Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019 (venturebeat.com) 339
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft today launched a marketing campaign pitting Office 2019 and Office 365 against each other. The goal? To prove Office 2019 isn't worth buying -- you and your company should go with Office 365 instead. In a series of three videos, twins Jeremy and Nathan calculate the differences in Excel, Cynni and Tanny present their findings in PowerPoint, while Scott and Sean type it out in Word. The ads are cringe-worthy, to say the least, but they do get the point across.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
Have it your way, MS (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bad enough that ffice products have historically been grossly overpriced; now they're trying to force people into a subscription model that will likely end up costing them a lot more in the long run.
I don't "subscribe" to software. Sell it to me or get lost.
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Cynni and Tanny present their findings in PowerPoint
That one has possibiliies though. In the opening scene, Cynni and Tanni start working on Powerpoint. Then they get bored and start working on each other. Just as Cynni is eating Tanni out, a pizza delivery guy turns up. A really well-hung pizza delivery guy, who proceeds to ream out Cynni while Tanny calls over her friend Crystal who sucks off the pizzza delivery guy. In the meantime, Tanny notices a plumber whos been fixing something under under the sink...
SaaS is news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gee, Software as a Service, aka monthly software rental fees, where Microsoft can nickel and dime you every month is a surprise?
The entire software industry is moving this direction. Adobe, JetBrains, etc.
Why is this news?
Re:SaaS is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
The side effect for the company. Other then just printing millions of CD's for you app and selling them for a hundreds of dollars. You now need to maintain a full data-center to handle the data for millions of customers.
Cloud is good when you need to share across networks. Or you are a small organization who just doesn't have a secure infrastructure. But for others having software that you can buy and keep updated (or not) yourself is useful. There isn't too many features past office 97 that I really need. Why can't I use office 97 for work.
45% of software features are used (Score:3, Insightful)
Long known truth: Most software features are never ever ever used.
MS knows it, Adobe knows it, Oracle knows it yet they throw new features out, rebrand the UI, create a new UI layout every 2 years, etc... just as a way to say it's new and shiny so buy the new version.
"Why 45% of all software features in production are NEVER Used."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-45-all-software-features-production-never-used-david-rice
Steve Jobs did a disservice to us when he chromed up the UI and let UX design icebergs o
Re:45% of software features are used (Score:5, Interesting)
With the sole exception of a business case report i had to write for a software package acquisition in...2014? I can't think of the last time I needed a formal word processor. Even then it wasn't strictly necessary.
Most of my documents now (2017-2019) are written in markdown, which although there are a couple of competing standards, most parsers can accurately render 99%+ of documents legibly. It's no PDF but is a pretty portable standard.
I still use excel-type spreadsheet software to calculate personal finance projects but the sum, average functions are pretty bog standard
After that you have what, powerpoint? Depending on company culture you might do 80% of your real work in an app like this...
Finally there's the mystery meat fourth app, which might be somethinng like MS Access, or MS Project or... MS Notes? Visio? Who the hell knows, whatever it is, you're probably better off using something else instead.
I feel like the word processor is a dead segment, most "documents" I get these days are just well formatted emails, most spreadsheets are generic and interchangable, but powerpoint slideshow apps might be the one vendor lock-in left for office?
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Well, you can always end up being acquired by a company that has swallowed the Microsoft Kool-aid. Then suddenly the corporate standard becomes a clumsy Word document, specifications will be made in Excel, and you'll be scratching your head trying to figure out how to navigate in Sharepoint or VSTS (now called Azure DevOps just to be extra insulting). IT and HR will be encouraging you to Yammer and use Team. In general you'll be using software that's adequate, it's certainly not great and it's not terrible
Re:SaaS is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SaaS is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even if I'm not collaborating, an Excel file is far more useful than a PDF.
It's very useful to be able to manipulate the numbers often (as in sort, ad some percentages, etc).
Ideally a CSV would work, but Excel has some very stupid opening policies and can permanently change the file on open.
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Excel often fails because you won't know which numbers can be changed without seeing if there's a formula behind them, and you can't tell what the spreadsheet really does until you understand all the formulas. And trying to figure out the formulas is painful if you're not the author.
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Excel often fails because you won't know which numbers can be changed without seeing if there's a formula behind them, and you can't tell what the spreadsheet really does until you understand all the formulas. And trying to figure out the formulas is painful if you're not the author.
