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.
Again, I specifically want to leave the power users alone, but my experience in business/industry is that 90% of folks with Excel on their machine don't even know how to write a function. There's no sense paying lavish amounts of cash for those particular people to have Excel when LibreOffice will likely suit their needs.
Honestly even most Excel users would be fine transitioning to LibreOffice Calc. I was very impressed with how most of my spreadsheets just worked on recent Calc versions. Formulas and charts were mostly all fine. Even pivot tables worked. I had one formula that had to be changed (it was specific to Excel, but there was an equivalent option in Calc), and one external data pull that I had to figure out. That was across 4 pretty involved spreadsheets.
The main problem will be users who are so ingrained with the specifics of navigation that they can't easily adapt to a new menu system. The same happened when Microsoft changed from the old toolbars to the ribbon. And that will be an issue across all the apps.
Valid point. Good luck with your journey!