My city has a budget shortfall of $400,000 and they're looking at cutting firefighter positions, arts funding, and parks funding to make up the shortfall. They also, incidentally, spent over $400,000 on just Microsoft office licenses last year, which doubled in cost from the previous year. My goal is to fix the budget shortfall, or at least take a big bite out of it, by switching all users who can't specify what advanced (see: VBA) features they use from MS Office onto LibreOffice, since it provides all the same basic functionality and interoperable file formats. As a stretch goal, I'd love to persuade them to get on Linux, but that might be a bridge too far for most folks at the city.
Does anyone have any advice to help me persuade the city to cut bullshit MS office licenses instead of firefighters? The city does have an IT dept that I've considered reaching out to, but I'm worried that they may fight that proposal because:
A. I hear that MS lobbies city IT relentlessly
B. They may not have the capacity to do the switch.
As for Linux, I'd love to get the machines that are W10 dependent switched to Linux, but that feels like a big reach. People tend to have a "NERD!" reaction to Linux, like mentioning tabletop gaming.
You should take into consideration the additional load this would generate on IT, both short and long term.
The transition would be relatively costly. As would all the support tickets that go in for users asking "how do you do x. In word, I used to be able to click here and here and now it's not there"
The other area i would be concerned about it excel. Many organizations rely heavily on excel and moving to another type might make calculations, pivot tables, etc, break. You'd need to do a feature analysis across a variety of use cases and roles. (And I'm pretty sure the finance team would poison your coffee for even suggesting moving off excel)
Is LibreOffice calc much worse? And, again, I feel that most users of office suite software are fairly basic users. I want to specifically leave MS Office power users alone, let them keep their licenses, but if people are just using the basic features, there's no reason for us to be paying outrageous amounts for MS Office licenses for them. Yeah, I'm aware that this is going to increase the load on the IT dept, but I'm hoping that the targeted user base are basic enough users that they can be onboard with an orientation video for most cases.
Most users of word & powerpoint are fairly basic users, but if you're using excel for work then there's a surprisingly high likelyhood you're using a sheet written by a wizard with arcane skills in it with the number of VB macros, pivot tables, and things most people don't even know exist.
Even if you're just a user and not creating them, and their functionality would better work in a dedicated program or a database, chances are it'd still break unless you're very lucky.
Oh, yikes, that's problematic. I was afraid of that. It really doesn't feel good to look at that and say "and therefore, sorry firefighters, we need to pay Microsoft half a million a year to let us have Excel", but I guess I get it.
Yeah, it's a classic of locking you in and hiking up the prices, and the people capable of porting those sheets are probably way too overworked dealing with supporting the vast majority who have no idea how they work to spend time on it (or getting fired by Elon for not doing anything while being the single block that supports the tower)
It sucks, but I wouldn't give up on trying to get them to convert, just be aware that it's very possible that this will be one of the biggest technical (as opposed to administrative) blocks.