by marcinzm on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:22AM (#21629623)

Everything has risks and tradeoffs. Excel means that you can communicate with clients and vendors in their preferred tool, it means you can onboard new hires more quickly, it means you need less internal support staff, etc. Switching from Excel adds those things back in as risks for your business.

Good business is about managing and understanding risks, and not about eliminating them at all costs.

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Re:Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice by cobbzilla on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:55AM (#21630072)

This is a very sane approach, and I agree wholeheartedly.

But when the only thing holding you back and locking you in is your own company's internal vendor-specific tooling/infrastructure, the argument doesn't hold as much weight.

fwiw, I have never received an Excel spreadsheet from a vendor/partner/customer that I could not open and work with in LibreOffice, re-export to Excel and send back to them.

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Re:Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice by immigrantsheep on Monday November 25, 2019 @01:09PM (#21630986)

I did because a lot of our clients and partners were non technical people using complex excel spreadsheets with macros and vba.

And since Excel is the de facto standard, shouldn't Libre Office offer a 100% compatibility to whatever Excel has if it wants a piece of that market share? Also $150/year for something that does it all and just works it's really not much. The same reason why we don't ask how much Visual Studio Enterprise costs or IntelliJ products even if you have free alternatives.

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