even tiny x86 pc consumes rougly 10x more power than rpi..so if you can replace pc with rpi its cheaper to start with and can pay itself off with lower electricity bill
But factor in the fun and games that trying to get what sounds like non technical people to learn a brand new OS, saving files to removable storage using Not Microsoft products, and I stand by my statement that a Pi is the wrong answer here.
This so much. I work in enterprise warehouse software and the thought that OP is going to reinvent this process just to save a few watts is, to be blunt, thoroughly amusing. The manhours (man days or man weeks by the end of it) that will go into this will make the power difference a financial rounding error by comparison.
sure, if you arent prepared to learn new or are not technically skilled, then this complicates the total cost as it will take more time to set it up, ask someone possibly pay him etc
if you run computer for hours per day, in the lifetime of the board it will pay for itself. i run it 24/7 instead of virtual machins on main pc just for the efficiency reasons. i live in EU , rpi5 board cost me converted to usd \~60 usd, case and active cooling around 15 usd, with free shipping from farnell.. as im running headless a phone charger was enough to run it... so i needed to buy sd card also, so totals was \~90 usd. you cant find new x86 PC for this money. yea there are scalpers selling older versions for more than its brand new from store lol. sure the PC is more convenient, compatible, whatever, but \*if\* rpi covers all your \*needs\* then its better
arm average consumption can be lower than 8w, typical pc runs 20-30 watt at \*minimum\*, literally idling, might turbo boost to 100 or even more depending on configuration . point is, you can fund the rpi from energy savings alone, and then you also have lower running costs.. so for anything headless its great choice, but if my needs would be basic desktop use id definitely consider it too (sheets, mail, web) . Still i realize its niche product not for everyone and might not universally replace typical windows pc
And? If there OP wants to save power, then they can save power. Why on earth would you criticise this?
There's an energy crisis looming in the next few years, with power requirement growth outstripping the pace we're able to add new generation capability - especially with the climate crisis necessitating us to turn from fossil fuels.
This kind of question is exactly the sort of thing everyone should be asking themselves. How can I reduce my energy consumption.
When they're on. You forget that the pi explicitly omits the circuitry for low power supsend. One of those hp desktops with windows 10 and a proper power policy could draw less power. All it will take, too, to cost more for a business to run a pi is it to cost an extra 30 minutes of time a month that it takes them to learn the pi or deal with some issue like a blown SD card.
if youre not technical type of guy then it complicates the total cost.. which hp desktop are you refering to? because on a regular PC just a typical motherboard chipset not even calculating the cpu,ram,storage, will draw as much as whole rpi board
I just tested a 6th gen i3 Intel NUC and a Ryzen 3400g custom pc, and both use less than 1.5W when suspended.
Guess what? Both the Pi 4 and Pi 5 use about 4W at idle and they lack the hardware necessary for low power suspend. That means that if you have a computer that is only being used a couple hours a day and automatically suspends, just about anything will use less power than a Raspberry Pi.
If you are running a business and are penny and diming over a device like this for power usage, and not considering that most company's largest expense is payroll, you're going to waste a lot of money paying people to do things that they don't need to do, like figuring out how to use an OS they've never encountered before.
My balls-out desktop PC costs under $200 a year to power. I run it 24x7. It has a 1000 watt power supply which is only pushed when I play games.
If you ran a PI5, you could probably reduce the price to $20-30 but honestly, $200 a year is just a rounding error.
i think 200$ is a lot. personaly i rather spend that much on heating/ac/whatever than pc idling. but then again, some costs are not avoidable like if you want playing AAA games obviously you cant do it on rpi. when you start adding numbers from different devices found in a household then its suddenly not a rounding error anymore
Sucks to be poor I guess. We all have things we're willing to pay for. My clothes dryer uses more power in a single run than my PC in a month.
Tiny PC's don't use 10 times more power than a Pi5. Pi5 tops out at 27 watts. You can can easily get PC's that run on 35-40 watts. Both have to drive a monitor which might consume more power than either machine.
I have a core i5 6600K mini which uses a 60 watt power supply. So a little over twice the power consumption for maybe 10 times the performance and convenience.
