Im gonna be honest it sounds more like a procedural oversight.
But the "oversight" is likely due to the fact that those policy-makers only see MS Excel used around them, and only expect people to use MS-Excel - which is why they did not think there might be any problem with requiring its use in a procedure. So, the people doing policymaking, and other related technical work, at the EU do actually need their MS license to work.
Therefore, that these sentences don’t describe the situation great could be due to poorly vetted copy-paste of AI text.
I know that this pattern is used by AI but it only said this is, one time not two times and then continued with It is rather than the pattern that you mention. An AI would've probably used "This" second time instead of "It" most likely given that its probably really trained on it.
I mean, we do use "this is" in a sentence atleast once like they did.
How else do you want them to write this point :/
I don't think that Libreoffice team is using AI to write their messages.
Ever since LLM generated content proliferated we now have “This isn’t X. It’s Y” shibboleths EVRYWHERE!
A person doesn’t normally start a sentence with “This isn’t a silly minor thing that you wouldn’t think it was but I had to say it out of the blue as a set up for the next sentence.” only to be followed by “This is a major deal worthy of you resharing and liking!”
They might do the clauses in the other order, though. “This is a huge deal! Not just business as usual.”
Or maybe, ever since you became aware of it, you started increasingly becoming aware of it?
From my experience, unfortunately, people who manage policies are much less competent that those who implement them.
And its not just competency, its also consumption based or its the highway road inducement problem.
The reality is if we want science back policy decisions, you need to involve stakeholders through every step.
I’ve never actually had anyone complain about me sending them ODT or ODS files since even the said MS Office doesn’t have a big issue with those.
Oddly enough, if you ever also see a CSV, LibreOffice Calc will give you a nice import dialog whereas by default MS Excel will happily open it wrong and fuck everything up for you.
Edit: oh wait there was a case in university where I did a presentation in front of like 60 people and it referenced fonts that weren’t on the other machine and they didn’t get embedded in the presentation file. It fucked up all of the font layouts. Since, I do presentations in PDFs (the archival kind). Except recently I also wrote my own presentation tool that outputs HTML pages and can also serve everything from a folder, or I might just put them on my server. I think I reinvented worse Google Docs.
On a Mac, I can read .doc(x), .xls(x) and .rtf without installing any additional software. I can’t do that with ODT/S.
90% of open data spreadsheet downloads could just as easily be provided in CSV format (looking at you, gov.uk).
Office has no issues with ODS formats either. This is a purely performative exercise.
Great, I can open proprietary document formats with proprietary software. I think you are missing the point of this "performative exercise".
The drawback is that spreadsheet cells are a terrible way to convey narrative information. I’ve seen detailed product requirements in spreadsheets with thousands of cells, that failed to capture what the team actually wanted to build, and were never read.
HTML with only the table tags allowed get you a document that you can 1) View in a browser, 2) Has table headers and the ability to define column widths and combine cells
But you can leave presentation up to the viewer.
Same principle as Markdown, but markdown tables are bad.
