this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
37 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17960 readers
4 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've been using LibreOffice for a number of years without issue. Literally takes care of all my word processing and spreadsheet needs. I don't miss MS Office at all, which I use daily at work.
Why not use LO at work?
Because most employees can't just install random software on their machines and because compatibility between Libre Office and Microsoft Office is nowhere near perfect. You don't want to send your boss a file that ends up looking mangled on their screen.
Send them a PDF... unless explicitly required otherwise.
Company computing assets are managed. One normally doesn't get to override IT policy without business justification.
Its not hard to justify giving everyone free cross-platform office suite at work lol
It is when your business relies on Microsoft services which are inherently incompatible with LO
That's a huge bill for a business, and businesses are always looking to cut expenses. Again, its an easy sell
What happens when you need to collaborate with other businesses who use O365? The business would also have to spend time updating any legacy documents, templates, spreadsheets and so on. Then you have the IT teams, who will need extensive training so that they can field the inevitable flurry of support tickets and calls. And that's not getting into the support side of things - who do I go to if something breaks in LibreOffice?
I am an advocate for OSS, but there is a bigger picture here, and unfortunately it's not always as simple as just switching over. I wish it was, believe me!
Tell the other business to use LO. Shouldn't be an issue because its free and runs on every platform.
Y'know, this conversation doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so I will leave it here: if it's such an easy sell, every business in the world would have done it by now.
It became the default in every business I ever worked at. If that's not the case where you are, perhaps you should look into a mirror and ask why?
Not when you're already on an annual contract with Microsoft and the majority of your company's employees are nontechnical
Yes. We're talking about Libre Office here. Its a very mature and accessible app. Not something that requires technical knowledge.
And, yes, if you're on an annual contract then its even easier to convince management to cancel it for all users by default (with some exceptions as needed). Lots of money to be saved.