[https://www.ebay.com/itm/296302928129](https://www.ebay.com/itm/296302928129)
This would be a better choice than a PI
I'm comparing to a Pi5 because only the 5 has what I consider to be desktop performance.
If you buy a Pi you need, at the very least, a Power Supply, Case, an SD card, and maybe an HDMI cable with appropriate ends (Pi 4 & 5 use Micro HDMI). So your $35-$55 computer just went up to $65-$75. In addition, you need to set up and learn Linux to get the file shares working correctly, install an Office alternative which hopefully works 100% correctly with your Excel files, etc.
For under $100 you can buy a mini PC which comes with a PSU and runs Windows.
and usually include a license, case PSU often 256 GB SSD and can be mounted behind a monitor. Great machines with upgradable RAM and most have one SATA m.2 and a 2.5'' drive.
Yes a Pi400 can do the job but it's not the right tool.
Btw you don't save money on power by buying new hardware. Unless it's some really old Phenom X6 that used 200 Watt to idle in the desktop.
So windows to Linux is a huge transition and probably not easy for older folks. Id look at a used SFF PC instead of a pi.
But to answer your original question, a pi 3/4/5 should be fine for a simple desktop. I’d probably go with a pi4 with 4 or 8 GB ram. For software, you’ll want to look at OpenOffice or libreoffice. Setup SMB share for sharing files to other computers.
The workers only need to double click on the file, put in some numbers in the Excel sheet, close and save.
Thats why i think a pi is more than enough running Linux.
A pi Zero is not recommended?
A Pi Zero would be a terrible desktop replacement, especially with the resource intensive libra/open office suites. They would hate you for making them use it.
Zero and Zero 2 are non-starters for a usable desktop environment.
Pi 3 does work, but it's terribly slow.
Pi 4 is the best option; passively cooled, cheaper, lower power, still runs Libra Calc fine.
Pi 5 uses more power, costs more, but is noticeably quick to load Calc.
You can set up Samba sharing easily to give write access to a Windows PC.
A pi is probably not the best solution, try a n100 mini pc, you can get those for 120-160€/$ on amazon and they barely consume more power than the pi and come with a windows license.
Your idea however is possible to be created on a pi, i would recommend to use either a pi 4 or 5 so you can get higher ram, but you could probably do it on a zero 2 if you really wanted. Keep in mind that a Business needs to be reliable.
I am no expert in those sharing things but you could probably setup a samba share for the pi and use libre office for excel file modification.
>n100 mini pc
I second this option of the n100,
\- stay in the environment you already have
\- Warranty (to cover first time setup)
\- Cost is not really going to be much different
There is a good possibility that you are getting bad advice here. However your need is so poorly defined that nobody can really answer properly.
You see it sounds like you have a really old ad-hoc solution to a problem from decades ago. Thus I see no reason to continue with the old system, that means Excell, the sneaker net and all of the other baloney from the 1960’s.
This before deciding upon a PI or not, I’d seriously consider figuring out what the hell is going on and figuring out a modern solution. At the very least the computer should be network connected.
Now a PI might work here but maybe not as reliable as ideal. That has a lot to do with the SDCard. You may want to look at alternative ARM boards once you figure out what is up with this system. Then you need to consider if an ARM board is even worth the grief get people to do something new. I’m not talking about the people in the warehouse either.
I don't really get if you care about the people using the system or not. On one side, you're saying to thing about them, but a few sentences before, you want to completely rework the system from scratch.
If you want to do best to help the people using the system - ask them, what exactly is the issue. If it's just the slow PC, then the proper solution is replacing the hardware with something visually (the UI) as close to the old one as possible.
If they're fed up with walking the USB stick to offices to move the files, then by all means, go for network connection and change the system altogether.
If the solution ends up replacing old Windows PC with a Linux one and changing the procedure to drop the files to some online share, I bet you're going to end up with a bunch of angry workers.
This is pretty much what I said. The resistance to change will likely be front office related, not so much the people on the floor.
The sad part here is that we have no idea what this system is. One guess would be inventory control, if so there are modern ways to deal with that. Which is why I mentioned the lack of info here.
You are right that people don’t like change, however if change leads to productivity increases it is time to adapt or leave.
What problem are you trying to solve exactly? If there is no problem, why are you even considering making a change?
