
Nantes Métropole completes switch to LibreOffice - buovjaga
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/150244
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maxxxxx
I have recommended LibreOffice to several people but they all went back to MS
Office due to compatibility and usability issues.

I really want LibreOffice to succeed but MS Office is a really tough
competitor. Especially Excel is a very good piece of software.

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gtk40
I find that newer versions of Office (especially 2013 and 2016) support Open
Document (e.g., .odt) better than LibreOffice supports Open XML (e.g., .docx).

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alasarmas
I would certainly believe it, considering (naively) that one expects the cost
of implementing a standard to be directly related to the length of that
standard: checking the ISO Publicly Available Standards page[0], I found 6760
pages of Office Open XML standard (ISO 29500) and 1996 pages of Open Document
Format standard (ISO 26300).[1]

[0]
[http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/](http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/)

[1] The link to Technical Corrigendum 2 for Open Document Format in [0] is
broken, so I included a version I found at
[https://www.nen.nl/pdfpreview/preview_166227.pdf](https://www.nen.nl/pdfpreview/preview_166227.pdf),
which was seven pages long.

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athrun
I'm French and while I'm generally in favor of usage of open-source by our
public offices, I'm not sure moving to LibreOffice is an achievement to be
proud of.

In 2016, can an office suite claim to increase "productivity" without any
Cloud-based collaboration features built-in? It seems so old school, the rest
of the world is moving on and once again, our public sector is left stuck in
the past.

I understand the advantages of using an open format but AFAIK both Office or
Google Docs can export to ODF for long term archival if needed.

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grive
Moving an administration to "the Cloud" seems like an extrardinary bad idea to
me. Administrations do not move quickly for a reason. Their processes are
bound to the law and they have to respect things most offices have no idea
about.

Them doing it "old school" is a _good_ thing. Old school is not bad, it's
stable and reliable. It's everything you want from an administration.

And among the open source alternatives, LibreOffice is order of magnitudes
ahead of other suites (except OpenOffice, is there any one actually?).

Moreover, having public documents written and stored in an open format is
simply going back to sanity.

Really, criticizing this move because it's not "hip" enough seems reckless to
me. I'm very happy that the process and procurement procedures exists in my
government (I'm french too) to allow administration to switch if they want to.

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gtk40
Only other FOSS option I know of that's comparable is Calligra Suite. Then
just smaller, not trying to be feature complete programs like Abiword and
Gnumeric.

There's other good free as in beer options and cheaper alternatives to
Microsoft Office though.

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eloisant
"Nantes Métropole, France’s 6th largest city"

Actually Nantes Métropole is not a city, it's the regroupment of the city of
Nantes and its suburbs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Community_of_Nantes_M%C3...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Community_of_Nantes_M%C3%A9tropole)

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Gmo
You are right of course, but, for someone outside France, it doesn't matter
that much.

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gtk40
In the U.S. at least we often refer informally to a metropolitan area as a
city. For example, I work in an office that isn't in the city limits, but is
instead outside the city by its airport (one of the busiest in the country).
We still say we're in the city, even though we're about 20 miles away (though
we do have the city in our mailing address, even though we're in the city
limits of a suburb).

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bmm6o
Right. The actual boundaries of a city are often the result of historical
accident and depend on the governmental power structure of the region. "White
flight" and "urban decay" cause people to live as close to a city as possible
without actually living within it. I think the inclusive meaning is even truer
in areas of greater sprawl, e.g. most of US and Asia. Los Angeles is a big
city, but when people talk about LA they often mean the entire county or more.

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brillenfux
A city might get away with using LibreOffice, a small business however cannot.
The main problem is not the program but the file formats and compatibility to
other MS products.

Also: in my personal opinion, LibreOffice is horribly stuck in the 90s. Again
also: where's the PIM? WTH LibreOffice, WTH?!

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drzaiusapelord
This is because government is a monopoly. They don't need to cater to their
clients in any way. So they can say "Fuck you, your MS word file doesn't work,
send us something that does or we cut off your water." That motivates people.
They can't fire their government or use a competitor.

I think people are not realizing that these deployments are happening in
government for a reason.

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f_allwein
My hometown of Munich switched much out its IT to Unix/ OpenOffice etc. in the
2000s, with mixed success:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux)

As far as I remember, one of the biggest issues is lack of compatibility with
MS Office documents.

