Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign Microsoft has decided to demonstrate the worth of its flagship Office 365 subscription by pitting it against its flagship Office 2019 product in a bizzaro productivity face-off. Redmond has punted out a series of ads where the Office giant pits twins against each other in a series of tasks aimed at demonstrating that while …
"I would rather use a traditional desktop version"
So...O365 then. The primary difference between them is licensing. O365 allows you to install on multiple systems including mobile devices. The 2019 boxed product does not. The other difference is that O365 gets new features as they arrive while 2019 won't get most of them. There's also a web version of O365, but that's not as good as installing locally.
"I would rather use a traditional desktop version"
Agreed.
Every time they break O365 during an "update" or your broadband goes down you get stranded without your data.
On top of which, W2019 (or whatever desktop version) and your files are yours for life, whereas if your O365 subscription payment fails (e.g. you bank with TSB) you lose all your data.
On top of which, using a desktop version you're not sharing your files with a potentially interested third party with more legal clout than yourself to do as it pleases.
On top of which, promotion of continuous update as a benefit merely emphasises the need for constant fixes to a flawed product.
There is ONE useful upgrade to Excel 97, introduced in Excel 2000: XY scatter plots "now" give you the option of flipping the axes assumption on creation. Which means you can plot N separate data series (with labels) rather than being railroaded into it assuming it's a single data series of N points.
However, there's also another obscure functionality which is removed -- can't remember what it was.
Office 2007 changed file formats to OOXML, and also expanded Excel sheets from 64K to 1024K rows. That helps me a lot; 64K was way too small.
I'm not sure what meaningfully changed later. In 2014 I bought Office 2010 and still use it; 2013 didn't seem any better and I think a couple of things were reportedly worse. And I still don't like the ribbon.
Anyone with Office 2007 still installed and wishing to keep it so (post O/S rebuild situation) should look into Virtual Machine creation and make an image ASAP... Microsoft turned off the activation servers last year, so theyre closing the loop on the longevity of their responsibilities to support older software.. this is a reasonable business practise, but it could be advertised more as it provides a significant bill increase for the end user when a hard drive fails..
In, approximately, '94/'95 I was using WordPerfect Office Suite which contained Windows versions of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Borland Paradox. I thought that each of those products worked wonderfully. Been stuck on the Windows Office treadmill since shortly after that. LibreOffice at home :)
Well, yeah. Or so I hear. But if you wanted to graph info from your spreadsheet in the 90's, 1-2-3 was the way to go.
Firing up an emulator to run visicalc and finding a way to get one's data into it, would've been waaaay quicker than coaxing a simple line graph out of excel '97...
?
Excel 1.05-->today: click, shift-arrow+arrow [standard range-extend/select], click : choose from variety of chart options, which have only had a handful of additions (radar plots, etc) in the intervening 30yrs.
80s thru 90s, when the 123 boys were struggling, I'd just grab their workbook and do the graph they wanted in Excel, then hand it back to them in a variety of formats for them to add to their documents.
Pfft.
Excel 97 Easter Egg was an actual flight-simulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM [1.25mins]
Note the Credits on the monolith in that crater.
"If it looked and worked exactly like Office 2003, I'd be on it like a shot"
I think they peaked there, after that it was cosmetic or unwanted naff 'features' and to say the least, I was using it less and less of it the more they 'improved' it. I mean the ribbon? what utter crap.
Office 2003 lives on for me, under a VM on Windows XP - because it works.
I'd be happy to still be using 2003, but I have to keep pace with what is currently deployed in the various businesses I work/worked for. Hence I'm on 2013 with little sign of that changing.
Quite a lot of spreadsheets and VBA coding prop up some ailing legacy systems, and slavishly following the Office iterations would result in several multi-billion pound organisations collapsing into nothingness.
365 would in all effect, be the equivalent of installing a random virus on every machine on a regular basis.
We all know how well Microsoft's compatibility feature works with its own products, so what chance has our in-house software workarounds got?
Excel 2019 has a =SWITCH() function in excel, which is a bit more convenient than doing nested IFs. That's the only difference I've noticed.
By the way, if you install Office 2016 and relicence it with a 2019 serial no, it will work as Office 2019 with the additional features, and that is a way to get it to install in versions of Windows earlier than 10.
I think it may have something to do with predictability. These days, it seems that mere revenue is not enough. Companies want predictable revenue, and subscription-based services offer a more predictable revenue stream than one-off purchases.
I bought an Office 365 sub for my daughter when she started college. I kept it after she graduated solely because $10/mo for 1TB of cloud storage isn't a terrible deal. I use it to supplement my on-site backups and encrypt everything I put up there.
Or they want off the upgrade treadmill. Microsoft's traditional model only worked if customers needed to routinely update to the latest version, and so pay for it - but is that still true? Look how many years it took them to drive customers off of XP, and Windows Seven is still in common usage. Office is the same: For a lot of customers, Office 2000 would still do everything they need, and Office 2013 is good enough for almost all.
In software, if you make a good-enough product, you deprive yourself of the chance to sell later versions. People won't pay to move away from what works without a very good reason.
"Microsoft's traditional model only worked if customers needed to routinely update to the latest version, and so pay for it"
That model worked fine when the format of a .doc file changed with every version so victims had to upgrade whenever someone sent then a file in the new version.
Then they got sucked into having to arrange an international standard format for themselves. Now they can't play tricks with the file format. They got round that with a change of UI so that once a cohort of new recruits had been trained on the new UI by the MS education programme hit employment they had to have the new version bought because they couldn't use the old one.
You can't play that game too often so they discovered subscription - lock-in on steroids.
"In software, if you make a good-enough product, you deprive yourself of the chance to sell later versions. People won't pay to move away from what works without a very good reason."