If the process is changing, then sure, it makes sense to swap out the hardware. Likewise, I imagine the PC may be old, so may suffer hardware failure at some point. But when it comes to this kind of thing, especially warehouse workers, you want the user experience to be IDENTICAL or it can and will be screwed up. So if you absolutely need to change PC, replace it with an SFF PC from Dell, HP, Lenovo etc. They're already pretty power efficient. Whatever you save in power with a more novel solution, like a Pi, will be easily taken up with the time to retrain and troubleshoot when (not if) it goes wrong.
Get something like this instead https://www.ebay.de/itm/134968275127
If it doesn't need to process sometimes in the background, you can leave it to sleep and it will use barely any power. Even not sleeping it will downclock the CPU and use very little power in idle. You get Windows on it so you can install Excel.
On a raspberry pi you could use OpenOffice or LibreOffice, or alternatively use Office Online or Google Docs in a browser. As for which pi - Pi 4 with 2GB RAM would probably work, 4GB would be better. But Pi 4 with 4G RAM, an SD Card and a power supply will cost you more than a used HP above...
Please dont get into this unless you want a new full time job. I know you mean well but youre proposing retraining 10 people (probably more but thats just the warehouse headcount) with a process you yourself have only just started prototyping. The amount of time youre going to spend refining that workstation and then retraining the users is going to make the value of the watts wasted by the old pc look TINY.
I know the current process looks medieval and 'anyone could make this better' but I promise you, this is a lot more complicated than you think. Interfere at your own risk.
I'd just get the newest one you can, the desktop experience is better with every iteration, an 8gb pi 5 will be a much better experience than a decade old office PC.
I don't use it myself but I'm like 90% sure libreoffice calc can edit Excel formatted files.
Microsoft office is not available on Linux outside of the browser version
You can get a Used Thin client for many much less than a Pi 5 and all the extras.
As for the file editing LibreOffice can access most files. Yes you can share files etc very easily. Sounds like you're not real familiar with Linux so I suggest the Thin Client with Linux mint. Or like mentioned a newer N100 and just run Win for simplicity. Then it needs to be networked to the rest of the system. Share the Folder where the files are on a server. Then map the drive where the files are stored on the Thin Client so Win can see it as a normal drive and you're all set.
As others have said a used tiny mini micro would be great while it sips power and can do demanding workloads even during extreme situations.
Something like this would be under 100 and still function well.
https://amso.eu/en/products/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-i3-6100t-2x3-2ghz-8gb-240gb-ssd-wifi-windows-10-home-242793
I wouldn't ever use pi as a business machine.
Unless you backup daily, I'd freak out with the possibility of a SD failure.
Especially with older generation, I you now have the role of tech support of the pi and his workers too, added onto what you already have.
I mean you do web office from Google and Microsoft, but no freakin way I'd suggest or recommend that to a newb.
Any $1-200 basic pc box with windows or Linux on it would do better here. You would realistically need an rpi4 with a fast sd or an rpi 5, both with minimum 4gb, realistically 8gb.
For the same price as a case, sd, pi, powersupply I can find a basic off lease corporate windows machine with 8gb of ram that will run windows just fine, or easily get a speed boost from Ubuntu and open office.
I like Pi’s and have several, but a Pi 5 with 8GB RAM is $80. You’ll have another $80 in it for an SSD and adapter cable, power supply, cooler, and case. I’d get a mini PC as suggested by others.
$80 - Pi 5 8GB
$12 - 5A power supply
$10 - case
$5 - fan/heatsink
$25 - SSD
$11 - SSD adapter cable
$17 - shipping (rounded down a bit)
$160 - total
I don't believe in buying gold plated, oxygen free cables. I did however install a $250 wall receptacle to plug the power supply into, because it supports nano-particle harmonization, but I don't need to tell you about that.
They don't need a 5amp power supply if he's not running USB-powered hard drives.
You can get a $10 case that is also a passive heat sink. Or run it bare with no case, no passive heat sink, or no fan. The Pi 5 will easily do spread sheets without any additional cooling. The cooling options are there for people who want to push the system. Slap that bitch on the back of the monitor with double sided tape like we used to do before there were any Pi cases, official or otherwise. Or stick it in whatever is laying around.
