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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: 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.