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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

They should just get office 365 and use the online version of word Excel and PowerPoint in chromium. That's better than libre office and they won't need to switch to windows 10.

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They'd still produce documents in proprietary software, which is one of the reasons they migrated the first time.

A government should not set itself up in a way that requires software from a specific vendor to interact with it.

The proprietary nature of the software doesn’t matter. All that matters is that their FILES can be read and written. And with Office XML, since 2007, this is a solved problem.

The software is proprietary, but the actual files use a variant of an open ISO/IEC/ECMA standard.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

IIRC, it is essentially impossible to correctly implement parts of OOXML without reverse-engineering the Office suite. The standard does not provide enough information.

They can export in an open format for publication, probably pdf. It shouldn't matter what's the format for edition.

Online versions still pale in comparison to the desktop client. I'm sure people in accounting would be upset by a forced transition from desktop Excel.

To be fair accounting is supposed to use specialized software, not excel to do the actual accounting. Software that could absolutely be web based.

The problem I suppose is more hardware issues like printers, card readers and a lot of third party professional software that just doesn't have drivers for linux.

Online excel is worse than desktop excel, true. But everything is better than libre office, which is what they are using right now.

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