If the result is that we have moved from MS straight into the arms of Google we have won nothing. I wish LibreOffice would get more dev investment from big companies. As of now they are unfortunately way behind MS Office in terms of usability and design.
Hangouts didn't work for a long time on Firefox. They fixed it around a month ago or so, but that's pretty much three years after they knew that this problem would arise (deprecation of NPAPI plugins in Firefox).
For other parts, for example GMail, I've heard that they don't work as well on Firefox.
And to some degree, this is also just what I expect to see more of in the future, as outside of G Suite they're not exactly known for treating other browsers well either. Android Firefox in particular gets bullied by Google a lot. Last time I checked, the Google Custom Search that webpages can embed, just straight up returned a 404 when contacted by a browser with Android Firefox user-agent. And they serve some age-old version of google.com to it.
I was coming here to say this. Nothing compares to Excel. The problem with replacing Excel is that it has thousands of features, and every user seems to use a different subset of those features.
With that said, a large majority of users can probably get by with what GSuite offers.
Long have I wished for an open source spreadsheet tool built on a database backend.
I don’t hear the stories as much these days but for ages it was common for contracting firms to come into a place and find they’d been running the whole operation as an Excel spreadsheet and they had a very poor understanding of how complicated it would be to grow their system. Basically a complete rewrite to a DB model.
I thought for sure when Oracle bought Sun that this would be forthcoming but nothing came of it.
That was exactly my experience around two years ago. The brand of the company was far, far more valuable than their internal processes or capabilities as a result, and it was a painful migration (still is, from what I hear).
It's hard to describe why Excel is so good at what it does. The only way I can think to describe it is "the most amount of power for the least amount of work."
I agree. I have been using it for over 20 years now, and use it almost daily in many different capacities. Excel along with the entire MS Office suite of applications is ubiquitous across almost every enterprise.
I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.
They are big enough for their contracts to enforce usage of something other than the de facto standard.
Not only are they big but a lot of their suppliers are SMEs which in effect are economically dependent to Airbus (even if they carefully avoid dependence to them in the legal definition of the expression).
Do you have any performance benchmarking to show the difference between Excel and LibreOffice Calc, because my experience LibreOffice is much better on resources. I would like to see what tests you are using so that I can run them myself.
> I am wondering which Microsoft PR company you work for?
That’s really unnecessary.
I don’t have any of the alternatives available to me right now but if you’re honestly curious I could take another look this weekend and see if every widely used function has a shortcut. But from what I remember many don’t. I would love to see a plugin that maps excel shortcuts to either libre office or open office
First of all Google slides are even less free software related than Powerpoint (can't use them offline etc) but more importantly I said "layout" specifically. Aligning stuff nicely just works very well in Powerpoint.
I started following this religiously for recurring decks, and the results have been outstanding.
If you want to hone your communication skills in general:
* Do not add animations
* Do not use themes
* Force every bullet point to fit on a single line
* Points need not be grammatically complete
* Use a font size that you can read from more than nine feet away
* Talk about - don't read from - the slide
And now, some unconventional advice:
PowerPoint can absolutely replace Vizio, and you should disregard all the rules when you create product announcement decks where style can trump substance. Some of those slides have over a hundred animations and must be split up into three or more pseudo-slides (initial state, N keyframe slides, final state) seamlessly.
PowerPoint is an extremely versatile tool, and its success and failure modes directly mirror the user's.
Almost every single company I've ever seen for 20+ years has open sourced their developer SDK examples. It literally makes no sense what so ever to do anything else.
This has nothing to do with what the OP was talking about which is open sourcing the core app.
The comment was about trending G Suite into open source.
You've got to start somewhere. It starts with developer samples, moves into tools, languages (Apps Script), then sub-products.
If you're asking for Google to open source it's products in one big blow, I don't think that will happen without smaller steps. I'm on the team that would probably best start the conversation of considering G Suite in open source. Would love to hear proposals.
I'd be truly excited if Google was prepared to state it had any intention to open source it's actual web apps. But everything I know about the company says that isn't even an option. What you open source is the same as most of the other things Google open sources: The things that funnel you into Google's proprietary services.
Even suggesting that Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides might be open source someday is as unbelievable as suggesting Google's considering open sourcing their search algorithm. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
You are reflecting very poorly on your employer because you are proving that they hired someone naive enough to think that he could try to open source G Suite.
FWIW, those numbers are based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" to a project in those orgs. So not really a measure of those companies' contributions to open source (it counts any action from any user, not just someone from those orgs), but companies also have more than one org (you can see the problem with all the articles covering this from the fact that both angular and google are in the top ten list...).
You're proving the grandparent's point. Android's "openness" matters only if you want to build your own OS based on Android or you're a system integrator. For users buying Android devices, it's more often than not just as closed platform as any other alternative.
- A way for users to prohibit internet access per application
- no forced installation of the whole Google Play Services, just to get access to the Play Store
- better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
- less politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
> - better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?
> ess politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google. How is this politics?
> Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?
I'm dead certain that some manufacturers would still not ship root, but I'm also dead certain that more would do than do right now, if it was officially supported.
> So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google.
They're not illegal. It was never trialled whether they're illegal. Google did not sue these app developers and did not have a judge confirm that they actually violate the YouTube ToS. They just threw them out of the Play Store, with the accusation pretty much just for PR reasons.
And I'm sure that they would not have won an actual lawsuit. The point in the YouTube ToS that they accused with, basically said that you're not allowed to separate the audio from the visuals of a YouTube video. Supposedly this was in there, to have something against people pirating music through YouTube.
If this were to suddenly be interpreted as it not being legal to have any way of just listening to YouTube videos without seeing it, then tabbed browsers would be illegal, any sort of multi-tasking-capable operating system would be illegal, it could technically even be illegal for users to not adamantly stare at their screen as soon as they click on a YouTube video.
No judge would push this through and no judge would rule someone guilty for not knowing that all these seemingly accepted uses were apparently different to offering background playback in an Android app.
That Google seems to not think much of their own rules would not have helped the case either.
Android, as is offered to most of the customers, is basically a completely closed platform that just happens to allow you to side-load APKs. It's basically Windows.
For starters - have you tried to use Android without Google Play Services or its reverse engineered open reimplementation, microG? Android with F-Droid is like a completely different runtime platform than Android with Google Play. It might be a nice platform, but it's different - you can't just switch without extreme changes to your habits and apps you use, even if you don't mind installing closed apps. If you say "Android is open", you really mean something completely different than most of Android users think about when hearing "Android". When they hear or say "Android", they think "Google Play's Android".
Most of Microsoft contributions to open source are "how to make X work on windows or Azure" kind of projects such as linuxkit, node etc. There are a few exceptions though and it's getting better (yay) with really cool projects such as VS code and now many more.
Did you know that GitHub doesn't equal the definer of open source, in fact in many ways they are the opposite, and that GitLab and many other projects operate outside the confinements of a commercial solution?
Let me know when they open source their spyware OS and then we'll talk. Until then you are just continuing to campaign for exploiting educational tools by locking them down so that students can't understand why they are getting forced upgrades, always getting viruses, and having their shopping and browsing information sent to Microsoft Moscow or Mossad.