Yes, their previous modus operandi was to tweak the file formats with each new release, then realise that older version were incompatible with the new version and then spend 6 months developing a fix so older versions could at least read the newer versions. By which time so many companies who had not upgraded to the latest version were so frustrated by getting the new format documents that they were forced to upgrade so as not to appear to be luddites by continually asking suppliers, customers, clients to re-send documents in the "old" format.
Back when I still needed to use MSOffice, I tended to automatically use Save As and select the previous version of Office for the file format if I was sending a copy outside our org. That vastly increased the chances of them being able to read it.
Very true, but how about they make something BETTER than the old version to get people to buy it, or even come up with a TOTALLY NEW product.
Sorry that I shouted but making a 'new' product that is no better (or even worse) than the old version will not charm the money from my wallet.
Or they want off the upgrade treadmill. Microsoft's traditional model only worked if customers needed to routinely update to the latest version, and so pay for it - but is that still true? Look how many years it took them to drive customers off of XP, and Windows Seven is still in common usage.
There's a piece of wisdom from the Ancients that says: If you want your users to upgrade from version X of something to version X+1, you should try to ensure that Version X+1 is at least as good as version X, that the upgrade breaks nothing, and that using version X+1 will not require re-learning the user interface.
Clever chaps those Ancients.
If version X+1 is widely perceived to be a cartload of turds the users will stick with version X.
Had Vista not been a resource hog requiring a substantial hardware upgrade to equal the speed of XP it wouldn't have been the dismal failure that it was. Had Windows 8 kept the UI of Windows 7 people wouldn't have seen it as something strange and incomprehensible and to be avoided.
Microsoft have only themselves to blame.
In software, if you make a good-enough product, you deprive yourself of the chance to sell later versions. People won't pay to move away from what works without a very good reason.
That's why malware.
"I think i need to upgrade to the newer Windows. My computer at home is running slow lately", heard from my secretary a few years ago. By that time I had learned it was unwise to predicate Linux at work - just use it, in my work computer, and at home.
"
because $10/mo for 1TB of cloud storage isn't a terrible deal.
"
You think? Really?
You can get a USB 1TB HDD for the price of 5 months subscription if you need portability.
Or a 1TB NAS for the same price as about 1 years' subscription.
Both solutions are at the least 10 times faster, and will work fine when the Internet's down (which usually happens just when you urgently need the data).
And I trust the reliability of a HDD more than I trust "the cloud" as well.
On the flip side, local storage doesn't protect you from local disasters: Fire, flood, you know, the things that regularly kill small businesses and home offices being wiped out; I do make extensive use of local storage to the tune of 24+ TB, yet remote storage off-site for anything I can't live without is important as well.
[Technically, yes, I can live without, just makes my otherwise painful existence totally pointless.]
Eventually the web of internal politics is going to resolve the issue - someone higher up the chain will wonder why the company is producing two products that are in direct competition. Perhaps this anti-Office-2019 ad is part of the preparations to eventually abandon the office suite altogether, after first nudging those users onto Office 365.
"eventually abandon the office suite altogether" - well it happened with Lotus.
I was not a fan of their products myself but Lotus Notes allowed ordinary office workers to get some amazing things done.
Whilst I would spend a week coding something up in MS Access my bosses PA could code the same thing in Lotus Notes in the morning and be graphing the results from the users by the afternoon.
OK so in terms of programming style it was a bit amateur but you can't argue with how effective it was.
Why did this amazing tool go away? Was it so real programmers could keep their jobs and not be replaced by the bosses secretary?
"I was not a fan of their products myself but Lotus Notes allowed ordinary office workers to get some amazing things done."
I loved notes and wished for years that it had been taken up more widely, rather than the alternative world of people using email to connect the dots in their business.
That is precisely how they got into a position of desktop dominance. The people who trained a lot of the readers here would not touch MS products so MS went over the heads of those who knew and MS Windows 3 or less was dumped on the world by a mixture of accountants, Art Grads and MBAs, few of whom knew much about computers.
They are sticking to a proven method.
The subscription business model is all about:
A) pushing out updates as they are ready, and not storing them up for a big new version release that you need to once again sell to customers.
B) More importantly, getting a predictable revenue stream from the software offering, so you don't have huge dips and spikes in revenues around new version release dates.
Those aren't necessarily bad reasons to move to subscription services. It's not in an organization's interest to see their important suppliers suffer and start shutting down operations/reducing investment in future products. (Granted, sometimes I think that Microsoft is an exception to that rule.) But you have to price things carefully to avoid outright soaking of customers, while providing them with value in return for the value their change in payment terms is providing to you.
"But you have to price things carefully to avoid outright soaking of customers"
Who is doing that, though? With the subscription services I've seen, the total cost of the subscription is always greater than the cost of the same software as a native application. Even more so when you consider that it makes it impossible to decide to stick with an old version and no longer buy upgrades.
I certainly haven't seen all of the subscription offerings available, but I haven't actually seen one that doesn't seem like it's soaking the customers.
That is especially true with something like Office. When I bought my current personal laptop, I very briefly looked at MS' current Office offerings, then reviewed my trusty old Office 2007 Personal Edition disks, and finally decided to go with LibreOffice, to take any decade-old security gaps off the table.
If I were MS, I would take the revenue hit and reduce the current price by an order of 1/3. There is just not much functionality that has been added to Office in the last 10 years (or more). And certainly most of their developer time on the Office 3xx offering (Are we in the 350's on actual 2019 availability now?) seems to be getting spent on enabling delivery and updates via the internet.
So I kind of think they are rent-seeking on their cloudy version these days.
Both Office 2019 and Office 365 can be loaded locally.
