4 situations when this is impossible… but it works out quite well

Hello! Sasha Beznozdrev, leading development engineer at K2Tech, is in touch. The topic of replacing Microsoft products for corporate users is on the surface today. Indeed, what if the vendor plans to cancel all subscriptions and turn off everything it can reach in the near future? But in fact, we at K2Tech have been working on the problem of replacing the office suite (that is, MS Office or MS 365, if you wish) for a very long time. In this article I want to share the experience of similar projects, talk about why replacing MS Office often goes wrong, and also raise questions (with answers) – “who is to blame?”, and “what to do now?” Below the cut are examples when replacing MS seemed like an unrealistic task, but in the end it only got better!

Today, enough office suites have been developed that, in theory, should replace document editors, spreadsheets and presentation preparation systems. However, in practice, it turns out that most companies face difficulties when trying to migrate users from Microsoft products. When starting a project, it turns out that some features that we (or our colleagues) are accustomed to considering as an integral part of Excel or, for example, PowerPoint, are not supported by other software packages.

Here, of course, you can say: “Put out the lights, there is nothing to replace MS Office!”, but this would be wrong. Because in fact, what we do in Microsoft Office often shouldn't be done in an office suite at all. And if, for example, it turns out that your company has implemented BI functionality directly in Excel or a full-fledged system for working with a DBMS, you should think about the fact that this contradicts any security rules, the logic of IT development and creates huge problems in matters of Maintainability.

When MS Office turned out to be too functional

Here are a few examples where overly developed practices in MS Office have already led to problems and could create serious difficulties in the near future.

Macros

Sophisticated macros in MS Office often become a point of vulnerability for external attacks, and also turn out to be extremely difficult to support and improve. Therefore, the practice of disabling macros is normal in a corporate environment. But if you do use them, an overly complicated structure leads to reduced transparency and complexity of support.

One of our customers had a “working” macro that carried out calculations for the accounting department. But the employee who developed it quit and left. No one in the company could figure out what was written “inside”; external specialists were needed. And not only was it long and expensive, it turned out that there were errors in the macro that distorted the calculations. The business has yet to figure out how much this problem affected the work, but they decided to abandon macros in such calculations, because this should be done by a special platform

Working with DBMS and data sources

In Excel, for example, it is possible to connect to an external data source and retrieve information directly from the DBMS in order to carry out further calculations. And in a single case, there is nothing wrong with that – they just went ahead and connected. But as Excel gradually evolves into a data collection point (aka ETL), the issue of relevance, reliability and security comes to the fore.

Let me give you an example again. The financial indicators of a small company were collected into one Excel file. But after the failure, analysts were faced with the fact that not all data was loaded. Questions arose: “Which ones were loaded?”, “What did we lose?”, “How to fix it?”. In the case of Excel, answers to them are searched manually and require a lot of time and effort.

BI system without BI

There is an opinion that BI is “just diagrams.” So why not implement the visualization directly in the spreadsheet? And again, this is normal if the requirements of corporate reliability, integrity and security are not applied to such actions.

In the transition to data-driven management, such visualizations become extremely important. And, for example, literally at the beginning of 2024, a customer contacted us who discovered that some diagrams were questionable. Upon inspection, it turned out that one of the employees “twisted” the data in order to increase his KPI and receive a bonus. And really, how can we ensure the accuracy of the information if we are just sending each other a spreadsheet?

Complex calculations

Spreadsheets, of course, are designed to do calculations. But if their volumes reach hundreds of thousands of elements, they begin to require special conditions, and using an office suite becomes a problem. A typical situation is that you need to check that the sum of the components is equal to the final element.

For example, one of the customers was assessing the performance of branches and checking reporting. At first these were general calculations, but then there were more and more parameters, more and more values, and an ever-increasing frequency of running calculations. Excel began to slow down, and the situation could not be corrected. If such massive operations are carried out, and their intensity continues to grow, even in MS Excel, sooner or later we will hit the ceiling of capabilities, and it will not be possible to scale such a solution. But it's already written! What do we do? Suffer, but use…or maybe we’ll stop after all?

We can’t…or can we still?

In fact, the practice accumulated to date helps to switch from MS products to Russian and open analogues, while simultaneously “healing” the IT ecosystem – that is, bringing things beyond the office suite that should not be there. And although the request from the customer usually looks the same: “does not work like in Excel,” in fact, we usually deal with one of the following cases.