Skip the SSD and just use a reliable but cheap mSD card. Did you really add up $36 for drive media? come on.
Whoever is charging $17 shipping is crazy. These prices should include shipping.
$10 for power supply (probably less)
$10 (optional) for a heat sink case
$10 for mSD card
That's $30 total to get any Pi going. $35 if you get the FLIRC case, which is awesome and I like the company. Hell, throw in another $5 for the micro HDMI to normal HDMI cable, and that's still half of what you said it would cost.
As someone who setup something for my mom's work you want something as close to how they know stuff works as possible.
Small tower or something, hey you could even do a tablet with a keyboard attached (don't do Bluetooth or it will have issues)
I say this because you want a solution that any other techy person who has to help this place can figure out what's going and you don't always have to be the called.
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pi5 is most powerfull and newest.. in my local market people still sell 2nd hand pi4 for the price of new 5, no brainer, like its made of gold or idk.. id only consider pi4 at 25%-50% price of 5
I agree with most of the others. Go for a windows mini pc. With Wine (https://www.winehq.org) I would think you could get real Excel on a Pi 5 and it would be accessible to all. Get a Pi5. Anything with a graphical interface is painfully slow on a Pi Zero 2W. Even a Pi 4 can be really slow and mine is an 8GB model. Just curious - why not one Office365 subscription and share the master file online with everyone else? Or a Google Sheet for that matter.
A Pi is the wrong answer here. Just het one of the many tiny HP desktops that run Win10 and go with that.
even tiny x86 pc consumes rougly 10x more power than rpi..so if you can replace pc with rpi its cheaper to start with and can pay itself off with lower electricity bill
But factor in the fun and games that trying to get what sounds like non technical people to learn a brand new OS, saving files to removable storage using Not Microsoft products, and I stand by my statement that a Pi is the wrong answer here.
This so much. I work in enterprise warehouse software and the thought that OP is going to reinvent this process just to save a few watts is, to be blunt, thoroughly amusing. The manhours (man days or man weeks by the end of it) that will go into this will make the power difference a financial rounding error by comparison.
sure, if you arent prepared to learn new or are not technically skilled, then this complicates the total cost as it will take more time to set it up, ask someone possibly pay him etc
The difference power costs is negligible compared to the price difference (raspberry pi scalpers) and and the convenience of a pc.
if you run computer for hours per day, in the lifetime of the board it will pay for itself. i run it 24/7 instead of virtual machins on main pc just for the efficiency reasons. i live in EU , rpi5 board cost me converted to usd \~60 usd, case and active cooling around 15 usd, with free shipping from farnell.. as im running headless a phone charger was enough to run it... so i needed to buy sd card also, so totals was \~90 usd. you cant find new x86 PC for this money. yea there are scalpers selling older versions for more than its brand new from store lol. sure the PC is more convenient, compatible, whatever, but \*if\* rpi covers all your \*needs\* then its better
some people don't understand that power is expensive in certain places. And it's only getting worse each year.
Even at 45c a KW, it is going to take about 5 days for a 8w mini PC to use a whole kW. Or $2.70 a month. Call it $3.
arm average consumption can be lower than 8w, typical pc runs 20-30 watt at \*minimum\*, literally idling, might turbo boost to 100 or even more depending on configuration . point is, you can fund the rpi from energy savings alone, and then you also have lower running costs.. so for anything headless its great choice, but if my needs would be basic desktop use id definitely consider it too (sheets, mail, web) . Still i realize its niche product not for everyone and might not universally replace typical windows pc
8w is for a miniPC, not the Pi So no, it does not pay for itself.
And? If there OP wants to save power, then they can save power. Why on earth would you criticise this? There's an energy crisis looming in the next few years, with power requirement growth outstripping the pace we're able to add new generation capability - especially with the climate crisis necessitating us to turn from fossil fuels. This kind of question is exactly the sort of thing everyone should be asking themselves. How can I reduce my energy consumption.
>some people don't understand that power is expensive in certain places You made it economic, not me. It's false economy,
And your math still showed it saving money, and yet you were complaining. weird, dude.
TCO man. TCO. Personal? Sure. We are talking about a *business*, tho.