You find it difficult to select a cell and look in the formula bar to see if there's a formula? I'm an Excel dummy, and even I know that your first notion is absurd.
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Have you got any examples of office documents that you can't open? I've still got an old hotmail account and via that I can open any word document online with no problems, I've not really had any issues importing an ms office document into google docs or opening in libreoffice before either. Surely it would be pretty trivial to produce and example that exhibits this problem you describe.
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Keeping the version of Office you have is a good idea. There was NEVER a good reason to upgrade yearly anyway, that's just dumb and had nothing to do with security but mostly an autonomic action by IT department heads who are brainwashed by Redmond.
The cloud version, just avoid it. It does not work very well, especially if you need to do stuff like Project or Visio or want drawings in Word documents that actually look good. If you do go to Office 365, be prepared to have unexpected outages that you canno
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This is where a wine port to windows could come in handy.
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Why would it? Are you really that dense?
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Why not take the freedom challenge. Download https://www.libreoffice.org/ [libreoffice.org] and install and try it, no matter how much you like it, you will not have to pay for it, yours forever as is access to your documents. Take the freedom challenge or pay rent to M$ for the rest of your life, 10 years, 20 years 50 years, 100 years or more paying rent to read the letters you wrote but no longer own the access to, you can only rent it, one month at a time and they can take it away at any time for any reason, perhaps becau
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Office2003
+ Office2007FileFormatConverters.exe
+ Windows7
== #LastKnownGood
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Re: SaaS is news? (Score:3)
You poor bastard...
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Still don't understand why people buy into the SaaS model of closed source for exorbitant fees.
Maybe because those of us who use these things know, especially the oft trotted out Adobe stuff, that it's actually cheaper. I use PhotoShop for photo editing, and simply can't get used to GIMPS interface, especially years ago before they had the dockable windows. I've used PhotoShop since 7.0 came out.
I used to upgrade ~2 versions of PhotoShop, because there are things being integrated into the newer versions that make my job easier. With CC over the same amount of time I save $100+. I also get LightRoom
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The Adobe argument has been rehashed for years. It is cheaper IF you were one of the few people or organizations that purchased every update.
Their rental program offers each program for about $10-$20 per month, purchased in year increments. $10 per month for Photoshop & Lightroom means $120/year. If you get the suite, it is $600 per year. With the old costs back in CS5 and CS6 days, if you purchased the near-yearly updates then it was cheaper. Few people and businesses bought upgrades that often.
Most
they are half right........ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:they are half right........ (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite true.
Now if we can get Schools and Universities to use it and recommend it to students. Vs. Having the Professors with Cool Microsoft Swag to make sure the students pay for legit MS Office copies.
Re:they are half right........ (Score:4, Insightful)
At least with their old program (where a student could buy a standalone copy of Office for $5), you could continue to use it even after graduating.
Re:they are half right........ (Score:5, Funny)
I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
Re:they are half right........ (Score:4, Informative)
I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
I hate that it doesn't actually work.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
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For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. ... I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
I strongly dislike both PowerPoint and Impress. They both put way too much "power" in the hands of clueless users while hamstringing experts. A former manager of one of my co-workers once said "You can put all kinds of poop in to PowerPoint."
Sometimes slideshows are the right thing. I don't doubt that your presentation was appropriate for a slideshow. Just that there are far too many that were "Hey, I'll make a slideshow 'cause I can" crap.
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I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
I hate that it doesn't actually work.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
What was the last version of LibreOffice you tried? LibreOffice 6.2.0 is at RC3 level, and LibreOffice 6.1.4 is the latest stable version. If you are adventuresome, you can even download LibreOffice 6.3.0.0 Alpha and compile it yourself (trying asking Microsoft if you could download and compile their source code -- good luck, even if you are prepared to sign a contract!)! Though, not something I'd recommend for most people!
If you have a problem with LibreOffice you can raise a bug report, and/or pay for c
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I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours
And it sounds like what you learnt is to blindly trust someone else with your hard work. Maybe you should look to your own practices if you lost anything more than 10 minutes worth.
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Well, I do prefer the indexing options available on the 1990 versions of MSWindows for the Macintosh...but when I switched to MSWindows 95 those options weren't available.
So while there are aspects of LibreOffice that I wish were better, the alternatives I've checked haven't been appealing.
That said, due to EULAs I haven't looked at any MS software since about 1998 or Apple software since about 2000. So it's possible they've improved things. I just really doubt it. It would be nice to have multiple separ
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I wish you were right.