Request to migrate a simple macro or create a template. As I already said, a macro can be quite adequate. If we are talking about a clean and transparent business process (that is, the macro does not access the file system, does not make system calls, does not define complex interactions), it can simply be rewritten so that it works in another office package. Yes, you can’t just copy the code in VB, but our guys successfully implement any simple calculation algorithm with selection options (branches) on P7 Office.

Data exchange with databases is required. Very often, MS Office users turn to the central server for “fresh data”. Excel had standard mechanisms for this, but in the new office suite you just need to add a plugin or use a ready-made one (there are many things already on the market).

In the case of sophisticated logic, you can again add new functionality (but there is no need to complicate it too much). The main thing is that the plugin is supported. Therefore, its code must be stored in Git in order to track changes and versioning of development.

When Excel is in fact…a DBMS. Yes, there are often cases when large and complex functionality with significant amounts of data is crammed into spreadsheets (at the limit of technical capabilities). This configuration definitely does not work in any new package, there is never documentation for it, and changes cannot be tracked. In fact, it is a black box in your hands, in which it is impossible to even distinguish one file from another.

In this case, rewriting it head-on, even while preserving the logic, is inappropriate. Processing such a volume of data is difficult, not to mention “expensive and time-consuming.” And even if we take on this, how can we check whether we got the same thing as we did?

Here it is better to cut this knot, return to the original problem, describe the processes and solve it with more suitable tools. For example, if a large parent organization collects information from numerous branches in order to process this huge amount of data and issue reports on various sections, it is better to use ETL + BI to solve the problem. If we make such a decomposition and correctly build the architecture and processes, we not only avoid problems in the future – often errors are found on such projects, accuracy, flexibility and speed increase.

Checking the rules. It happens that we need not only to collect data, but also to ensure its quality. Checking formal logical rules (for example, such a requirement is found in social surveys) is a difficult task for an office suite. It happens that during surveys, questionnaires are created with a very large number of questions, and some are asked under certain conditions (there may be answer options and further branches). A formal-logical check, in particular, may affect the age of the respondent and other factors – that is, a person cannot be more than 100 years old or, for example, cannot be a doctor of science by the age of 18. Also, a huge problem is created by checking the entry of each element value into some large directory.

If such tasks are solved on the basis of an office suite, this is wrong! When switching to a Russian office, we recommend using special software for opinion polls. And the results of its work are already loaded into a spreadsheet via a plugin… or into BI, if the company uses analytics in the broad sense of the word.

Conclusion

Thus, if you are faced with the task of replacing an office, and someone from the XXX department (we won’t name names – everyone will have their own 🙂 starts waving his hands and saying that you cannot transfer our well-established practices to the same P7 Office , you can turn on the picky inspector and start, “Do you understand that everything you have done is a big problem for the company?” Here, for example, is what the vendor himself says about migration problems with MS Office:

“The help of an integrator is irreplaceable in a number of cases, because integrators perform a range of tasks related to software implementation. Integrators also resolve issues of interfacing the implemented software with both the customer’s existing software and the one being implemented. Such work does not affect software modification, but only configuration and adaptation. For example, in the Astra Linux operating system, the file manager has a standard function for sending files by mail. The P7-Organizer email client supports the mode of creating new messages immediately with attachments of files to the letter, however, calling this function leads to the creation of a new letter, and the selected file was not attached to it. In such situations, an integrator can help, who needs to determine on which side the issue needs to be resolved, and then contact the vendor and receive instructions for setting up or encourage modification of this function. To achieve this, the integrator has competence in each of the interfacing software products.”

Vitaly Shaev, director of the R7-Office competence center

That is, solving non-standard problems is actually just an additional small IT project. And seriously, in parallel with the abandonment of MS Office, it would be good to improve IT, take advantage of the situation and approach the solution of those infrastructure problems that would emerge in the future. This situation is similar to a trip to the clinic, where, during the treatment of acute gastritis, appendicitis was simultaneously discovered and it was removed in time.

Our team has already gained experience in solving the problems of transferring expertise from MS Office to P7 and other office packages, and I can say for sure: there are no situations when it is “impossible” to move from Excel or nothing can replace PowerPoint. You just need to take the right approach to reworking the clutter that made it possible to create Microsoft Office products.

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