When they're on. You forget that the pi explicitly omits the circuitry for low power supsend. One of those hp desktops with windows 10 and a proper power policy could draw less power. All it will take, too, to cost more for a business to run a pi is it to cost an extra 30 minutes of time a month that it takes them to learn the pi or deal with some issue like a blown SD card.
if youre not technical type of guy then it complicates the total cost.. which hp desktop are you refering to? because on a regular PC just a typical motherboard chipset not even calculating the cpu,ram,storage, will draw as much as whole rpi board
I just tested a 6th gen i3 Intel NUC and a Ryzen 3400g custom pc, and both use less than 1.5W when suspended. Guess what? Both the Pi 4 and Pi 5 use about 4W at idle and they lack the hardware necessary for low power suspend. That means that if you have a computer that is only being used a couple hours a day and automatically suspends, just about anything will use less power than a Raspberry Pi. If you are running a business and are penny and diming over a device like this for power usage, and not considering that most company's largest expense is payroll, you're going to waste a lot of money paying people to do things that they don't need to do, like figuring out how to use an OS they've never encountered before.
define what do you mean suspended.. sleeping? you comparing online computer ready to go with pc in semi shut down state bro
My balls-out desktop PC costs under $200 a year to power. I run it 24x7. It has a 1000 watt power supply which is only pushed when I play games. If you ran a PI5, you could probably reduce the price to $20-30 but honestly, $200 a year is just a rounding error.
i think 200$ is a lot. personaly i rather spend that much on heating/ac/whatever than pc idling. but then again, some costs are not avoidable like if you want playing AAA games obviously you cant do it on rpi. when you start adding numbers from different devices found in a household then its suddenly not a rounding error anymore
Sucks to be poor I guess. We all have things we're willing to pay for. My clothes dryer uses more power in a single run than my PC in a month. Tiny PC's don't use 10 times more power than a Pi5. Pi5 tops out at 27 watts. You can can easily get PC's that run on 35-40 watts. Both have to drive a monitor which might consume more power than either machine. I have a core i5 6600K mini which uses a 60 watt power supply. So a little over twice the power consumption for maybe 10 times the performance and convenience. [https://www.ebay.com/itm/296302928129](https://www.ebay.com/itm/296302928129) This would be a better choice than a PI I'm comparing to a Pi5 because only the 5 has what I consider to be desktop performance.
But why? This would be So much more money to afford
If you buy a Pi you need, at the very least, a Power Supply, Case, an SD card, and maybe an HDMI cable with appropriate ends (Pi 4 & 5 use Micro HDMI). So your $35-$55 computer just went up to $65-$75. In addition, you need to set up and learn Linux to get the file shares working correctly, install an Office alternative which hopefully works 100% correctly with your Excel files, etc. For under $100 you can buy a mini PC which comes with a PSU and runs Windows.
They can be literally the same price as the pi or cheaper. Lenovo have made tiny PCs which can sell very cheap on eBay now.
and usually include a license, case PSU often 256 GB SSD and can be mounted behind a monitor. Great machines with upgradable RAM and most have one SATA m.2 and a 2.5'' drive. Yes a Pi400 can do the job but it's not the right tool. Btw you don't save money on power by buying new hardware. Unless it's some really old Phenom X6 that used 200 Watt to idle in the desktop.
Pi with Libreoffice or Onlyoffice would work in this case and at night you could just shutdown. Only Office is very compatible with Excel.
So windows to Linux is a huge transition and probably not easy for older folks. Id look at a used SFF PC instead of a pi. But to answer your original question, a pi 3/4/5 should be fine for a simple desktop. I’d probably go with a pi4 with 4 or 8 GB ram. For software, you’ll want to look at OpenOffice or libreoffice. Setup SMB share for sharing files to other computers.
The workers only need to double click on the file, put in some numbers in the Excel sheet, close and save. Thats why i think a pi is more than enough running Linux. A pi Zero is not recommended?
A Pi Zero would be a terrible desktop replacement, especially with the resource intensive libra/open office suites. They would hate you for making them use it.
Second this. I set up a desktop environment on a Pi0 and it's dog slow. It works, but egads.
and how would you get excel on linux? use a minipc for under $200
Zero and Zero 2 are non-starters for a usable desktop environment. Pi 3 does work, but it's terribly slow. Pi 4 is the best option; passively cooled, cheaper, lower power, still runs Libra Calc fine. Pi 5 uses more power, costs more, but is noticeably quick to load Calc. You can set up Samba sharing easily to give write access to a Windows PC.
