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As part of its move to Free and Open Source Software, the city of Rome, in Italy, has begun to phase in LibreOffice as the only available suite of office productivity tools on its desktops. Those city employees who currently use productivity software one hour per month or less are in the first group to migrate. Heavier users will follow in the near future. Eventually around 14,000 desktops in all will be addressed.
In April, Rome completed the installation of LibreOffice alongside the proprietary alternative on all of its 14,000 PC workstations. This means that city staff can try out LibreOffice and gradually get familiar with the office suite. Staff members who use the proprietary office suite intensively will not be forced to switch.
As part of the change management approach, the city is partly relying on 112 staff members who are in favour of free and open source. This means that, on average, the city has two such innovation champions per department. They help explain the reasons for the change to LibreOffice, and encourage their colleagues to find out more by pointing them to a Moodle-based eLearning portal. Last month, the champions received a two-day training course to boost their LibreOffice expertise and prepare them to help train their colleagues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @03:37AM (5 children)
You should read up on pivot tables and pivot charts before displaying ignorance. A wise man would understand the use case before pissing on a clever solution to a problem that required speed and output a layman could understand. I welcome someone offering a tool that offers the same data aggregation capabilities, visualization, and extraction capabilities as an excel pivot table/chart.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday August 03 2018, @04:03AM (4 children)
Huh? Do you think I don't know what pivot tables are?
A pivot table is NOT a spreadsheet. Pivot tables are functions found in various analytical tools including spreadsheet programs, databases, and other data analysis tools. If you know what you're doing, you can simulate many of their functions pretty easily using more fundamental data analysis tools.
Is this giant data analysis problem a use case for this sort of analysis? Perhaps. That doesn't make it a good use case for a SPREADSHEET.
A wise man who is short on time may indeed use this sort of hack for an enormous amount of data in a single (likely not to be repeated) use case. A wiser man would do well to invest in learning how to use more dedicated data analysis tools, along with all sorts of visualization apps available if planning to analyze such amounts of data regularly.
And as for "output a layman could understand," that's easy enough with all sorts of data analysis packages if you have any clue what you're doing. What you're really saying is you didn't want to invest the time and needed "data INPUT and manipulation functions a layman could understand."
That's fine for a one-off case. It's not efficient if you are just doing a single analysis like this to learn something more flexible and efficient for handling large amounts of data. Just don't pretend this is a textbook case for spreadsheet use -- because that's NOT the preferred medium for such amounts of data.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday August 03 2018, @04:17AM (3 children)
Just want to clarify before you pick up on a meaningless distinction as a criticism to quibble about: yes, pivot tables can take the form of a table that acts like a spreadsheet too. What I meant by "pivot tables are not spreadsheets" is that the existence of a pivot table depends on a raw data flat spreadsheet. The existence of that spreadsheet is superfluous is you're not examining data in it. Unless it's useful for you to look over the 7 million rows individually or do manipulations on individual cases differently, you could more easily dump the data into some other data analysis app and do the manipulations to spit out the summary you'd get in a pivot table. The spreadsheet is therefore unnecessary to the analysis.
Sure, Excel wraps up these functions in a nice GUI. So if you only have somewhat limited needs and don't mind the overhead, it's convenient. I wouldn't call it a "clever" solution given that most of the intelligent people in the mainstream business world know how to use pivot tables.
(Score: 2) by shipofgold on Friday August 03 2018, @04:36PM (2 children)
What you apparently failed to grasp in my original comment is that Pivot tables are exceedingly well implemented by MS-EXCEL. You called it "Stupid" to use MS-EXCEL for this use case with no other information than you see it as an incorrect tool to use in a given situation.
Sure there may be "plenty of other tools" (none of which have been mentioned by name......) which might implement Pivot Tables and Charts but MS-EXCEL has wide availability that these other tools may not. My company probably didn't license MS-EXCEL so I could do a 7 million row Pivot Table/Chart, but the fact that I had it at my fingertips at the very time I needed it meant that their fee was covered many times over.
Had my company tried to save by going to LibreOffice it may or may not have paid off over the long run. But IMHO LibreOffice Calc is not a "direct replacement" for MS-EXCEL and that is the takeaway.
Calling something stupid with no facts is just plain stupid......especially when you have no response with a better solution. Granted you don't have the use case to formulate a solution, but I am guessing any solution you formulate would not have a better result than mine.
Others say "learn a database"....I have 30 years experience with databases, JDBC, reporting tools etc. but I couldn't find anything that would take this particular dataset and produce the chart that I produced in little more than 3 hours.
I am certainly no M$ fanboy, but in this particular tool they have created something that I don't believe has competition for my use cases.
Offer something up of substance and I might be willing to further this conversation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday August 03 2018, @05:35PM (1 child)
Okay, first off -- please calm down. I was replying to an AC whom I assume was not you. Someone who was ruder, and thus my responses for voiced more strongly against said AC, not against you.
Second, I said a 7-million row SPREADSHEET is "stupid." (And, I'll stand by my point that it IS a stupid thing to have a 7-million row visualization tool in almost every use case, and trying to handle such monstrosities is likely what adds to bloat in Excel.)
