Do you really need to use office 365? It’s a question worth asking.
So, we’ve been using office since it came out in 1995 or so and it’s still more or less the same basic thing. You write a doc, use a template, tweak the formatting, write the document, do some tables, tweak the tables, tweak the pagination, proof read it, tweak the sizing again, then print, load letter A4, then reboot the printer, then load A4, tweak the tables one more time, then send the document and that’s it, done.
But why?
Why all the formatting stuff? Why can’t a computer do all that? Why can’t I just write the text and then get on with my day? How many man hours of company time is wasted just tweaking documents and getting the formatting right?
Let’s look at the costs first for Microsoft 365 Business Basic. £4.90 user/month
For a Small / Medium Enterprise of 250 workers, that’s
£4.90 x 250 = £ 1,225 /month
So..
£1,225 x 12 £14,700 /annum
VAT @ 20% £ 2,940
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Total £17,640
That seems a lot but then consider what the wage bill must be like for a company of that size where many of the workers spend time reformatting their documents to suit and spending time formatting stuff?
They’re not adding any value to the workflow and that doesn’t make sense.
The thing is you see, it just isn’t 1995 any more and cloud technology and the way in which we do things just isn’t really like that any more either.
Time for MD
Markdown is the answer (and should be) for all documentation documentation these days. It’s easy to learn, there’s no formatting to be done because that’s baked in to the concept and you only need a text editor to use it. Once your documents are ready, they can be published to the web and that’s it, finished. Other great features are things like it’s easy to update, copy/paste works flawlessly and doesn’t copy formatting, it has very low overhead in storage and transmission terms: an empty Word document by comparison is 29kb.
MS Teams should be replaced by either (a) Slack. or (b) Mattermost, both of which are astonishingly good. I personally prefer Mattermost (MM) because of it’s seamless chat, seamless understanding and interpretation of markdown, and open source/roll-your-own so you can build it exactly how your Enterprise wants it.
The only significant difference I came across between the two is that Slack supports voice/web calling and MM does not in the Open Source version. You can IIRC buy it if you get the enterprise edition, along with AD connectors and the like. Both these are excellent products waaay ahead of MS Teams which is still clunky and basically tosh by comparison.
Excel would be a straight swap for Libreoffice Calc. I’ve used this for 20 years and it has never let me down. If migrating to Libreoffice Calc, I’d just check if there were any apps using Excel Add-ins that might be a problem.
Powerpoint
Libreoffice Impress would be my goto or use Canva instead. Hell, I’d even prefer to use an overhead projector and markers just to make it quicker. I’ve spent so much time in life doing presentations and nobody listens or even cares, so much so, I think the best presentation I went to was a scientist who spoke about his Genomics trip to a University in Israel. He spent most of the time showing us slides of the food / hotel / pool / labs / peers and so on and then had one slide with relevant info on what he was supposed to be doing, which amounted to about 20% of the talk. He skimmed it and closed with “Any questions?” and that was it.
Post Script
I should add, just as an indicative, that the text file for this post is just 4.2k in size, while the images cost 72k in total. That’s truly performance as a feature.