I too have seen the same problems in a very large ICT organisation. Even though their published policy is to use platform independent tools such as Firefox, Open/LibreOffice (or variations thereof), so many of their tools are Windows-centric, or their web-tools rely on Internet Explorer behaviour and ActiveX components.
One of the big problems in moving away from MSOffice is Macro lock-in, whereby macros in Excel or Word (written in VBA) use Windows-only facilities and/or are structured using language constructs that have not yet been mirrored in LibreOffice.
Of course, when writing macros in any of the Office-type suites, it would help transportability if
a) the macro writers used conditionals to separate platform-specific sections of the code and;
b) macro syntax parsers ignored the code bounded by these "alien" or "foreign" platform conditionals.
Until these very basic approaches to transportability are adhered to, this long-running saga of costs and difficulties moving to/from MS products, and supporting Windows/Linux/MacOSX etc will continue <em>ad infinitum</em>.
Authored Comments
I too have seen the same problems in a very large ICT organisation. Even though their published policy is to use platform independent tools such as Firefox, Open/LibreOffice (or variations thereof), so many of their tools are Windows-centric, or their web-tools rely on Internet Explorer behaviour and ActiveX components.
One of the big problems in moving away from MSOffice is Macro lock-in, whereby macros in Excel or Word (written in VBA) use Windows-only facilities and/or are structured using language constructs that have not yet been mirrored in LibreOffice.
Of course, when writing macros in any of the Office-type suites, it would help transportability if
a) the macro writers used conditionals to separate platform-specific sections of the code and;
b) macro syntax parsers ignored the code bounded by these "alien" or "foreign" platform conditionals.
Until these very basic approaches to transportability are adhered to, this long-running saga of costs and difficulties moving to/from MS products, and supporting Windows/Linux/MacOSX etc will continue <em>ad infinitum</em>.