My clients send me .DOCS that must be converted to a vector and printed onto very expensive machined assemblies. Libre and Open cannot be trusted to get the formatting right, the customers departments all use different file formats, and supplied documents must be verified and compared when moving software suites to ensure data integrity.
I'm stuck working with the latest office if I wanna work with the industry titans that provide half my work.
No help for it, but I still won't rent soft
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Well.....if enough people used LibreOffice, then they wouldn't NEED compatibility with MS Office.
LibreOffice, for great justice!
Re:they are half right........ (Score:4, Interesting)
The subscription model may be more profitable for Microsoft overall, but I have a hunch it will lose market share for cases that use the software casually. The same users that we hurt when Microsoft abandoned Works [wikipedia.org] in 2009. Microsoft has opened up a nice niche for LibreOffice. Even though it's not as good as MS Office, it's much better than Works ever was.
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LibreOffice is perfect for occasional home use, or a student writing a term paper.
One assumes that the student writing a term paper is not doing so for fun, but for class credit. If he turns that paper in electronically and Word cannot read it, poof goes the credit.
As for another comment about forcing students to pay for copies of MS Word -- good unis have bulk licensing and students get the tools they need. Like Word, Matlab, etc...
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As for another comment about forcing students to pay for copies of MS Word -- good unis have bulk licensing and students get the tools they need. Like Word, Matlab, etc...
What about grade school, middle school, and high school? Not everyone can get bulk licensing. I've been away from the education system for a while, but from what I hear, most of it is on Google Docs anyway.
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Submit in PDF?
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Submit in PDF?
Good answer! You only need compatibility for collaboration. You need readability for the final product. LibreOffice exports to PDF nicely!
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Then don't go to a shit school.
I went to a state school, and even they had both Libreoffice and MS Office installed side by side on all campus computers. You literally could send in anything in your choice of formats - .doc, .docx, .odt, .pdf.... you name it.
Re:they are half right........ (Score:5, Interesting)
In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.
At least where I work, nearly all the technical people are using LibreOffice - many of us are using it on Linux, though we all have "office PCs" for access to corporate email and several "business apps" we are forced to use.
Anyway, the MS Office users in the company don't seem to notice. And any compatibility issues they do encounter are no worse than what they encounter in documents from customers and suppliers, who use different versions of MS Office, some as old as 2007. MS Office inter-version is often poor. We usually hear more complaints about outside documents than ones from the tech staff.
Re: they are half right........ (Score:3)
That's cute.
I get calls from executives all the time about free/busy meetings across shared Exchange calanders and getting Skype for business meetings working with external clients with Ms federations from customer active directories.
You don't know what business use is until you support it. Until Libreoffice has freebusy and calanders and groups across the Enterprise than it's not worthy.
Oh if you give me shit about telling the executives to fuck off and embrace freedom and evolution and send mail and educa
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LibreOffice is perfect for occasional home use, or a student writing a term paper. In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.
If Microsoft Office is a requirement at your place of work then you are working at the wrong place.
Re:they are half right........ (Score:4, Insightful)
Compatibility is the only reason MS still exists.
To be honest, MS is often poorly compatible with MS. Compatibility is not the reason they exist.
The reason MS - and MS Office in particular - exists is because it gives businesses an out if something goes awry. If I'm at business ABC and I get an important Office document from a customer from business DEF, I need to be able to show that I'm doing everything reasonable to open it. If it came in Office format and I have the latest version of MS Office, I can check that box even if the document eats shit and is completely unreadable. However if they send it to me and I have libreoffice (or any other non-MS Office suite) and can't open it, that is my fault. And there is money on the line, so I had best make sure I do everything I can to prevent cross-incompatibility.
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What else can you stuff into the various programs.
Microsoft admits Office 2000 is enough. (Score:2)
Well duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
If a customer BUYS your software, then you get paid once but you still have to support it for years.
If the customer RENTS your software, Software-As-A-Service, you get them to keep paying you annually or even monthly.
Kind of a no-brainer for Microsoft, really. An owned copy of the software costs what, $200-$250? They keep you subscribed for two and a half years and that's covered. Relatively few people will BUY new software every year when the old versions work just fine, so you absolutely make more in the long run through subscriptions.
=Smidge=
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>If a customer BUYS your software, then you get paid once but you still have to support it for years.
That's not really the case, though. Eventually people upgrade computers, operating systems, and so on. Eventually they'll have to buy the latest version to continue using it with the latest hardware.