But, to be clear, I did NOT say that YOU were stupid, or that your specific achievement was stupid.
Now, to specific replies:
I didn't say they weren't. In fact, my previous post you just replied to said explicitly: "Excel wraps up these functions in a nice GUI. So if you only have somewhat limited needs and don't mind the overhead, it's convenient."
Actually, no, I called a 7-million row spreadsheet stupid. As for using it in this case, this is what I said: "A wise man who is short on time may indeed use this sort of hack for an enormous amount of data in a single (likely not to be repeated) use case. [...] That's fine for a one-off case. It's not efficient if you are just doing a single analysis like this to learn something more flexible and efficient for handling large amounts of data."
I didn't mention anything by name because I don't know enough details about the specific project to be able to tell you what tool may work best. In some situations, a database may be the best option. In other cases, a statistics software package (like R) might be better. In other cases that you need more specific advanced math tools, there are other options. A number of such tools are free, but certainly there are plenty others one can pay for.
The implementation varies a lot. My point is that most of the stuff that pivot tables do is stuff that a database query or a statistics package or other options could also easily summarize, and either would likely be a lot more flexible, though it would require knowledge of how to use said tools, which is why I said if this is a "one-off" case that a "wise man" might use Excel.
And visualization tools for data look rather polished in Excel, and if you're familiar with those options, they're reasonable for a summary chart. There are plenty of other options too for making graphs if you have the summary data already (output from whatever). Again, my point was really quite specific -- that a spreadsheet is NOT the ideal tool to analyze 7 million rows of data.
Yep, I don't have enough info to tell you exactly what might make more sense. And sure, maybe you have found the 1-in-a-billion use case where a 7-million row SPREADSHEET is the best possible way to store and process data. But I doubt that.
Again, I'm not saying pivot tables are stupid. I'm not saying data analysis is stupid. I'm not saying Excel is stupid. (Though I AM saying it is bloated.) I'm not saying you are stupid.
I'm saying a SPREADSHEET is a tool specifically designed to display individual bits of data in rows and columns, and to perform small amounts of custom calculations (as well as other related operations like sorting, etc.) on small datasets. In the vast, vast majority of use cases where you have 7 million data points, you are not needing to view individual data bits (which is the whole point of having a SPREADSHEET -- I mean, that literally is the etymology and meaning of the word... you SPREAD out the SHEET so you can see all the data in one place). And you likely are not customizing every row of the 7 million with a different sort of operation if you did this task in 3 hours, which is the other reason you'd likely need an actual SPREADSHEET. Otherwise, if you doing bulk operations, data summarization, etc., the vast majority of use cases could be more efficiently handled in a dedicated data analysis tool.
The AC I was replying to claimed this was a "textbook use case" for a spreadsheet. It absolutely is not. It may be a good use case for pivot tables if you don't have other tools or knowledge to use them at your fingertips (as I said before).
Lastly, since I think there's some confusion here, let me be clear that I'm differentiating a "spreadsheet" here (i.e., the thing with columns and rows) from a "spreadsheet application" (like Excel, which includes other advanced functions for data analysis). Lots of spreadsheet apps come bundled with data analysis tools which are not actual "spreadsheets" and don't actually need them. The point I was trying to make is rather narrow -- and basically it's just that spreadsheet applications are fine for small-scale data analysis, but they come bundled with enough tools that people start using them for much larger use cases where you no longer actually need the actual spreadsheet. Once you get to that scale -- and you're doing multiple projects where you need large-scale data analysis -- it makes sense to learn how to use other dedicated tools which are often much more flexible.
(Score: 2) by shipofgold on Friday August 03 2018, @07:54PM
I agree with everything you have said except the part about calling anything stupid. Sure, there are people who will try to put a square peg in a round hole and use a hammer when it doesn't fit, and I have of course seen things in my career that makes me shake my head. I have seen people use Excel for things where I think there are better tools (email everybody a spreadsheet of IP addresses as a DNS replacement....use it as an Action Register which is emailed....v372 of the current application status log stored on a shared drive...). You can certainly use LibreOffice Calc for an Action Register or an Application Status log, and at the end of the day the job will most likely get done (albeit with probably a little less efficiency than if the proper tool had been done).
The point of my original post is that LibreOffice Calc is NOT a direct replacement for Excel. I have tried to use it many times and found it lacking for data analysis where Excel does an excellent job...I wanted to replace Excel. With each new release of Excel M$ seems to move farther away from what I use it for. You can certainly use LibreOffice Calc for an Action Register or an Application Status log, and at the end of the day the job will most likely get done (albeit with probably a little less efficiency than if the proper tool had been done).
My use of Excel is its chart making capabilities. I don't know of any other GUI based tools that allow you to do charts as easy as Excel. I have amazed many of my colleagues with Pivot Charts and how you can instantly visualize and aggregate a time series set of data showing exactly what happened.
If there is another tool where I can throw a time-series of "per second" data (4 days at 86400 seconds per day) and get a chart of 3 columns of that data with one line on the left axis and 2 lines on the right axis with a logarithmic scale in less than 5 minutes, I want to know about it!
Thanks for the discussion.