• woelkchen@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    While no evaluations were conducted for this pilot, there were reports late last year that the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa.

    MS Office document importers need to have similar backing as Valve did with Proton. Hopefully Euro Office gets it.

    • Denys Nykula@piefed.social
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      20 hours ago

      Importing works fine, issues arise after one person exports from LibreOffice, another edits with MS Office, and they repeat a few iterations of that. I thinking changing an office suite is many times more difficult than changing an OS, and am kinda hopeless about interoperability, but I also hope Euro-Office gets major funding from countries to give it a try.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        Importing works fine

        Quote says that it literally does not. The “and vice versa” bit of the quote is about both directions not properly working.

        issues arise after one person exports from LibreOffice, another edits with MS Office, and they repeat a few iterations of that.

        Tests for that can be automated since 15 or so years ago. Doesn’t even need any Claude or something.

        • kossa@feddit.org
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          15 hours ago

          Yeah, and that would work, if Microsofts format actually could be considered a standard in any way. But it doesn’t. Some random Microsoft update breaks stuff, you fix it, but IT does not patch…so you have a lot of users telling their bosses “LibreOffice bad”. When you’re playing catch up with somebody who doesn’t want to be catched and is setting the pace…you’re going to lose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

          I guess you can only escape, if somehow governments were forced to only accept open standards. Internally and externally. You send a docx or whatever? Screw you, odf or bust. But it’s too niche of a topic to gain momentum for that.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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            1 hour ago

            Yeah, and that would work, if Microsofts format actually could be considered a standard in any way. But it doesn’t.

            Win32, DirectX, etc. aren’t standard either and yet Wine/Proton are proper clean room reverse engineered solutions good enough that >95% of the time users don’t see any difference.

            Microsoft update breaks stuff, you fix it

            Problem is that even legacy documents are not properly read.

            so you have a lot of users telling their bosses “LibreOffice bad”.

            Collabora is a commercial enterprise. Collabora Office is FOSS just like Proton but just like Proton there is a company behind it that bets their income on proper compatibility. Difference is that Valve works on that compatibility and Collabora doesn’t.

            Collabora need to get their act together and automate document round-tripping.

            • kossa@feddit.org
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              51 minutes ago

              Yeah, because I never have to switch Proton or Wine versions or use some launch options or something. I bet if the average docx opener was as willing to tinker as the average Linux gamer, we would not have a problem.

              Plus your Steam stuff is not fleet managed. That is what I mean: if your company IT (as we’re talking government agencies here) is not providing updates, the current version can be as good as you want, it doesn’t arrive at the user’s computer, thus the user hates it.

              And, come on, legacy documents don’t render correctly? Guess what, try to open old Microsoft Office shit in new Microsoft office programs: that shit breaks, like, a lot. Not even Microsoft can stay Microsoft compatible 😅.