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Comment by jonheller | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that they're moving to Google Docs as well. From my experience Google Docs does not fare very well in government & enterprise settings where people are used to Microsoft Word.

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From what I can tell in government (my side of the vast government) no one uses Word beyond the sheer basics. No macros, no fancy "decimal tabs", WordArt, gradients everywhere, any of that.

For what 95% of people are doing Google Docs is more than sufficient.

That might be true in general as far as client features go, but I do know that at least the DoD is a heavy user of the identity and access management services which effects what you can do with an Office document. That rules out Google Docs for anyone that is already or planning to do that.

Shipmate, I'm in the DoD. Maybe you're talking about OSD, JS, Army, Air Force or something else though.

Edit: Also, doesn't Google Docs have controls to limit sharing of online documents to certain persons, groups, or teams?

The big concern I can think of is PII spillage, but honestly I think I trust Google more than I trust random GS-13s with their externals and laptops. DoD at least has PKI but in the Navy we're recommended to also use a password-based certificate for encrypted externals in case the CAC is lost, which kind of defeats the point since I'm sure the password is not going to be high-entropy.

Hopefully, advanced users are using features like merges, automation of data sources, templates and address validations rather than WordArt and gradients.

With minimal studying on their own, a smart office worker can be pretty efficient doing analysis with Excel Pivot Tables while avoiding a lot of red tape. I could see the switch to an office suite with reduced features getting in the way of work done by a lot of behind the scenes, unsung heroes.

I think that when actual exposure to how people use software is largely comes from support calls, it is easy to get an inaccurate picture of bumbling and general incompetence, rather than creative solutions to often arbitrary constraints on their tool sets.

I'm not a help desk. I'm using the same software these other people are using in an environment swamped with office documents.

We write memoranda and instructions, we make PowerPoint briefings, we use scads and scads of spreadsheets, and although I personally use and admire PivotTables, most don't.

Even the famous "Access database that underlies the operation" is very rarely to be found around here. The only thing I've ever seen an Access database behind around here (besides the ones I personally use) are for FITREP processing in the Navy.

Perhaps surprisingly, much of the stuff you'd use "advanced spreadsheets as database" for end up being run by actual databases with website frontends around here, which makes office software even less essential; just make the ad-hoc query on the web page and export to Excel and you're done.

95% of computer users aren't sysadmins, but if you use that logic to take sysadmin access away from 100% of computer users, you might regret the decision.

Maybe the requirements of the DoD are different than those of a city administration? When the City of Munich switched from MS to Linux/OpenOffice, they had to port 21,000 macros [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

There's a reason I said the government is vast. ;)

I have no doubt that macros are in use somewhere in DoD, but it's really not that extensive for day-to-day stuff.

If you don't believe me, just search for .xlsm files compared to .xlsx on a standard Navy command's share drive.

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