Wearing my hat as family IT specialist I have my grand-daughters laptop which requires the latest version of Office 365 installed. It's a free download for students and teachers at schools and colleges, providing the establishment has signed up for the deal.
"site licenses can cost serious $$$, even for educational institutions"
Nah, the EES volume licenses are fairly cheap - around $10/user per year. That was for the plan that only offers students Office365 to use at home (which Microsoft says is "free" as part of the base Windows licensing). It does cost a bit more to include WAH for standard Office 20xx for students, maybe double the price? We dropped that where I used to work when MS came out with the "free" Office365 back in 2012 or so. Microsoft wants to make it as easy as possible for schools (especially universities) to push MS software out to the future Microsoft customers...
Fortunately, a lot of home users' use cases for Office are entirely trivial.
It makes perfect sense that there's a free alternative for those people. If you can't tell the difference between MS and Libre, you probably *shouldn't* have to pay that sort of money for your needs.
If MS cared, they would produce a cut down version of Office (anyone remember Microsoft Works?) and bundle it into Windows for free. But why would they care? Libre is no threat to them.
There are an awful lot of small businesses and other organisations out there. And a great many use a spreadsheet and WP. Many probably would even use a diary and contact list (Outlook).
And for these non-corporate business users LO would be more than good enough, even if there are some big players who need something that only MS Office can provide. (It's way out of my league to know what that might be). Ironically it was Outlook that kept me tied in for along time, until Lightning in Thunderbird got good enough, and that still takes an add-on to make it work properly and synchronise across devices.
> Fortunately, a lot of home users' use cases for Office are entirely trivial.
>It makes perfect sense that there's a free alternative for those people. If you can't tell the difference between MS and Libre, you probably *shouldn't* have to pay that sort of money for your needs.
I agree, Veti.
Can't quite agree with yourself, though, Terry 6. It's very hard not to run right off the end of LO's capabilities if you're doing anything non-trivial, and the additional friction of friggin around manually to fudge back in manually what you need, can only be costly for small businesses. Basically, if you're doing more than a list + twiddly calcs, or repetitions of simple letters, LO is a PITA.
Libre Office doesn't work for anything non-trivial. I wish it DID. But it doesn't.
What's the factoid? 90% of Office users only ever use 10% of the features?
LibeOffice works pretty well for most people, just about all of the time.
The problem with that factoid is that one could think 90% of the users only need or want 10% of the features. I don't believe that is true. Most users would benefit, and could learn and routinely use, more than 10% of the features.
The reason they only use 10% of the features of MS Office is that a lot of its features are buggy and crappily implemented.
But Microsoft has no incentive to fix that. They still get the money by being "the Standard" (undeservedly), and users have arranged themselves to work around the crappiness. It's sad how much productivity and progress is wasted that way.
Depends on your definition of trivial.
I find LO fine for my trivial word-processing, spread-sheeting and presentation needs. Typically course guides with 80 pages, formulas, diagrams &c associated presentations destined for import into interactive whiteboard softare. Nothing amazing.
For non-trivial stuff (in my definition) I'm using LaTeX / programmatically generated graphics anyway.
Ditto. I'm forced to use Office of one sort or another at work (generally to read stuff generated by other people, since I can usually get away with something relatively sane, such as MediaWiki, for documents I generate).
But for my academic and personal stuff, I've always used OO or LO for spreadsheets and presentations, and LaTeX (usually via LyX) for text. HTML I write by hand in vim and check with a validator. I've never, ever missed Office in this context. Not once.
"Nah, the EES volume licenses are fairly cheap - around $10/user per year. "
Yes but if you have 1000s of users that is tens of thousands of dollars every year. Where as you could probably get away with free office alternatives for the majority of users and for those that have to use MS office buy it just for those users.
"It's a free download for students and teachers at schools and colleges,"
Not. It may be free for the students and teachers but I can assure you theres a giant bill sucking at the financial teat of the academic establishment.
What would be a better idea, is if some of those in academia, that make such decisions told MS to fuck off and relied on any of the free offerings, such as open office instead.
"......have my grand-daughters laptop which requires the latest version of Office 365 installed"
When you say 'requires', do you mean that for some reason it will not work with anything other than 365, or do you mean that your grand-daughter insists on having 365 installed on it?
I ask, because, barring some odd installation issues I had (which I was able to work around), I am presently running (without any hitches so far), Excel 2000 (yes I did say that), on a Windows 10 Pro laptop.
Office 365 has client applications for most of the suite (depending on licence) which work fine without the cloud. You just might not be able to get at your files if you store them all in the cloud but you could just as easily elect to save them locally or on your network.
"Office 365 has client applications for most of the suite (depending on licence) which work fine without the cloud. You just might not be able to get at your files if you store them all in the cloud but you could just as easily elect to save them locally or on your network."
If you're going to install a local client and work on local files, why would you want to pay for a subscription cloud service instead of just paying once for the actual local client? The only reason to use Office 360ish is if you actually want the cloudiness; if the only way to make it work reliably is to ignore all the cloudiness, there's simply no reason for it to exist at all.
Well that is your choice. Do you want the continually updating Office 365 version of the client or the stationary Office 2019 version of the client? Do you want the extra application that come part of the Office 365 suite, some of which are great, some not so great.
There are some advantages to Office 365, the disadvantages are the costs and ongoing nature at that. However if I wasn't going to use Office 365 I would probably use LibreOffice/Google Apps free instead - like I do at home.
"Do you want the continually updating Office 365 version of the client or the stationary Office 2019 version of the client?"
Stationary, please. Continually-updating anything is very ungood.
Continually-updating anything is very ungood.
