This is the kind of win-win I'd like to see a lot more of, for the sake of both the user organization and the LO community as a whole. Special attention will probably have to be paid to document compatibility with MS Office, regarding both internal use and sharing with outside organizations.Īlso worth mentioning is that if there are any special needs that are lacking in LO they might be met by sponsoring a bug fix, enhancement or extension, via 'bounty hunting', since it is open source. Maybe even place the program in the hands of some key people in each department and ask them to test drive it for a week and give you a report on it, which you could work into your presentation. Is one easier or more powerful? Both word processors have styles support, but Word supports themes, which are families of styles, by which one can change the appearance of a document radically, and preview the changes with the hover of a cursor.įor that reason, a detailed study of what the program would be used for is most probably necessary if you really want to cover your bases. Is one easier than the other? Both spreadsheets do charting. The real question sometimes is how well each program performs the function in question. I find that comparisons like that, while useful, can be misleading, because they only look at the top line.

We have some good geeky people at the top, but they are not computer geeky and have little understanding of software, so unless they are presented with a strong business case, they would rather stick with the status quo than make a mistake. Our organization prides itself on doing the right thing, and I do not think it will be hard to make the case for FOSS, but they also do not mind spending the money for software when there is an advantage. I would love to just switch to Linux, but we are not ready for that, which is why I think migrating software we commonly use over, step by step might be a good way of improving. I use evolution for mail, but there seem to be a few things missing. One challenge I had was with their Exchange Server.

I also use wine for MS office, just to confirm that my documents will work fine on everyone else’s computers. I am already operating 100% on Linux, occasionally using wine for things like IE6 (believe it or not we have a controller that requires it).

Openoffice vs libreoffice reddit