Netherlands Looks to Move to OpenDocument Format for Goverment
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@Carnival-Boy said:
They're the main two, plus the fact that it is so common, so you will receive Office documents from 3rd parties and similarly 3rd parties will be able to receive Office documents from you, without any compatibility issues.
This is the big one, IMHO. But I've seen few issues with documents in the last few years with LibreOffice and I've also seen a huge drop in receiving documents. But maybe that's just me and maybe the rate of document sharing hasn't gone down like that. But it sure seems to. I used to receive Word docs for everything, now I get PDFs or web files.
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I'd consider Google Apps serious in lots of ways, not least user adoption.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I've also never found a serious competitor to Access.
As I never use Access I don't have a good idea of what is or isn't competitive. I don't find it very useful, I honestly find "not using it" more competitive than Access itself, even though we own licenses for it AND licenses for having it hosted on Sharepoint AND licenses for MS SQL Server to make it enterprise ready. Even with all that, I don't see it as having value in general. It just doesn't compete well with PHP or other options.
Have you tried LibreOffice Base? That's the LibreOffice attempt at competition with Access. I have not tried it so I can't speak to any opinion on functionality or quality. I just know that it exists and goes after the Access market.
What about FileMaker? I've seen people chose that over Access?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'd consider Google Apps serious in lots of ways, not least user adoption.
I've been using it for the past year, it's super easy to use but the suite is very limited. Yes, user adoption is getting high. But it is not a suite competing with MS Office or LibreOffice, IMHO, but rather a suite looking for a different, light user market instead.
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I've never used it in anger, but it's not marketed as being only for "light" users, it's marketed towards organisations replacing all their Office users with it. It's definitely trying to compete. I'm not a big fan of any web apps for serious work (including OWA which I don't like much compared with Outlook)
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
MS has given it away for most if not all mobile platforms.
Not exactly. Its use is tied to having an Office 365 subscription.
Online and mobile is free for non-commercial use, no O365 subscription required.
I was thinking I heard this. Anything with a 7.99 or small screen, Office is completely free.
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These days I mainly only use Access as a front-end to SQL Server for creating SQL scripts, or just for reading database tables. I find it really cool and much easier than using Management Studio.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I've never used it in anger, but it's not marketed as being only for "light" users, it's marketed towards organisations replacing all their Office users with it. It's definitely trying to compete. I'm not a big fan of any web apps for serious work (including OWA which I don't like much compared with Outlook)
I've used it for the last eight months and it isn't bad, but it's not MS Office either
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@Carnival-Boy said:
These days I mainly only use Access as a front-end to SQL Server for creating SQL scripts, or just for reading database tables. I find it really cool and much easier than using Management Studio.
I use other web tools for that. PHPmyAdmin is excellent for this. We don't use MS SQL Server so don't have need for specific tools around it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I've used it for the last eight months and it isn't bad, but it's not MS Office either
That's because Office is so awesome
I'm sure Apps will keep on improving, whilst I suspect Office has peaked.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm sure Apps will keep on improving, whilst I suspect Office has peaked.
I don't know, MS took a major step back with 2013 to prepare for some awesome stuff. I think that they have good things coming. Their move to make collaborative editing like Google Apps had was a major win.
