Microsoft’s specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice’s The Document Foundation (TDF) too. There is some controversial history behind this feud between the two formats
No, there was no feud. What happened is that when Microsoft had to create an open document format that everyone could use, they purposefully made their format impossible to implement by anyone. IIRC, The open doc forma spec does it all and is 1500 pages large, whereas the Microsoft format doc is well over 6000 pages long and contains closed parts still anyways.
This is just standard Microsoft strategy and it worked again and dumb fucks again decided to stay married to Microsoft Microsoft because at apparently they love being abused
This is not particularly surprising since Collabora leverages the Open Document Format (ODF) rather than Microsoft’s proprietary OOXML specification. Microsoft’s specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice’s The Document Foundation (TDF) too.
While it seems elections killed this initiative, the above is why I recommended EuroOffice or OnlyOffice for converts. It has a more MS feel and much, much better support for conversions.
I’m still confused why TDF hasn’t put more time into opening other formats.
sounds like they didn’t try very hard
They’re getting threatened by the US and they can’t even change a word processor, lol good luck to them
They got the call.
too quick to surrender
Something is rotten in the state.
Doing these things is not easy and they take a lot of time and effort. But from a short look at the article it seems that there were issues with expectations:
the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa
Like what do you expect when using an ODF first tool for OpenXML (Microsoft Office) documents? Euro-Office would be a better fit, from my ONLYOFFICE experience. It’s not perfect but it’s the more drop-in solution for their use case. It’s sad that this has come to an end because of what a good, experienced Linux user could tell them even before they began.
I see this all the damned time. Some people are obsessed with pages breaking at a heading or figure so they insert manual page breaks all over the damned place.
Even the slightest font kerning difference and you end up with blank or mostly blank page when some manual page break gets pushed to the next page.
Delete the manual page break that never should have been there? Nah, just cancel everything.
It’s like they went straight for the most unintuitive option for MS Office users. Besides EuroOffice, LibreOffice (even OnlyOffice) would have been better.
One thing I hate, but came to understand about governments and big companies, - is that they only leave stuff if it starts falling apart under them due to lack of support and growing incompatibilities.
Because otherwise the “technical problems” in the title can possibly be one Excel spreadsheet that turned out to not be bug-to-bug compatible when opened in LO.
And now I’ve read the article, and with the exception of Collabora instead of LO, this is even dumber, they’ve cancelled the pilot due to “formatting issues”. Even after looking a bit at big companies I think they are f-ng parasites and should have somehow gotten used to those “blank pages”, thank you very much.
That’s an excuse. I say continue the pilot, and fire the focus group of 38 lazy ministerial jerks.
But OK, I’m not a Danish citizen, so please be my guest, you hypothetical Danish citizen reading this, to borrow my opinion.
Used to work IT for american municipalities. I can guarantee you that if a single sheet looked at all different, id get a call. They mindlessly press the same 4 buttons they know how to press and ignore everything else until it “breaks”
Used to work IT at a university during the transition time from Win 3.11 to Win95. The amount of emotional hand-holding (not even so much technical support) involved in getting the admin staff through the process was unbelievable to me at my young age. Now I understand, but back then I was expecting way more “this doesn’t work” or “I can’t find this program” and way less “I don’t know how I’m going to do my job.”
Cause the way UIs look when you want to do a job are discarded as “by programmers for programmers and not normal people”, and UIs making an illusion of things working by themselves by intuition of the user and hiding specific actions are considered “user-friendly”.
UIs intended for people to do their jobs look, as an extreme, like
ed. Less extreme - WordPerfect. XEphem, XGrace, Lisp environments. Those are what you come up with when you want a kiosk, but with a clear idea of a workplace supported by it, or an expert workplace where you do a job.While things like MSO, Telegram, today’s web browsers, and so on - they are intended for people who don’t want specifics. They want the illusion of fuzziness of what they are doing.
I genuinely, genuinely don’t understand the need for microsoft office. A text editor has sufficed for everything I have ever wanted to do.
I could easily believe that it was more work than they expected and so they decided that it wasn’t worth it after all, but man. Do it anyway.
Did MS offer them a huge deal?
Only some vacations for deciders.
What a bunch of weak ass removed. I did it a few years ago. I’m on Nextcloud and collabora. I spend a lot of my life in spreadsheets. In their defense, collabora’s choices when it comes to key commands and defaults could not possibly be more stupid. For example, if you are pasting something into a spreadsheet, only a clown would think the default should be paste with formatting? At least give us a “ctl-shift-V” or something like that. So stupid. Just mimic google sheets and be done with it.
I don’t agree with their decision, but migrating any large organization to new software is typically a lot more difficult than migrating a single home user.
Agreed. But Fyi, I’m not a home user, I own a small business.We have to train employees on Collabpra and other open source tools. Its not that hard. We have tons of collaborative, shared documents that our clients interact with. Cybersecurity is a thing, but its not all that difficult to not be slave, or involuntary contributor to the dark side.live by your principles or capitulate. I know which choice I’ll make. I also know that 90+% of people wouldn’t even consider the extra burden of defining, much less living on principles. That’s so sad.
Maybe, but sometime you cannot stop trying to do something just because it is difficult, especially if you are a State government.
Of course. I just don’t think “I can do it, therefore Denmark can do it” is that good of an argument.
I bet OpenAI and Copilot were the original source of this information.
Y’all being surprised is the funny part.
Says Microsoft propaganda site.