I hope not in the same way Windows 10 continues "updating"
They're really doing a brand-new full install of windows every so often.
Windows Service Packs were easier to deal with. Oh look, it's Windows 10 Falling Over 2019 Creators Edition - build 19402201. That why I couldn't use my PC yesterday.
I made my comment with the utopian assumption that updates never cause malfunctions. The reason that I consider continually-updating software to be bad is because it can change at any time in ways that make you alter your workflow. Anything that changes workflow is something that shouldn't be foisted on users unilaterally. Users should be able to choose if and when they want to make that change.
Service packs rarely changed workflows. They mostly fixed bugs, instead. That sort of update is fine.
If you're going to install a local client and work on local files, why would you want to pay for a subscription cloud service instead of just paying once for the actual local client?
I agree with the sentiment, but my college student child got the cloud version pre-installed on her school supplied laptop, but stores everything locally because she often works from locations with no connectivity. Choice is good, even in cases that may only make sense for a small percentage of a user base.
I use Office 365, have never had availability issues. As far as I can tell the app is local but checks in with the mothership from time to time; I've gone 3 weeks with no connectivity and it's been fine.
Go 1 more week and it will have stopped working
The license check has a max period of 30 days.
Office 365 doesn't work well in high security disconnected environments like the ones I work in. That is why we are moving away from Microsoft products now, they want you to use azure, can't do that, but they want you to, so remove features and stop supporting things to try and force you. So have to say good bye to Microsoft.
Makes sense. So for most users that will be fine - checking in once per 30 days allows for internet outages, holidays and so on. Presumably after this you can check in by phone as well if you're out in the boonies somewhere?
"That's not a problem, I've been disconnected for two weeks"
"That online service is shit, If you don't connect for 30 days it' kicks you off"
"Nothing like having your work day extended 29 days so you can bitch about MS"
"But but but people on here hate M$"
"Yes, it's difficult to discern but the bile and moving goalposts definitely suggest that."
Yes, but as you can see, and had been said by Microsoft Office 2019 is the last perpetually licensed office. Why go to a product, keeping your dependencies on said product that is essentially EOL. With the replacement needing Internet access.
System center is the same, they are moving functionality to azure.
DSC, the pull servers haven't been updated in a few years, guess where it has been.... Azure.
Yes it does, again, high security area, hence the disconnected environment. All systems must be supported.All software provided with security updates. If its EOL there is no path to the next product or support, so has to be replaced at a later date no matter what. Office 2019 and office 2016 support ends the same day.
This isn't working at home.
If you are concerned about security, the product needs to be actively supported, if its not it increases your exposure. Even with disconnected environments which I work with, you need to be concerned about updating as there are other avenues to retrieve the data. But to execute those avenues you still need to have a way to exploit it.
Is there anyone, anyone at all who does serious work in Excel or Access on a phone?
I use Excel from a iPad or iPhone quite often to update my time sheets and a few other things from OneDrive. Is it serious work - well it's the basis of how I get paid so I consider it serious enough. Is it something that I could do with Google Docs etc sure but I need to forward the time sheets to a accountant who requests them in Excel format based on a template they use. If by serious work you mean complex formulas and dozens of rows and columns then it's not.
Access isn't available on the phone.
I use Excel to update my expense claim sheet on the go. Is that serious work? I think so.
By the way, you don't need an O359 subscription to use Office Mobile. you get one or two extra features if you have a subscription, but I've never needed to use those features, whatever they are.
The "work offer" would be because your company is on something like an Enterprise Subscription Agreement which includes software assurance (and thus home use rights), or possibly an O365 subscription (don't know whether that includes home use). We're not, and my wife's employer doesn't offer that either.
O365 subscriptions allow you to install on any 5 computers, IIRC. My employer requires me to prioritise work devices first, but is happy to allow any remaining installs to be used on personal devices. There was a warning that if my employment was terminated I'd lose the ability to use Office on the home devices though.
"Personally, I use Office 365 Home because it covers the whole family"
I'm the same. There's 5 of us and it covers all our devices - 3 Windows PC's, 3 Mac's and 8 iOS devices. Sure I could use something free but my wife is familiar with Office and uses Excel heavily and she's familiar with it and she doesn't deal well with change. I want my kids to use Office as most of the corporate world uses it so they will have better prepared for a job if they have Office skills.
My dad has a small business and they were still running Office 2007 last year and have a local Exchange server. I looked into Office 365 for them, looked at the declared support lifetimes and we did the maths. For him it worked out cheaper to buy Office 2016 for the 7 Office PC's & laptops as they'll keep using it for as long as they can. They aren't power users at all but use most of the features of Exchange. The only reason we upgraded Office 2007 was because it was no longer supported.
Later this year we'll replace the local Exchange server (SBS 2011) with Office 365 Business Essentials which is only Exchange, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint. We are only going this way because MS doesn't sell Small Business Server any more so a full license of Exchange, CALS and a server to run it on is more expensive than O365. Also means we don't need to back it up any more. We'll get a small server to run Windows Essentials for their AD, file & print sharing and Direct access.
Anyone who might be scared to use LibreOffice, etc, because they will be “better prepared for a job if they have Office skills” is making a false argument. Microsoft Office isn’t that different to LibreOffice, it mostly just (nowadays) has a weird menu/toolbar/“ribbon” structure.
Anyone who is so hardcoded to using just one application by rote is going to be completely fscked the next time Microsith decide to mess with the interface. Using LibreOffice at home will if anything only enhance your skills because you will be more used to and more resilient to changes in working practices.
So if I don't use MS Office at all in Microsoft's logic I barely pass as a human?
Not at all. It means you are generally much smarter that the average Micros~1 fanboi/drone, with highly developed analysis skills (yes, with an 's', dammit!) and the capability of employing deductive reasoning.