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The problem for Microsoft is that the term is indefinite, even when they plan otherwise.
For example, they had to extend XP support well beyond their planned EOL, due to pressure and perception that XP being a gigantic security hole reflects on their current products, not just that they EOLed XP, and that MS doesn't care about security if they don't keep those guys up to date.
However I don't think Office has the same problem. Anyone using Office 97 won't get away with blaming microsoft for infections, for s
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> Eventually they'll have to buy the latest version to continue using it with the latest hardware.
My dad still uses Lotus 123.
Old software runs on new OS/Hardware amazingly well. The only way to stop this is to intentionally break things to prevent it, which is probably a large part of why Microsoft was so ham-fisted getting people onto Windows 10... you can't avoid buying new software if the software you already own and paid for doesn't work anymore.
=Smidge=
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That's not really the case, though. Eventually people upgrade computers, operating systems, and so on. Eventually they'll have to buy the latest version to continue using it with the latest hardware.
How often does that really happen? I can run old C64 and DOSBox games from the 80s if I want to, there's almost always some kind of compatibility setting, emulator, VM or similar solution to run old software. The only software I keep vigorously up to date is everything that needs security patches like my OS and browser and of course online games I play require I have the latest client. New generations of hardware are usually drop in replacements as software is concerned, they only see a file system not if i
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Re:Well duh. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's where the real confusion sets in. Office 365 is both a unique set of products/services and a unique way of paying. I use Office 365 - and I have the normal versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my computer. I don't save anything to Microsoft's cloud, and I don't use the cloud version of the apps. After factoring in the online meeting functionality and the excellent hosted email services that I would have to buy from someone anyways, it probably only costs me $50 a year. For that, I get to install Office on every PC and laptop in my house (limit 5).
So, for many people Office 365 is simply a subscription plan for good-old-Office. For others, it's a cloud service. For others, it's a combination of both. But, if I miss one payment, all I lose is the ability to edit files. And I can always choose to switch to LibreOffice as long as I'm using the subset of functionality it supports.
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Note that on the quarterly reports, they've already taken the move to defer and amortize benefit of windows 'transactional' revenue over years to make it resemble a recurring revenue picture rather than transacitonal.
Buying into the subscription and having your content held hostage in OneDrive is the supreme deal for them.
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Subscription models aren't just about milking more money, though obviously they can be, there can be plenty of other benefits for the provider including smoothing cash flow. It can also be tha
Not quite (Score:2)
Google docs (Score:2)
Or LibreOffice. Either do a nice job for most folks.
TeX for the rest of us that need to publish or write very technical detail-oriented documents with multiple authors.
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Or Scrivener for those of us who write books and don't care about presentation and "pages", but care a lot more about typing than clicking.
Libreoffice is even worse - I don't like having to wait a minute for reformatting because I changed WA to Washington on "page" 3 and now need to jump back to "page" 700.
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I honestly don’t get how the majority of companies could survive with Libre Office or Google Docs for any reasonable number of their employees. They both do 80-95% of what I need, but that missing portion makes it a non-starter. Once you add in the need to share your documents outside your organization it gets worse.
I so wish it was a slam dunk.
Sadly, we will move from Google Apps for Business to all Office 365 so the contacts and calendaring work properly.
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Indeed... My typical workflow is bash (that creates a skeleton .tex file using the doc title, launches the edit/view windows, and updates Makefile) + emacs + make (to run latex/dvi2ps/ps2pdf/etc.) + Okular. For really small documents--depending on the content--it's normally LibreOffice. If I need to interact w/ Word, LibreOffice's "`Save As' to Office-whatever" option works just fine. Importing Office docs--and even Excel spreadsheets (where I'd expect to see the greatest amount of interchange problems)--ha
Well I guess we can count out 2022 (Score:2)
Just force you to use the shitty 365.
And people will eat it up. They already have enough idiots that have bought. Now that will get the rest.
keep getting better over time? (Score:2)
more like rent (Score:5, Insightful)
Buy? They don't want you to buy anything, they want you to rent it.
We don't want to either (Score:2)
But unfortunately for us the "march of progress" is pretty much forcing us to upgrade, even when the existing copies of Office 2003 and up work just fine.
We looked at going to Office 365 and the pricing looked good... until we found that needed functionality cost extra. We would end up paying more in less than 2 years going with Office 365 instead of Office 2019. And we would keep paying that out, year after year. Office 2019 could last us many years.