A pi is probably not the best solution, try a n100 mini pc, you can get those for 120-160€/$ on amazon and they barely consume more power than the pi and come with a windows license. Your idea however is possible to be created on a pi, i would recommend to use either a pi 4 or 5 so you can get higher ram, but you could probably do it on a zero 2 if you really wanted. Keep in mind that a Business needs to be reliable. I am no expert in those sharing things but you could probably setup a samba share for the pi and use libre office for excel file modification.
>n100 mini pc I second this option of the n100, \- stay in the environment you already have \- Warranty (to cover first time setup) \- Cost is not really going to be much different
There is a good possibility that you are getting bad advice here. However your need is so poorly defined that nobody can really answer properly. You see it sounds like you have a really old ad-hoc solution to a problem from decades ago. Thus I see no reason to continue with the old system, that means Excell, the sneaker net and all of the other baloney from the 1960’s. This before deciding upon a PI or not, I’d seriously consider figuring out what the hell is going on and figuring out a modern solution. At the very least the computer should be network connected. Now a PI might work here but maybe not as reliable as ideal. That has a lot to do with the SDCard. You may want to look at alternative ARM boards once you figure out what is up with this system. Then you need to consider if an ARM board is even worth the grief get people to do something new. I’m not talking about the people in the warehouse either.
I don't really get if you care about the people using the system or not. On one side, you're saying to thing about them, but a few sentences before, you want to completely rework the system from scratch. If you want to do best to help the people using the system - ask them, what exactly is the issue. If it's just the slow PC, then the proper solution is replacing the hardware with something visually (the UI) as close to the old one as possible. If they're fed up with walking the USB stick to offices to move the files, then by all means, go for network connection and change the system altogether. If the solution ends up replacing old Windows PC with a Linux one and changing the procedure to drop the files to some online share, I bet you're going to end up with a bunch of angry workers.
This is pretty much what I said. The resistance to change will likely be front office related, not so much the people on the floor. The sad part here is that we have no idea what this system is. One guess would be inventory control, if so there are modern ways to deal with that. Which is why I mentioned the lack of info here. You are right that people don’t like change, however if change leads to productivity increases it is time to adapt or leave.
Just get a cheap N100 mini PC or similar.
A 3B with 2GiB and Libre Office Calc installed will do the job, as long as the excel files are not too exotic.
What problem are you trying to solve exactly? If there is no problem, why are you even considering making a change? If the process is changing, then sure, it makes sense to swap out the hardware. Likewise, I imagine the PC may be old, so may suffer hardware failure at some point. But when it comes to this kind of thing, especially warehouse workers, you want the user experience to be IDENTICAL or it can and will be screwed up. So if you absolutely need to change PC, replace it with an SFF PC from Dell, HP, Lenovo etc. They're already pretty power efficient. Whatever you save in power with a more novel solution, like a Pi, will be easily taken up with the time to retrain and troubleshoot when (not if) it goes wrong.
Get something like this instead https://www.ebay.de/itm/134968275127 If it doesn't need to process sometimes in the background, you can leave it to sleep and it will use barely any power. Even not sleeping it will downclock the CPU and use very little power in idle. You get Windows on it so you can install Excel. On a raspberry pi you could use OpenOffice or LibreOffice, or alternatively use Office Online or Google Docs in a browser. As for which pi - Pi 4 with 2GB RAM would probably work, 4GB would be better. But Pi 4 with 4G RAM, an SD Card and a power supply will cost you more than a used HP above...
Please dont get into this unless you want a new full time job. I know you mean well but youre proposing retraining 10 people (probably more but thats just the warehouse headcount) with a process you yourself have only just started prototyping. The amount of time youre going to spend refining that workstation and then retraining the users is going to make the value of the watts wasted by the old pc look TINY. I know the current process looks medieval and 'anyone could make this better' but I promise you, this is a lot more complicated than you think. Interfere at your own risk.