Yay & nay.
Imagine that document you typed in your home yesterday night, that one that took you two hours to redact. Yes, the one you needed to bring to that meeting with your boss and an important customer.
Imagine O365 stops working before the meeting.
I know, you are knowledgeable in IT and would make a local copy in a thumbdrive, but most users are not knowledgeable in IT, and MS describing their cloudy solutions as almost infallible doesn't help here either.
"...it's also synced to your local machine..."
If your "local machine" at home is a desktop, you still need to specifically copy the file to a thumbdrive.
If your local machine is a laptop and you already have a desktop at the office, you're forced to either take your laptop to the office or copy the file to a thumbdrive.
If your company forces you to use a company laptop at the office instead of a desktop, then you don't need to use the thumbdrive, but I'm sorry for you.
8^)
I remember having to do that for friends' Word documents. I don't know if it still happens, but apparently Word could save a file with a stated length different from its actual length, and when you tried to reload it it Word would throw the toys out of the pram. Open Office on the other hand would just load what was actually there, and re-write the correct length when re-saving.
Two years of subscription (constantly updating yadder yadder) pays for a copy of the standalone version for what counts for perpetuity in computing terms. Or in other words the standalone pays for itself by comparison in a tad over 24 months.
And I use Office 2010 and LibreOffice at home quite happily. I'm not even sure either of them are giving me anything much more useful than in office 2003 ( or whatever it was called)
<<Office 97 was pretty much all you needed>>
Thank you, mix. I've been sitting here trying to remember which it was. Back when the earth was young and I was teaching in a university, I'd tell my students to buy '97 if they had to buy because everything worked. In addition, the Help files were on the local computer, so you didn't have to have an Internet connection to use them, as with later versions.
That was before I retired and switched to Libre Office.
When talking about the core office suites, Word, Excel, Publisher then to most parts I'd agree although Excel has got better since the old version - still buggy though.
However Office 365 does have a great bundle of other applications, most have significant limitations (but the monthly updates help!). Does depend on your licence, but you could replace or not require a number of other systems if you use Office 365.
For instance, a user could create a form (say a new starter form) and easily add it to a workflow, add an approval step from a line manager and store the result in a database, with very little effort, very little technical expertise and very quickly.
You could get emails to an on-call user, look up the duty rota and e-mail the on-call engineer all with hardly any configuration.
You could create a series of essential training videos and alert users that they need to watch them then automatically mark their training records to say they have been watched.
So for business automation across multiple integrated and third party applications it works really well but only worth it if you want the extra functionality - many won't.
So for business automation across multiple integrated and third party applications it works really well but only worth it if you want the extra functionality - many won't.
This is exactly the context I'd consider recommending to be one of several for consideration. Otherwise? Not so much.
"For instance, a user could create a form (say a new starter form) and easily add it to a workflow, add an approval step from a line manager and store the result in a database, with very little effort, very little technical expertise and very quickly."
Random un-audited shadow IT used to capture confidential and personally identifiable information as a feature?
Good luck everyone.
Random? Un-audited? Shadow IT?
WTF? It would be a tool supplied by IT so hardly shadow IT. Your staff should be fully aware and trained in GDPR by now so know what information they can hold and you can easily check what is being saved and where.
The alternative - well many HR departments are still creating manual forms (word forms) or PDF. This information is completely insecure, has no oversight, not ability to audit and can be done by anyone in your organisation today.
So I could use an expensive office software package that is bursting with arcane functionality of which I routinely use about 3%, and which spies on me and steals my personal data.
Or I could pay even more for a less featured, slower, less reliable version of that same app, which still spies on me and steals my personal data.
Or I can just stick with Libre. Free. Always available. Working. Doesn't spy. Doesn't steal my data.
Oooh, difficult choice.
Perhaps MS could have warnings before its adverts, like "Ignore this unless you're a clueless corporate monkey"?
I too am a long-time Libre Office user.
But all that is set to change now I've discovered that there is an office suite I can use for listing US state capitals. When I think of the countless times I've been sitting in front of the the screen staring at "Little Rock AR, Sacramento CA..." and wondering what comes next. Not any more!
But all that is set to change now I've discovered that there is an office suite I can use for listing US state capitals. When I think of the countless times I've been sitting in front of the the screen staring at "Little Rock AR, Sacramento CA..." and wondering what comes next. Not any more!
Well you just destroyed 4% of the value right there
Amazon are the worst offender for that: about twelves months ago they changed the unlock process on a Kindle Fire. I forget the details but you had to swipe in a different direction to previously. No explanation of the change, the adverts on screen still there, not even an "this has changed and you'll need to do this now..." on there. Only took a few seconds to figure out but leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.
A few things came to mind whilst watching all three of their nauseating adverts:
1. MS chose tasks that Office 365 could perform better than Office 2019 and then expected us to be amazed. Wow.
2. There is, I am sure, absolutely no technical reason my the "AI" helpers in 365 can't be integrated with Office 2019.
3. Paying monthly for software that traditionally used to be had for a one-off payment must make them a bucket-load more cash - hence #2, above.
4. I reckon 90% of what people do in real life with Office 365 could be done perfectly well using Office 2019 or a free alternative - hence these horrible ads.
5. #1, #2, #3 & #4 make MS just as evil as they ever were.
4. I reckon 90% of what people do in real life with Office 365 could be done perfectly well using Office 2019 or a free alternative - hence these horrible ads.
90% of what people use Office 365 or Office 2019 for could be done with wordpad+calc that come with windows, don't have to install any extra software (whether free or not) at all.
onto my desk whenever I press a key, i.e. they are just 'Word Processors' that cost money to use and their owner is venal and unreliable, I don't find any good reason to use either of them. I do however have anytime access to trustworthy and reliable means of producing formatted words.