Personally I'd be more than happy to switch to LibreOff
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Not surprised. (Score:2)
No so fast, dude... (Score:4, Informative)
...If you're not doing complicated macros and formulas, you have plenty of legal open source alternatives.
That's not entirely right - macros do exist, though in another language.
Open source alternatives suck big time - from the interface to speed to everything else one can imagine.
In short, not worth a try for the majority of [ordinary] users.
That explains why despite being "free" they have no traction to be proud of.
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>
Open source alternatives suck big time - from the interface to speed to everything else one can imagine.
In short, not worth a try for the majority of [ordinary] users.
Not in my experience. I've been swapping files back and forth between Office and LibreOffice for years now. In my experience LibreOffice is much faster than Office365 because it doesn't need to be in constant contact with Microsoft servers.
My mother-in-law was complaining about the Office365 subscription, so I installed LibreOffice. I've heard no complaints since.
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No, the lack of traction is explained by the fact that it's free. As a result, it has no money to waste on marketing. Quality is not what sells software. Or hardware. Or any other product. Consumers (and IT departments) are not rational actors.
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Bullshit. Libreoffice is fine, there is nothing wrong with the interfaces or anything else.
Bullshit back at you. I'm an outspoken critic of Microsoft's products and practices, but the interface of Excel is dramatically better than that of Calc, for example. Even O97's interface beats the hell out of Libre today.
Don't worry MS ... (Score:2)
... that never happened and it never will.
You're welcome.
Microsoft Tax (Score:4, Insightful)
Office is the main reason I detest Microsoft.
In Australia, office 365 without exchange server costs $144/yr.
We get 10 years from an office licence, because let’s face it, nothing has really changed in a long time. So that’s $1400 vs $280 to buy an outright retail licence, so 500% more expensive.
We don’t use their file storage, because we don’t trust the cloud and it fragments our data backup strategy.
I would dearly love to move our 50 users to Libre, but Libre doesn’t have outlook, and still screws up document formatting.
No wonder it’s called the Microsoft Tax.
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I guess the thing that most people miss is all of the value add that comes with an Office 365 subscription.
Not to be a shill or anything but with a base $12.50/user/month you get the Business Premium tier which lets you run the business edition (not GP aware) of all the office apps including Access, gets you the online version of the same apps, gets you a hosted Exchange server, hosted Skype/Lync server, 1TB of OneDrive storage a hosted SharePoint site and a ton of other stuff.
Then keep in mind that all of
So they will own your office documents (Score:3)
They are smart!
Better than the dinosaurs. (Score:2)
I'll never forget the commercials where Microsoft ridiculed their own customers for using their products.
I never went into MS Office willingly to begin with. The Corel office suite was better way back when, and now Libre Office is easier to use and has a better price point.
Screw MS Office.
You mean the thing that is down frequently? (Score:5, Informative)
So have your employees twiddling their thumbs while MS tries to fix their broken infrastructure? That will go well...
Clouds hide rocks. Every pilot knows this. (Score:2)
I monitor an email server that is constantly receiving messages from Office 365 users that they didn't knowingly send, but were sent using their compromised accounts. Why would I consider authorizing access to such a "service" within my organization?
I was happy with LibreOffice but went with MS (Score:4, Informative)
Why, you may ask?
Well, when I was teaching in the University in 2009, I was Happy with OpenOffice for Mac for my needs. I even had to live through the Great Fork (eventually, went LibreOffice in 2013). Did the class materials in Impress, exams in Writer, used Calc for the calification Sheets (had to use Yed for network diagrams because there was no equivalent to Visio)...
But then, I started to do Technical training for Huawei and Nokia... And guess what?
The class materials were done in PowerPoint, and if you opened them with Impress the formating would go to hell, even if the presentations were done in Office 2003 or 2007! And no one paid me to fix the formating of every!single!slide! *
The report forms were done in Excel, good luck getting the formating and the (very simple) macros to work in Calc. And good luck getting the guys in china/finland to be able to get it back completely right and trasparently in their copy of excel.
The daily assistance templates and example exams were done in word, good luck getting the formating right in writer upon opening, without wasting (unpaid) time wrestling with the formating.
And if you wanted to send some extra material to the trainees that you wanted them to be able to edit, guess what would happen if they tried to open your libreoffice docs in their company supplied copy of office? It was a coin toss if the document would display correctly or not.
