Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the Minister-President: Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will […]
The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.
Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.
Software freedom is about being in control of your computing. We can’t verify what proprietary software from a foreign company is doing on a government computer.
Public money public code is about citizens getting back the code we paid for. When a proprietary company improves software to get paid then they keep that advantage to themselves. LibreOffice is a collaborative project, everyone gains from it being improved by our money.
These aught to be valid concerns as much as productivity: to the degree it affects people. It cannot be dissmssed as being idelogical.
Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.
Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.
Are you working on ods formats? Anyways… We need more people using LO so we’ll have more developers and rhen comes a point in which LO surpasses everything else. Meanwhile, if we stick to proprietary software,we would be stuck in a vicious loop. We need to break trough and sometimes inthat transition there are some concessions to make. If we manage to make it aa a big collective of people,the transition process will be shorter.
I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.
I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:
*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.
Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.
In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.
for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*
*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.
The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.
I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.
Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*
Wow. i dont know. Ive never used calc nor excel for things that big. For that Ive used python or php/mysql. I use spreadsheets a lot, even complex ones, and calc always work for me.
Anyways, you are right in regarda to the lack of support/books. Of course. Same happens with a lot of things. They are not mainstream (yet) because they are projects that havent had the money or power corporations like microsoft has had for lobbies and marketing. So we can struggle a little on the transition (some very brave pioneers have already paved the way for us, so its not that hard anymore) and hope we are contributing to a libre/free future in which digital technology helps build a better and fairer society for all. And then, they’ll become mainstream and we’ll have more books, support and communities than we ever dreamed of before.
I think we should aim for what is ideal and then take into consideration the constraints of what we can do. If it’s not plausible enough to go for what is ideal then aim to make that more likely while doing whatever is the next best thing. We risk being stuck on a peak of possible good if we refuse to go down to eventually go up higher.
I only use LibreOffice but don’t need it much. I can’t comment on how practical it is, or isn’t, for use in a government. If there’s another free software option then we aught to consider that. Else spend money to make it good enough for frequent and important use cases.
I think reducing their reasons to ideological is not fair. They stand to save a lot of money, reduce the risk of leaking data (to MS or hackers), and will have the ability to fork/add their own features.
While I am not familiar enough with Calc or Excel to comment on the speed, I imagine having an entire government using it could get the ball rolling on optimizations.
The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.
Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.
This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.
The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.
Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.
Software freedom is about being in control of your computing. We can’t verify what proprietary software from a foreign company is doing on a government computer.
Public money public code is about citizens getting back the code we paid for. When a proprietary company improves software to get paid then they keep that advantage to themselves. LibreOffice is a collaborative project, everyone gains from it being improved by our money.
These aught to be valid concerns as much as productivity: to the degree it affects people. It cannot be dissmssed as being idelogical.
Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.
Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.
Are you working on ods formats? Anyways… We need more people using LO so we’ll have more developers and rhen comes a point in which LO surpasses everything else. Meanwhile, if we stick to proprietary software,we would be stuck in a vicious loop. We need to break trough and sometimes inthat transition there are some concessions to make. If we manage to make it aa a big collective of people,the transition process will be shorter.
I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.
I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:
*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.
Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.
In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.
for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*
*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.
The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.
I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.
Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9yjwyf/is_libreoffice_calc_truly_a_worthy_replacement/
Wow. i dont know. Ive never used calc nor excel for things that big. For that Ive used python or php/mysql. I use spreadsheets a lot, even complex ones, and calc always work for me. Anyways, you are right in regarda to the lack of support/books. Of course. Same happens with a lot of things. They are not mainstream (yet) because they are projects that havent had the money or power corporations like microsoft has had for lobbies and marketing. So we can struggle a little on the transition (some very brave pioneers have already paved the way for us, so its not that hard anymore) and hope we are contributing to a libre/free future in which digital technology helps build a better and fairer society for all. And then, they’ll become mainstream and we’ll have more books, support and communities than we ever dreamed of before.
I think we should aim for what is ideal and then take into consideration the constraints of what we can do. If it’s not plausible enough to go for what is ideal then aim to make that more likely while doing whatever is the next best thing. We risk being stuck on a peak of possible good if we refuse to go down to eventually go up higher.
I only use LibreOffice but don’t need it much. I can’t comment on how practical it is, or isn’t, for use in a government. If there’s another free software option then we aught to consider that. Else spend money to make it good enough for frequent and important use cases.
I think reducing their reasons to ideological is not fair. They stand to save a lot of money, reduce the risk of leaking data (to MS or hackers), and will have the ability to fork/add their own features.
While I am not familiar enough with Calc or Excel to comment on the speed, I imagine having an entire government using it could get the ball rolling on optimizations.
Do they? They’ll now have to start training people to use Linux.
These people aren’t going to be enthusiasts like us. They need to be shown where everything is.
The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.
Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.
This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.
Every time I see someone say ‘I’m actually really a fan of open source’ it reads like ‘I’m not racist but’.
Wow, Schleswig-Holstein meaning well and starting beef by doing it. I’m sure there’s no precedent for that.