Get You Open Source Skills Up To Date

[Mr 0.01%]

Can open office do VB/VBA etc?

For a lot of the work we do Excel VBA is so heavily embedded into our analytical work that it would be difficult to transition without some form of low level programming language available.

[davidg]

Can open office do VB/VBA etc?

For a lot of the work we do Excel VBA is so heavily embedded into our analytical work that it would be difficult to transition without some form of low level programming language available.

But you are not really talking about the bulk of work civil servants are doing. I have done a lot of work for the French Govt in the past (and now the Swiss cantons). To give you an example of some stuff going on here, the Gendarmerie have 70,000 desktops running Linux and Open Office. Most of their work is filling in some standard forms for crime reports etc., not exactly the stuff of rocket science. Most MS Office users only use about 10% of the functionality.

Getting back to the financial sector, there are some absolute abominations being produced in Excel and VBA which can cause no end of support issues and which could be better handled with a Web based application. I'm thinking of the VAR stuff I've worked on for banks.

[Mr 0.01%]

But you are not really talking about the bulk of work civil servants are doing. I have done a lot of work for the French Govt in the past (and now the Swiss cantons). To give you an example of some stuff going on here, the Gendarmerie have 70,000 desktops running Linux and Open Office. Most of their work is filling in some standard forms for crime reports etc., not exactly the stuff of rocket science. Most MS Office users only use about 10% of the functionality.

Getting back to the financial sector, there are some absolute abominations being produced in Excel and VBA which can cause no end of support issues and which could be better handled with a Web based application. I'm thinking of the VAR stuff I've worked on for banks.

At most 1-200 staff rely on functionality we provide based around VBA, although they use it to service a population in the tens of thousands. I agree though, we're hardly enterprise-level. VBA is fairly archaic now too.

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

I work in a mixed environment, in summary the Linux users are teccy enough to not need support, the Windows PCs are highly managed, and with tools like sccm and AD managing 1000s of PCs is becoming a trivial task and generates very few support calls these days.

That leaves the Macs, by far our biggest headache, they create proportionatly far more support calls. Apple don't cater for Enterprise enviornments beyond paying lipservice, and are even moving out of the market by scrapping their x-servers. Not an enterprise solution imho.

I'd agree with this. Whilst Mac Heads can see no wrong, you certainly don't want to be a sys admin in a company with a large Mac estate.

As Windows still has 90% odd desktop market share, it is also going to be hard to switch non techy users over to something like Ubuntu (which I think is highly usable) and could actually cost a huge fortune in training.The only exception being if all the apps are browser based.

Actually in practice Windows is not that expensive per user, certainly not in relation to support and maintenance. So this could actually be a huge false economy given all the migration costs.

[CasualBear]

Getting back to the financial sector, there are some absolute abominations being produced in Excel and VBA which can cause no end of support issues and which could be better handled with a Web based application. I'm thinking of the VAR stuff I've worked on for banks.

I think VAR caused a bigger problem than support - like the underestimating the accumulation of risk that led to a massive financial meltdown.

[Tiger Woods?]

Is there much Open Office can't do? There's a big saving there, straight away... How about Windows to Linux?

I haven't looked at Open Office lately, but I can pretty safely say that Linux causes huge productivity issues for "normal" sloppy users. The number of times I've seen people waste a day before someone points out that they don't have permission to read/write to a certain file etc.

I've always used Linux for servers and distributed applications and Windows for writing e-mails, reports and the stuff to go on servers - it has always seemed more efficient. A couple of offices I have worked in decided to go open source for day to day operations (this was a few years ago) and both of them converted back to MS pretty quick.

(Quickly puts on tin hat and runs for bunker...)

Edited March 31, 2011 by Tiger Woods?

[pete.hpc]

sounds like you need to resource your outsource.

Aye.

I promise to turn that PC support cost to zero and provide a robust Exchange environment for half of whatever you're paying those sandle wearing Mac zealots you're foolishly employing to look after that lot.

[Bloo Loo]

At most 1-200 staff rely on functionality we provide based around VBA, although they use it to service a population in the tens of thousands. I agree though, we're hardly enterprise-level. VBA is fairly archaic now too.

yep, lets get rid of that line by line code....we should be way beyond that by now.