Somehow my world is unmoved by the lack of either of MS's 'products'.
Listen up, Microsoft: I get that you notice, and fear, that users are abandoning Office. But squeezing will not keep them in! You cannot push people into a service, much less a subscription service. You can only lure. What you are doing is not luring me, though. Word, the only product I care about, is shit compared to others out there, and your advertised tools are laughable. If you want to lure me back, give me something I want or need! You can't, because you do not (want not) understand what I need or want. You continue to willfully ignore my needs. So no Office for me. No subscription, no money, and no data for you (other cloud services take my data only if I do not pay. If I pay, they do not take my data).
That's ANY Office. 365 and 2019. The only reason some people chose 2019 over 365 is because they need to exchange files in Office formats only occasionally. Once the entities forcing this will realize that they are better served not with Office file formats, you will loose.
I'm still using Office 2003 which I prefer due to the way Access works. In my opinion MS has been trashing Access in each of their subsequent releases.
Occasionally I will run into "number of rows" limit in Excel.
Other than Excel I don't find anything appealing about the latest Office offerings from MS.
worth pointing out, along with Sinofsky, the same person who invented the damnable ribbon also invented 'the Metro' and we're STUCK WITH THAT UI, too...
Because MS still has market power in the office productivity arena, and because educational establishments still have money, and that money still looks pretty and forms into attractive piles. It's just that the piles are somewhat smaller than those found at a Fortune 500 company.
The last Word version I used was 1.1b, which we used to call "winword" because "MS Word" meant the character-based DOS application. It was one of the few things I actually used Windows 3.0 to do, since everyone knew that real work was done in DOS.
I found that it did all that I needed a word processor to do, which wasn't a whole lot. Well, printing a ten page document in less than 45 minutes would have been nice, but I suspect that had more to do with the hardware available at the time. I remember waiting anxiously as the dot matrix printer slowly ground out the pages I needed for the uni assignment that was due shortly, having waited 'til the last minute to print.
How do you keep people buying the same thing over and over when the old one still works? Always the question, with all sorts of answers, none of which benefit the consumer.
If I had to use Office, I'd absolutely go with the native application rather than 365. With a native application, I can make sure that the application doesn't update (and therefore change) underneath me, and can do the update if/when I'm actually ready for it, providing greater stability in terms of usage patterns. Also, I don't need an internet connection, and I am more able to control whether or not the application phones home.
I know I am going to slapped by El Reg for not sending this to their corrections email alias, but the correct spelling of the final word in this sentence is I-N-C-A-R-C-E-R-A-T-I-O-N.
(And yes, I use Libreoffice at home)
"Hello. Is that the Greek tourist board?"
"Yes. How may we help you?"
"Ah, great. Yes. I'm interested in buying one of your gorgeous islands, and was wondering if you could direct me to the necessary department that deals with such things"
"I'm sorry, that's a very unusual request, I wouldn't know where to....Hold on! Is this some kind of prank call!?"
"No. No. I assure you, this is genuine. I'm responsible for maintaining my company's vast array of software resources and the boss has just signed a contract with the local undertaker to license Office 365 throughout our organisation"
"Sorry. I'm not quite understanding your point"
"What I mean to say is, my overtime bill from now until I retire will quite literally cover the cost of a modestly sized Mediterranean island"
I think the level of confusion exhibited by several commentators here only service to illustrate the complete Horlicks Microsoft has made of its product branding given that "Office 365" is an umbrella term for a series of different and often overlapping products aimed at both consumer and enterprise markets and which provide the end user with differing functionality depending on the package they have purchased. To whit:
Office 365 is the name of the cheap as chips cloud-based productivity suite of Word Processing, Spreadsheet and Presentation apps running in a browser and which share a user interface and most functionality with the legacy desktop Microsoft Office product.
Office 365 is also the name of the subscription service which allows the home user to install desktop apps on up to five devices, These apps are fundamentally Microsoft Office but benefit from a regular stream of feature enhancements and updates not immediately available to purchasers of the offline retail version. Purchase ALSO entitles the user to access the cloud based versions of the apps, and if we've been good users and configured our desktops to save to OneDrive then files can be accessed via the cloud on any device. Unless your desktop sync has glitched with an unhelpful error message.
Office 365 is also the name of the suite of enterprise cloud services which, depending on purchased tier, allow businesses to run filestore, mail and even AD systems in the cloud without recourse to any on-premises hardware. Billed on a per-seat basis it also allows use of the cloud Office apps and installation of desktop apps, unless you are on the cheapest tier in which case you are cloud only and it is no install for you bad customer.
Clear as mud isn't it? Don't get me started on Skype for Business which is the offering previously (or in certain backwaters of the admin console still is) known as Lync and an entirely different service to the product also called Skype as marketed to the consumer space. Or the fact that higher tier Office 365 (enterprise) customers get to use Sharepoint services for enterprise cloud storage, despite also having access to the enterprise-grade tier of OneDrive which performs largely the same functions on a basic level, just not in a granular Sharepoint-y way.
All of the above may be wrong as they may have changed stuff since last week.
That's normal for Microsoft -- they long ago perfected the idea of having numerous licensing options that are so difficult to understand that Microsoft has to provide specialist consultants to help you figure them out.
It's almost like they're intentionally muddying the waters, hoping that you'll end up with a more expensive license than you really need.
One of my favourite is that Office "Home" editions excluded Publisher.
Now Publisher is an OK DTP product, great for the Church hymn list, Girl Guides programme, auntie Bessie's birthday card and so on. Home and small office use.