So. I went office. But not standalone office for mac. I went office 365 for mac, and also got 1TB of onedrive that I do not use, and a lot of minutes for Skype calling to international phones that comes in handy from time to time, all for a very reasonable bundle price...
Oh, and on top of that, the SW is always on the latest version, pretty good when you get to an audience of very saavy telco trainees, instead of sporting your old copy of office 2007. If there is a problem with formating, the trainees can lay the blame were it belongs: in the guys who did the presentations, not on an old as hell unsupported copy of the SW (or on some very good but not compatible FOSS software).
I still have LibreOffice on my SSD, but I am thinking very seriously to remove it to save space (256GB SSD, with a 100GB Bootcamp/WinVM, had to move my steam library to an SD card**). I'll say that office is slightly better interface wise than LOffice, and MUCH better dictionary wise (specially in spanish). I realy found Open/LibreOffice good enough, but in the end, the circumstances decided against it.
JM2C YMMV
* Actually, that's the reason I declined the work of translating slides from chinglish to Spanish, the translating would break the formating, and you ended up wasting more time redoing the formating, than you got paid for the translaiton (you got paid per word, and very low at that, quite frustrating).
** When I get my next mac, I'll try to move steam to an iSCSI target drive. Moving it to a SMB 3.1 share on my NAS did not work out very well
Office 2010 (Score:5, Funny)
But it's also the same reason I will continue to use 2010.
Pages for Mac does what I need (Score:2)
Of course I hardly ever need a word processor anyway.
Really, the main reason I "need" an office suite at all is because some people still insist on using Word for everything - whether it's a simple note that would've been just fine as a plaintext email, or a list of updates they want made on some website page (which is doubly fun if the changes they've provided are for a page on a Wordpress site).
Microsoft: Don't buy MS Office 2019 (Score:2)
They were half right (Score:2)
To prove Office 2019 isn't worth buying -- you and your company should go with LibreOffice/LaTeX instead
FTFY, and done.
Internal Sabotage (Score:2)
Damn, stack ranking is getting cutthroat!
I'm convinced (Score:2)
I won't buy Office 2019.
Huh?
No, nobody said anything about getting 365, why?
Legally restricted documents can't be done in O365 (Score:2)
Happy to oblige (Score:2)
Done, I won't. I'm still never going to sign up for any software as a service. Currently running office 2013 on Windows 7. I'm not sure what I'll do when Win7 support is dropped though. But buying into subscription software won't be it.
Re:What is even the appeal of "the cloud"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
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Microsoft's advertising for 2018 was 1.6 billion. Their R&D for 2018 was almost 15 Billion.
About the only thing you got right was the 10 times, just in the wrong direction.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, how much of that $15,000,000,000 was the cloud. I would guess only $160,000,000 went into Windows and Office.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously. Why would I ever *want* this cloud bullshit? Even if we disregard all the horrible security and privacy problems, what is the actual *upside* that is so appealing? I simply don't understand it. There is no upside.
For a company? Mostly a standard service to a standard price. I've seen this now many, many times there's a huge internal negotiation between the business users and internal IT and whether their staffing demands are too high, service levels too low, required uptime and so on. Sometimes they're inefficient, sometimes the business demands are just unreasonable, but back and forth it goes. So you buy a SaaS solution like Microsoft 365 and it's like this is what you're getting, end of story. You can be happy or
Re: (Score:2)
I see the point, the frustration to me is that the reality has produced highly vertically monolithic cloud 'things' rather than federated services.
By and large 'cloud storage' is the key part. Live collaboration on a document is currently only viable through a 'all-in' experience, but there could have been a standard for bidirectional content streaming that applications could have used.
In such a case, hypothetically google suite and ms office could collaborate on the same content live, rather than having t
Re: (Score:3)
Couldn't you link to the products directly.
Re: (Score:3)
Try this:
LibreOffice [libreoffice.org]
Apache OpenOffice [openoffice.org]
Softmaker FreeOffice [freeoffice.com]
WPS Office [freeoffice.com]
(they have a whole office suite, not just the word processor)
Abiword [abisource.com]
SoftMaker Office [softmaker.com]
(again, they have a whole suite, not just the word processor)
Pages (for Mac) [apple.com]
(Apple does other office apps, too, but they don't seem to
market a unified suite)
Atlantis Word Processor [atlantiswo...cessor.com]
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Whoops, with all the cutting and pasting, I did one wrong:
WPS Office [wps.com]
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