Austria's military just ditched Microsoft for open-source LibreOffice

It's not because it's better. If you just need a basic excel/doc alternative, maybe.

As soon as you need some more complex excel calculations, LibreOffice falls flat.

Good luck getting formatting to look correct in a .doc file opened by Microsoft Office 99% of the time.

Saving 6 million per year... Hopefully some of the savings go towards funding The Document Foundation. The Austrian savings alone is more than the foundation's entire yearly funding.

(I would argue this is also a somewhat necessary step to take. Libre Office is a massive undertaking to be lauded, but isn't a 5 star product, especially in calc/excel.)

They work very much on compatibility, as that is required by and paid for by governments.

But same applies for M365. Good look opening a docx from Microsoft Word in their web app.

There is a paragraph about that:

> Austria isn't just replacing Microsoft software. Unlike typical public-sector and corporate migrations, Austria's military has heavily invested in LibreOffice development itself. The armed forces have been funding the creation of new features and improvements that are now included in public releases. These additions, ranging from improved slideshow editing to better handling of pivot tables, have been rolled into the latest version of LibreOffice.

I hope they dumped a pile of money in it to keep it alive.

Librecalc is fine and I would argue most people don't use the arcs advanced features of MS Excel.

The reason it's incompatible with MS Office is because MS doesn't use a consistent standard or the iso standard. Theyve done this as a counter measure to alternatives.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...

OMG, the usual FUD. Cannot here that anymore.

If one depends on opening old MS documents, MS Office often fails while LibreOffice (LO) does the job -- been there, done that; e.g. book manuscripts of old professors who close to never migrate to newer versions, old calculations in Excel, etc. Formatting isn't even the prime issue there. MS Office utterly fails -- for me that's _peak incompetence_: flooding the world with a overly complex format, that they cannot reliabily open themselves.

So, depending on the context LO _might_ be an issue, or it totally is the opposite: the go-to solution to a serious problem.

The advantage of migrating the whole organization is that it's no longer your problem if a .doc file looks slightly different for someone outside your organization. As long as it works internally.

As soon as you cross different organization IT systems, documents don't look the same anyways: e.g. local office vs Microsoft 365 online.

The solution is just not to use Excel and Office at all. I've been free of Microsoft's crap for multiple decades now and I interface with companies that are my customers so technically they get to dictate terms. The military is in the opposite position: they get to dictate terms to their suppliers. So they arguably have an easier time of it.

As for 'more complex calculations': yes, Excel can do some nifty tricks. So what, in the end, calculations get done, in a spreadsheet or in some other way, the military is mostly logistics, there isn't a problem there that can't be solved with regular tools. The .doc file format should simply be abandoned completely.

So indeed, it is not because it is better. It is just a little different, which is a small price to pay for the inconvenience of not enabling a country that has with some regularity threatened EU countries and other allies. Or did you think that companies like Microsoft are immune to the fall-out of such antics?

Given that Police Scotland recently found that MS cannot give any guarantees about where sensitive information ends up if it is ever uploaded to their cloud, I would expect any government or military to be evaluating their use of their software (or at least how it is used).

See the Computer Weekly article [2], discussed on HN here [2].

[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366629871/Microsoft-refu...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45062344

> for me that's _peak incompetence_

Empires always fall from within. It was inconceivable for a young me to ever think of day when MS Office would be unworkable. Advance couple of decades and MS 365 Copilot is just the thing that just doesn't work. Not because somebody exploited a bug and created unviewable doc, but because MS decided to pile on bugs while leaving old ones in..

Why just hope, when you could read the article and know?

librecalc shuts down for me all the time on small simple documents on different OSs and hardwares. I don't know how to work with it. I'm using Onlyoffice for editing and Tad for reading csv/xlsx files now.

Maybe someone needs to start a LibreRiR project.

Wouldnt be contribute with development? No idea about the Document Foundation but the Mozilla one prefer to waste donation money on CEO bonus and projects that nobody asked for.

Links for those who hadn't heard of those:

https://www.tadviewer.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/

Is OnlyOffice much more productive in terms of features/week than LibreOffice that they are better? How?

I haven't used OnlyOffice, but I prefer the vibes that LibreOffice gives off.

Meanwhile the Trump DoD is trying to close all the commissaries bc they're not warfighting enough

Zero cost is false, but for sure going to be less than MSFT.

“We are not doing this to save money,” Hillebrand emphasized to ORF, “We are doing this so that the Armed Forces as an organization, which is there to function when everything else is down, can continue to have products that work within our sphere of influence.”

“Adaptations and improvements required by the military are programmed and incorporated into the LibreOffice project. More than five man-years have already been paid for this, which can benefit all LibreOffice users.”

“Adaptations and improvements required by the military are programmed and incorporated into the LibreOffice project. More than five man-years have already been paid for this, which can benefit all LibreOffice users.”

It's better in the dimensions they care about.

LO may open old files, doesn't mean you're seeing the original/complete/"authentic" content https://natlib.govt.nz/records/46031753

Also, that reports highlights that yes most users don't use most rare features of office products, but many/most seem to use at least one