It isn't really a pro product.
So they don't f+++ing include it for home use.
Tossers.
They should have the Darwin Awards for Security and Privacy....
These *&^* think we're all going to cluster in SkyNe....er....Azure willingly.
Think again.
Not everyone is foolish enough to hand over all of their data on a say so of confidentiality.
Don't even get me started on that TimeLine feature they're working on.....
Because I realised Microsoft were going to go all in with subscription only software... my small business - with five operational laptops and two seeking repair when funds allow - is running Linux (KDE) and Libreoffice.
Single supplier lock in is not normally business savvy but, back in the day, Microsoft were really, really good at ensuring there was no other option.
User 1: Office 2019
User 2: Office 365
1. Fill out a spreadsheet with data about 50 states:
User 1: Google's list of US states in table format and pastes into spreadsheet, in under one minute. Gets back to work, meets clients, has lunch, goes home, work day done.
User 2: Goes to perform a dataset on list, oh no, Office 365 is offline. Tries to type by hand, but relying on Microsoft makes you unintelligent, thus lacking knowledge of all US states and abbreviations. Instead, waits for the cloud to resume. Hours pass into call after call. On phone to support, outage expected to last until the end of the day, no work done, boss pissed off, wife leaves due to lack of common-sense and reliance on Microsoft solutions.
2. Make a half-finished presentation perfect:
User 1: Outsources the design to their in-house design team because no business-minded individual has time to fuck around with graphics especially with amateurish output like that shit.
User 2: Whimsically continues to finish presentation file with hours of half-baked inexperienced pre-stamped (and repeated ad nauseum) template fluff that detracts attention from the purpose of the presentation. Response from presentation attendants result is employee getting the sack, due to lack of imagination and recommended employment outlook: a microsoft helpdesk.
3. Polish a resume and start a job search: Let's do this!
User 1: Retrieves template of resume from the web in raw text, uses style to define headings, subheadings etc, adjusts text, 10 minutes pass. Refines text making it personable and unique, 15 minutes pass. Document completed, spelling and grammar checked to remove 'z' from every other English spell checker outside of the US, so they don't look like a complete moron if reaching an interview, 20 minutes pass. "Hey, how are you going over there?" Reaches out to prospective employers via other social media, because no one in their right mind would use LinkedIn after the 2016 breach, receives replies from actual companies expressing actual interest and goes to interview. One hour passes. After interview, receives notification that accepted into role, because their resume isn't a stock-standard template they've seen before.
User 2: Starts to open the document but gets new message notification from LinkedIn about a new opportunity, 10 minutes pass. About to start on 'intelligent workflows', another message received on LinkedIn from old work colleague wanting immediate assistance with job application, 15 minutes pass. Opens Word and gets out pen, Word crashes due to bug, restarts computer, 17 minutes pass. Tries to login, but trust relationship broken between server and client, waits a few minutes while calling IT, 20 minutes pass. Just give me a fucking second will you? (slightly agitated) One hour passes, Office 365 resumed, 'works on intelligent workflow' is done in a few minutes. Looks up and says "Ha, beat you fuck…er…" Office is dark, User 1 has gone home, boss still there, looking on at the exchange. Sacked for incompetence.
In the pre-ribbon days I could readily adjust the menus to fit my working tasks. Stuff that I'd never use between then and the heat death of the universe was taken out of the menus. Stuff that I'd use in conjunction with items in a different menu, or that seemed to me to be more appropriate ( i.e. where I'd expect them to be) would be put there.
The Ribbon pile of excrement makes customising the menus far far more difficult. Oh, and they may call it a ribbon, but it's really just a posh name for a particularly annoying way to organise menus, IMO.
Office Home & Student does not include Outlook. A fairer comparison of prices would be Home & Business, which works out at about 3.5 years instead of the less than 2 years of H&S.
But all comparisons are only valid if you only have one computer. O365 can be installed on up to five machines in the same household (as well as iPads and phones and Android devices) making it far and away the cheaper option.
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What is wrong with the old adage if it ain't broke don't fix it?
Yes Office can be frustrating at times but I much prefer the 'out of the box' versions such as 2019 (still happily using 2010 at home) rather than the constantly updated (read as 'oh FFS where have the developers moved (insert function of choice) to now?' version that is 365.
There is also the fact that some users (ie the Boss AKA Mrs Cynical Pie) struggle to use 365 due to the lack of block colours for the tool bars etc. Office 365 may look all clean and modern and shiny but sometimes old school works.
Great banter in the comments here - I almost fell off my chair.
We try to make cost effective use of modern technology and methods.
Last month I finally managed to remove all traces of M$ dependency from our IT estate- except a natty SQL Server I use for prototyping nibbles of code for clients.
Anyone else had much joy with onlyoffice? - I got community edition running using a freenas appliance , using a bhyve VM and ubuntu with MAMP stack, integrated with a nextcloud installation running in a jail on Freenas - - Sound complex? maybe to install - but works pretty well once in. SSL is still a bind - but so it should be -
Some features of onlyoffice are interesting - such as lack of ISO Date formatting in spreadsheets - but then you realise you can configure the cell as a text data type etc - - but for a quick get up and go browser based office suite it is pretty good
(we switched to Chronos for user devices - cheaper and easier to maintain than some)
Having the might of M$ for scale and security is more a a piece of mind. With skills and research, the lesser known kit is flexible and importantly - controllable - once installed - it is possible to close the door on the never ending upgrade path. And minmised downtime.
Right - strong coffee for next chapter - may throwing a 3-D ball for that 3-D dog
It was forked from OpenOffice.org before THAT forked into OpenOffice (Apache) and LibreOffice. It's commercial and includes improvements from both nowadays.