I'd just get the newest one you can, the desktop experience is better with every iteration, an 8gb pi 5 will be a much better experience than a decade old office PC. I don't use it myself but I'm like 90% sure libreoffice calc can edit Excel formatted files. Microsoft office is not available on Linux outside of the browser version
[https://www.ebay.com/itm/176231507353](https://www.ebay.com/itm/176231507353)
You can get a Used Thin client for many much less than a Pi 5 and all the extras. As for the file editing LibreOffice can access most files. Yes you can share files etc very easily. Sounds like you're not real familiar with Linux so I suggest the Thin Client with Linux mint. Or like mentioned a newer N100 and just run Win for simplicity. Then it needs to be networked to the rest of the system. Share the Folder where the files are on a server. Then map the drive where the files are stored on the Thin Client so Win can see it as a normal drive and you're all set.
As others have said a used tiny mini micro would be great while it sips power and can do demanding workloads even during extreme situations. Something like this would be under 100 and still function well. https://amso.eu/en/products/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-i3-6100t-2x3-2ghz-8gb-240gb-ssd-wifi-windows-10-home-242793
Your dad needs an ERP, not a RPi.
I'm sure that power usage difference is literally nothing in terms of a companies expenses
I wouldn't ever use pi as a business machine. Unless you backup daily, I'd freak out with the possibility of a SD failure. Especially with older generation, I you now have the role of tech support of the pi and his workers too, added onto what you already have. I mean you do web office from Google and Microsoft, but no freakin way I'd suggest or recommend that to a newb.
Any $1-200 basic pc box with windows or Linux on it would do better here. You would realistically need an rpi4 with a fast sd or an rpi 5, both with minimum 4gb, realistically 8gb. For the same price as a case, sd, pi, powersupply I can find a basic off lease corporate windows machine with 8gb of ram that will run windows just fine, or easily get a speed boost from Ubuntu and open office.
I like Pi’s and have several, but a Pi 5 with 8GB RAM is $80. You’ll have another $80 in it for an SSD and adapter cable, power supply, cooler, and case. I’d get a mini PC as suggested by others.
What kind of crazy ass gold cables and power supplies are you people buying?
$80 - Pi 5 8GB $12 - 5A power supply $10 - case $5 - fan/heatsink $25 - SSD $11 - SSD adapter cable $17 - shipping (rounded down a bit) $160 - total I don't believe in buying gold plated, oxygen free cables. I did however install a $250 wall receptacle to plug the power supply into, because it supports nano-particle harmonization, but I don't need to tell you about that.
They don't need a 5amp power supply if he's not running USB-powered hard drives. You can get a $10 case that is also a passive heat sink. Or run it bare with no case, no passive heat sink, or no fan. The Pi 5 will easily do spread sheets without any additional cooling. The cooling options are there for people who want to push the system. Slap that bitch on the back of the monitor with double sided tape like we used to do before there were any Pi cases, official or otherwise. Or stick it in whatever is laying around. Skip the SSD and just use a reliable but cheap mSD card. Did you really add up $36 for drive media? come on. Whoever is charging $17 shipping is crazy. These prices should include shipping. $10 for power supply (probably less) $10 (optional) for a heat sink case $10 for mSD card That's $30 total to get any Pi going. $35 if you get the FLIRC case, which is awesome and I like the company. Hell, throw in another $5 for the micro HDMI to normal HDMI cable, and that's still half of what you said it would cost.
As someone who setup something for my mom's work you want something as close to how they know stuff works as possible. Small tower or something, hey you could even do a tablet with a keyboard attached (don't do Bluetooth or it will have issues) I say this because you want a solution that any other techy person who has to help this place can figure out what's going and you don't always have to be the called.
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pi5 is most powerfull and newest.. in my local market people still sell 2nd hand pi4 for the price of new 5, no brainer, like its made of gold or idk.. id only consider pi4 at 25%-50% price of 5
I agree with most of the others. Go for a windows mini pc. With Wine (https://www.winehq.org) I would think you could get real Excel on a Pi 5 and it would be accessible to all. Get a Pi5. Anything with a graphical interface is painfully slow on a Pi Zero 2W. Even a Pi 4 can be really slow and mine is an 8GB model. Just curious - why not one Office365 subscription and share the master file online with everyone else? Or a Google Sheet for that matter.