Wow Lotta folks gonna discover that LibreOffice is much better than MS Office. Not to mention, free.
I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it’s 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.
Me too haha. One of the first things I install.
I will forever hate 2007’s ribbon with a passion.
Microsoft probably added or changed unnecessary shit to the OOXML format that your old version can’t handle.
Do all documents open without any problems?
It hasn’t.
Same here.
Think of all the new words made since 2007 you won’t be able to write on such an old version.
Like skibidi
“You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we’re done half baking it into all our apps and now we’re almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all.”
The logic of the utterly deranged…
They did the same with 3.5 jack removal from phones, charged more for less
So glad I got a free phone from Visible after they were going to update their network and claimed my Galaxy S8 wouldn’t be compatible.
Best phone I ever had, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Suck on that, apple losers.
They should have made it opt-in instead of opt-out IMHO. You can still get the old subscription when you renew, but you have to jump through a couple of hoops. If you do nothing you just get “upgraded” for no reason.
Dolla dolla bill.
If they actually bundled a game pass subscription with it and made a proper Microsoft complete subscription they could have softened the bad press they’re getting on this (and giving customers something they’ve wanted for a while)
That and the fact that they’ve nearly doubled the price of the subscription to add a limited credit based feature just looks pretty slimy
bundled a game pass subscription
Most of the money MS gets from Office365 is from business users, not home users. I have a feeling that trying to sell game pass to corporate clients isn’t going to be a huge hit…
Sure and it would be silly to mess with the professional tiers
But personal and family subscriptions are fairly squarely positioned towards non-business users as their main demographics, from what I can see.
Why on earth would they bundle gamepass into Office365? Office365 is pretty much used for business and educational institutions. Everybody else is a rounding error.
The overlap between Office365 owners and Xbox gamers is extremely small.
You’d just end up pissing everybody off by combining them
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“They’ve added how much to the price by adding this gamer nonsense?! I don’t need that crap, I want office software!”
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“They’ve added how much to the price by including fucking PowerPoint and Outlook?! I don’t need that crap, I want to play games!”
And not to defend MS, but a 43% increase isn’t nearly doubling. A 100% increase would be doubling.
It’s called Microsoft 365 now
Office 365 was when it was just a business productivity suite
They renamed it when they pivoted it to a general subscription and started adding things like clipchamp.
I mentioned in another comment though that I agree it would be silly to mess with the professional skus, but the home & family ones would make perfect sense to offer as an option at the very least (just as they’re offering 365 without copilot for the time being).
I’m also not saying get rid of the independent subscriptions for Xbox, that would also be silly.
Just that a merged one would make a lot of sense for the people out there paying for both (which I reckon is a good number in the family subscription category at least)
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Fun story, it’s called office 365 as when you see the price you’ll turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Ok that doesn’t really work but God I love that stupid joke.
Anyway I haven’t used office personally for ages and never seem to run into real compatibility issues with the meager personal/business overlap in my situation.
It made me chuckle a little imaging that you do a full 365 degree spin Infront of Microsoft and then walk away (in an awkward way), instead of 180 degrees to walk the opposite direction haha
Technically speaking with 365* of rotation if you are far enough away you will be able to walk past microsoft, so this is possible.
Because of the Earth’s curvature you mean?
No not the curvature. For every one degree off you are of a target at 60 miles away you will miss your target by one mile. So if you were 60 miles from your target and you rotated 365, you would miss it by 5 miles. Hence you could spin 365 and miss it, if you were far enough away.
You mean you could accidentally spin 364.9° or 365.1° instead of 365° exactly and you’d be off by a large amount? Might be dumb but still not getting how a perfect pivot right back to 0°/365° would still miss!
Because a perfect circle is 360* not 365 so you would be 5* off perfect thereby miss by 5 miles at 60 miles distance.
365 spin, then realizing your mistake and awkwardly walking backwards out of the room
At the right distance it’s just enough pivot to give them a spiteful shoulder check on the way out.
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This is like adding ESPN to the live TV package.
So glad I never had to deal with cable, or internet companies.
Just $25/month with Visible and I have unlimited data with tethering.
I’m so glad I work in an industry where I can get away with using Libre Office.
Make it too expensive and people will switch to Google docs.
Excel is the deal breaker on that. My last company was all Google products and auth, but I still had to buy Excel for the accounting and HR teams.
Um excel certainly has its places, but accounting? Don’t they have actual dedicated software for accounting? HR? Like payroll? Again don’t they have actual software for that?
And I was thinking personal use, whose costs were posted. $100 a year, fuck that.
It’s hard to believe, but I work at a Fortune 100 company that’s still heavily reliant on Excel.
Sure, we have specific software as System of Record (Oracle suite, mainly). But for all the day to day estimating and calculating and reporting and other noodling, people routinely export to Excel and play with numbers from there.
The point is you can use google docs or Libreoffice for day to day mundane things.
It’s only the huge power features that you need Excel for, maybe in engineering. For accounting when you get to that power feature point I’m surprised there isn’t dedicated software.
Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it’s not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.
From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it’s clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn’t really need Excel… but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I’d probably switch to something else.
Like it’s a fun number cruncher, but for serious accounting that’s tied into point of sale, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc you really should be running something dedicated. That’s why there are all these software companies making bank when from the outside you can’t quite figure out what they do.
Protip on excel, when you start a new sheet ctrl+a, ctrl+1, change to number.
See you think that - but excel finds a way. We have what are lovingly called the “spreadsheets of doom” which accounting uses to manage all forecasts, and the bits that involve money flows. Did you know you can hook excel into Salesforce and pull all the sales records? A person who thinks her monitor is her computer (she has a Dell laptop) somehow found a way…
I remember my dad had a problem and asked if he had to take the monitor or the tower to the shop.
Google workspace just pulled the same crap with Gemini
The point is it’s free.
Last week at us.
First question I asked the evil twin was: “How can I deactivate Gemini and never hear from it again?” Support article poped up, where must opt out from some Labs setting or some bs, but only a workspace admin can do it.
Ended up with blocking that flare button with uBo. Problem solved.
The fact it costs anything at all, let alone a subscription, should be enough for the working class to seek other options.
This generation has sold itself out to the lowest bidder.
Phew, this was a good reminder since I was meaning to cancel my subscription anyway. It was going to auto renew in 2 days. 😬
More anti consumer garbage forced by a monopolistic juggernaut which the governments of the world refuse to do more than mildly scold. It’s worse than chatgpt and pops up almost everywhere you click. Something about heads in asses
So I’ve never used Microsoft office because I could never afford it. I went from notepad to wordpad to OpenOffice to libreoffice. I’ve never had a single issue even as a professional not using word. I actually really enjoy writing as a hobby and I just don’t get this copiolet thing. Why would I want something to do the thing I like doing? Screw that.
For professional settings, I understand the theoretical appeal of ai writing. A lot of people don’t like writing emails, but they have to for work. Many of those same people fret about tone or presentation, because silly office politics reasons (real or one-sidedly imagined in their heads.)
The solution, really is workplaces just need to cut down on the useless drivel emails and people need to be ok with short, no frills emails.
There are tons more applications in the workplace. For example, one of the people in my team is dyslexic and sometimes needs to write reports that are a few pages long. For him, having the super-autocorrect tidy up his grammar makes a big difference.
Sometimes I have a list of say 200 software changes that would be a pain to summarise, but where it’s intuitively easy for me to know if a summary is right. For something like a changelog I can roll the dice with the hallucination machine until I get a correct summary, then tidy it up. That takes less than a tenth of the time than writing it myself.
Sometimes writing is necessary and there’s no way to cut down the drivel unfortunately. Talking about professional settings of course - having the Large Autocorrect writing a blog post or a poem for you is a total misuse of the tool in my opinion.
As a software dev, I have the feeling you just described texts that nobody will ever read :-) or so I feel.
Props for the dyslexic help tho.
Some of these are for insurance, government organisations… They are naturally dry but we can’t get away from them.
Some others that I described like internal changelogs, I agree won’t ever get read. Then if that’s the case I don’t care (much) about the quality - just about doing it as quickly as possible.
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
They need money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
This decade for SURE! We promise!
Excel has most businesses in a headlock. Can’t see why anyone else pays for M$. I have Office, but it’s a permanent license from my last job. When I upgrade, say bye bye.
Exactly, the only reason I have the subscription is for Excel and OneDrive. My NAS and home network is still not good enough to cover the backup needs of my whole family.
the technical breakthrough of increasing shareholder value
As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I’m sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.
As for businesses that part stinks… once you get integrated with all the services offered, it’s going to take a lot to back out since it’s not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It’s awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn’t anticipate this then they didn’t do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.
It is. Remember when they just made a new version every 3 years and you didn’t REALLY need to buy the latest one if you had the previous one?
Well that didn’t make them enough money.
They still do that, though.
Yes, but you have to know that they do. They only advertise 365 on their website.
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that’s updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
Fuck the MS suite is such garbage. My work was sold in for Teams with all the BS. Now I have to either map up the filepath creating what we used to have, or I can’t see the file folder and make a call at the same time. Onenote with it’s arbitrary syncing. And good luck finding it again since it stored at some random place if you loose access.
Word and excel is decent, but for a person who likes to tinker with versions it’s a nightmare to invite people to edit it.
Cluncky interface, slow and bloated all around
The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.
It’s very “lipstick on a pig”, but you can run the PWA side by side with the native desktop. I have many screens so I keep non-call activity in the PWA version to avoid this nonsense.
I’m sure they will add tabs eventually as an afterthought and make it even more obtuse though.
I also reflexively delete the personal OneNotes and start a new one where I want it to be, but the war between me and Microsoft about how I want my personal documents stored has now raged for many many years.
Makes me glad I continue to use the free Google and MS Office options and keep my cloud storage with a service that is dedicated to just storage.
Cuts down on all of the forced price increases due to the AI mess the MBAs need to justify the expense of.
