Four alternatives to Microsoft Office

Johand said:
All of them. I work in the insurance industry and for all its fancy mainframe systems, Excel is the glue that holds it all together. And there are a million macros that do some pretty advanced things.

Sure everybody tries to get rid of it, but the idea is pretty much like the paperless office. IT projects have a lead time of several months, and cost hundreds of thousands if not millions. Sometimes a quick and dirty Excel macro saves a lot of money, gets the job than in a fraction of the time and manages to give the finger to the internal auditors.
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What do you acually do? I was part of the team that did the rewrite of the whole product engine for one of the biggest insurance comps in the country, and believe me, there was no place for macro's
 
Veroland said:
One example, OO have been able to export to pdf for about 5 years now, m$ announced their next office suite will be able to do it something like 2 years ago only?
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Can't say I agree. This is not such an issue for me as I have Adobe Acrobat. The thing is this. For years there have been utils that print to pdf admittedly they usually use printer emulation. This however is not the point. When I use Acrobat I usually need to combine a spreadsheet a text doc and some diagrams into one document (quote/proposal/report). Then I sign it with a bmp signature and protect it. No util will give you that!

The point here is for many people, OO is just fine. It's realy big plus is that it's free, but I certainly don't prefer it. Also it has no VBA. In mainstream business I think it's just not good enough
 
Takkies said:
Can't say I agree. This is not such an issue for me as I have Adobe Acrobat. The thing is this. For years there have been utils that print to pdf admittedly they usually use printer emulation. This however is not the point. When I use Acrobat I usually need to combine a spreadsheet a text doc and some diagrams into one document (quote/proposal/report). Then I sign it with a bmp signature and protect it. No util will give you that!

The point here is for many people, OO is just fine. It's realy big plus is that it's free, but I certainly don't prefer it. Also it has no VBA. In mainstream business I think it's just not good enough
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Ok, but how many people in mainstream business acually uses VBA and macro's. My guess is only the few in management and those that need to create reports for management. If you look at a organisation with 10 000 employees, you will problably find less than 100 of them acually uses the VBA functionality.

Besides, OO has it's own Basic jou can create Macro's with, as well as Python, BeanShell (whatever that is) and JavaScript.
 
Veroland said:
What do you acually do? I was part of the team that did the rewrite of the whole product engine for one of the biggest insurance comps in the country, and believe me, there was no place for macro's
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I work as a SAP consultant. I will agree 100% that there is no macro's most of internals of the core systems e.g. product /policy/general ledger/accounts/collections&disbursements.

But those systems are managed by IT people. The business part of an insurance company is run by business people though and they have a patchwork of macros.

1) Design of insurance products - the product might be "designed" and implemented technically in a system but the actual designers of a product from a business perspective use Excel. If an Actuary's job was so simple that it could be split into fine-grained steps and put in a system they wouldn't get paid so much.

2) Anything that happens out of process will go through Excel e.g. special once off commissions, calculation of extraordinary claims.

3) 99% of all management reports will go through Excel. And these reports are quite intense, and a lot of them rely on macros (in an ideal world all insurance companies will have central Business Warehouses with ALL their information. Currently no insurance company can claim that they really have ALL relevant information in a single warehouse).

4) Short-term incentives, special project budgets and predictions. Project Managers usually have two tools - MS Project and MS Excel.

5) Testing of Systems. A lot of production systems are tested by importing samples in Excel. Regression testing means there are spreadsheets with macros that is quite old.

6) The old guy in the corner that nobody really knows what he does, but everybody is pretty sure that without him everbody will be without a job. He does not use Excel, but the the original version of Quattro Pro in Windows 3.11. His wife packs him lunch and everybody speak in hushed tones around him. If you don't know him, you are not important enough.
 
Veroland said:
Ok, but how many people in mainstream business acually uses VBA and macro's. My guess is only the few in management and those that need to create reports for management.
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I don't profess to be a statistician but I believe that macros assist the organisation in both directions.
Sure managers use macros to take the drudgery out of repetitive tasks and improve accuracy, but they also write macros to assist their underlings. This might be more typical in a scientific or engineering environment where macros are used for technical selection or scenario analysis. In this way complex technical solutions become available to lesser skilled people who know only how to input the variables. A good macro will then also structure the output and enforce data capture disciplines.
 
Takkies said:
I don't profess to be a statistician but I believe that macros assist the organisation in both directions.
Sure managers use macros to take the drudgery out of repetitive tasks and improve accuracy, but they also write macros to assist their underlings. This might be more typical in a scientific or engineering environment where macros are used for technical selection or scenario analysis. In this way complex technical solutions become available to lesser skilled people who know only how to input the variables. A good macro will then also structure the output and enforce data capture disciplines.
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I'm my experiance we normally write applications to do that.

To Johand: I agree with you somewhat, I was involved in the re-write of Liberty's product engine, so I have a good idea what goes on in them. I have also done a project for Momentum and the business people I worked with didn't even know what a macro is.
 
Johand said:
Microsoft Word vs. Write - complain what you want about the Word grammar checker - AT LEAST IT HAS ONE. It is next to impossible to spent time proofreading every sentence of documentation within tight timelines. The grammer checker helps improve the quality of most documentation. I would not rely on it for a novel though.
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OO.o's handling of captions is a LOT better than Word's. Word's section handling is at least understandable, getting different page numbers in OO.o is not as easy as it should be... (Page styles is probably the problem...)
Johand said:
Microsoft Visio vs.. .... err. Nothing. Open Source only have dinky toys. If one more person recommend OO Draw then I will strangle that person. I don't want to draw pictures - I want to create models of abstract ideas in a software assisted environment. If you don't know the difference then you haven't modeled before. Dia is a joke.
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Dia is decent.... http://projects.gnome.org/dia/

Visio has its uses, but for some things, such as UML diagrams, much better alternatives exist... (I like StarUML)
 
Johand said:
4) Short-term incentives, special project budgets and predictions. Project Managers usually have two tools - MS Project and MS Excel.
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Slightly OT: Project has one of the worst user interfaces thast I ever used.... It might be better if you are used to it, but is some basic cases it acts too much like a speadsheet, handling parts of a task separately by default, when it should be handled as a unit...
 
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