Valencia Region Government Completes Switch To LibreOffice 93
jrepin writes "The administration of the Spanish autonomous region of Valencia has completed its switch to LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity applications. Last week Friday the region's ICT department announced that the office suite is installed on all of the 120,000 desktop PCs of the administration, including schools and courts. The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licenses."
Maybe I am missing something (Score:2, Interesting)
I use LO at the house and use Office 2010 at the office.
I use word and excel and have zero issues when I use LO.
What am I missing here? I realize that there are issues with formatting but beyond that its been smooth going between the two.
I don't think I am a power user though. I don't use any of the advanced features so maybe that's where the retraining comes in.
Otherwise it seems overblown to be claiming that it will take millions for re-training.
Re:The migration will save the government some 1.5 (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, most of the users don't care what Office Suite they don't know how to use.
Training is actually minimal. The main boost is that documents can be saved and viewed without lockin to OS and office suit. It also removes dependency on Microsoft and might give a little boost to small businesses, that won't have to buy office and windows in order to communicate with the government, so that migration decision might make a lot of sense.
Re:The migration will save the government some 1.5 (Score:4, Interesting)
This is different to the upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because of what? Migrating from Office 2003 to Libreoffice constitutes a smaller cost in training and compatibilty than the move to Office 2007.
Re:Cheap Office Licenses (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source office suites are like Chinese knock-offs. They may look similar to the real deal from the outside but once you start working intensively with them they start to degrade quickly.
Not really. I've used MSOffice for over 10 years. I've done so much technical writing that I know pretty much everything there is to know about MS word. Not so much with excel and the rest of the package.
Since I do my work in linux I decided to make the switch to libre office six months ago. With 3.x I was less than impressed, I even stated so a few times on /. posts related. Even saying that libre office will never compete with ms office in the work place.
With the release of 4.1, I'm not so sure any more, at least where it comes to writer vs word. There are still come compatibility issues between the two that needs to be worked out, especially in the area of file compatibilities. With that being said there is a lot of power in writer.
When I'm being forced to work in word now I'm actually wishing I could be back in writer. Over all I like the interface to libre writer better than I do the ribbons in word. I'm at the point in my life where I'm thinking about my next career choice. Making a serous attempt at writing is possibility. I've already chosen to do most of my writing in libre write.
While libre office still has a way to go before it can take the crown from office. But if I was office I would be looking over my shoulder because I'm starting to think libre office might pull it off.
Re:The migration will save the government some 1.5 (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's what I'm thinking: if you really need to train your workers in something as simple as an Office software package, maybe it's time to rethink your hiring policies. I mean, come the fuck on, that's the kind of stuff I dug back in elementary school, it doesn't take a genius, really (I'm not one). I was using WordStar and NewWord on CP/M machines back in 1st grade, and those things were, I'd say, much less user friendly compared to the ribbon. It takes a particularly behind the times troglodyte not to be able to look around for tutorials, youtube videos, etc. There's plenty of it, heck, the Internet is almost saturated with ribbon training.