It has some usage improvements closer to other Mac apps. My own criticism of the word processor part I already mentioned for LibreOffice (the crappy style handling workflows and the internal handling of fonts) remain, though.
Really, on a scale from 1 to 10, the style handling of Word is at -8, LibreOffice/NeoOffice writer is at -10. Nisus Writer is a very solid +9, Mellel +6, the latter just because it has a steeper learning curve. From a functionality viewpoint, Mellel's and LibreOffice's style handling are the most powerful, but Mellel is much much more easy and reliable. Libre's styles could even be much more powerful than Mellel. I wouldn't know, because it's such a pain to use.
The underlying notion of a company pitting one of its products against another is actually quite imaginative, though only if a sensible choice is made. Setting my Office 2000 suite purchased in 1999 against 2019's Office 365, for example, would be silly because even a cursory examination would determine that Office 365 is for the plebs. A more interesting comparison would be between Windows 7 and Windows 10. Of course, if you were a company clever enough to produce, let's say, a Flight Simulator and a Train simulator, a game-play comparison between those two would be even more illuminating. But Microsoft is much too stupid to be that kind of company so it's probably best not to bother at all.
From 2013 onwards they've removed a lot of document authoring features from the standalone that are only available via the subscription. Even though I need them to increase my productivity, I'd rather cut off a limb than pay them a subscription - which is essentially protection money.
After mopping up from an upgrade from win 7 to 10, I have decided I am going to live long enough to see microsoft either go kaput or be swallowed up by another company. Their behaviour over the last 5-10 years gives me hope it will be sooner rather than later...
"I have decided I am going to live long enough to see microsoft either go kaput or be swallowed up by another company. Their behaviour over the last 5-10 years gives me hope it will be sooner rather than later..."
I strongly suggest you try to survive a bit longer than those 5-10 years, it is much more fun if you can come back to that grave to dance on it every year for a couple of years.
Alas, while I do appreciate your sentiments (I was around when Microsoft were ruthlessly crushing anyone and everyone who dared to even attempt to compete) Microsoft are not dying out making record amounts of money via the cloud.
However, they are losing traction on the desktop and Office at long last and their monopoly cracking. Open source was the only way to escape Microsoft's clutches and break the monopoly. And it is. Sure, lots of Microsoft loyalists and ignorant - in the literal sense as in just do not know - Windows users but now there are alternatives to Windows and Office that Microsoft cannot crush.
And I'm running them! Yay.
It seems that people who drive cars and trucks are not wearing out the tires fast enough, this quarter we saw our profits flatline. So we are developing a new tire stategay with Ford, Fiat and General Motors where the tires during the lease are free to replace under normal wear but the person must pay $10 per month to get tire assurance. This will help us get re-offuring income like the iTunes radio subscription, NetFlix or Sirius Satellite radio.
I promise next quarter our profits will not be flat. We will find new and creative ways to get more profit from these profit centers.
Sincerely,
Money Hungry CEO #495
Steve Jobs was right. They have no taste. In a big way.
Everything on this "Twins" page is tasteless. And I mean everything. The text, the videos, the laughable features, how the links are embedded, the whole concept of saying one of the own products is shit, here'a the nearly identical product that's gold ... Everything.
Wait, Office 2019?
We only installed Office 2016 at home not long ago. It does everything we want it to do, so there is no sane reason to switch to a newer version. There are no fancy new features that we're desperately waiting for Microsoft to add ...
Given the frequency that Office is actually used in our house, a subscription model such as Office 365 makes no sense at all.
Yah, but people who want good smart and free software (thanks for keeping it up) use LibreOffice. Compatible and very opened to users. actually, there is no need in any M$ related Office software anymore as LibreOffice exists. I usually give small donation. We need to support our free world.
If 90 % of MS office users on use only 10% of MS Office. The place that I work, we replace computers every 8 years. If you were to purchase a copy of Office 365, it would cost approx. $10.per month or $120 or over 8 years $960. Which at the current price of MS Office Home and Business is 3 copies. This cloud crap is just giving Microsoft and continuing stream of revenue.
Microsoft have always tried to badger its competition, from MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 up to Windows 10 and Office365. It's bizarre that its putting its two top apps against each other. Personally, I prefer on-premises solutions. You know where your data is and if the hardware breaks you need to fix it. That's a Pro and a Con for on Premises.
I think Microsoft should split up - its got its hands into too many things - Network Operating Systems / Desktop Operating Systems / Office-Productivity Suites / Games machines to name a few. Microsoft should concentrate on Operating Systems, for network and desktop devices, hive off Office to someone else, give the games to Sony or someone, that way they can concentrate on building an operating system that does not need patched 2 weeks after being released.
In the long run, MS won't do any of this. They will drop everything that is on the desktop and put everything on the cloud, the only software which will reside on your desktop device is a simple application which makes a connection to the MS Cloud as soon as the hardware starts, and everything you do is done on the cloud and all applications are installed there also.
Is this good for data security? Maybe - Maybe not. It's also bad for your personal data - as the owner of your data - you will have no direct access to it, and even if you delete files, they will still be there somewhere and someone will be able to access your personal data - which you have deleted.
I don't think so. Give me on-premises all the time, a little bit more hassle but your data is exactly where it should be and not in the hands of some overseas conglomerate.
Rant over.
Whenever MS wants to sell me on an Office 365 subscription, it reminds me of that scene in "RoboCop": "I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209 - renovation program, spare parts for twenty-five years... Who cares if it worked or not?"
But, hey, when Word pumps my 100 page/50k word document full of lead, I'm sure it's just a glitch.
Lets just call it Office 183 as as you will lose 182 days in lost productivity to this complete backward step in an office program.
The 1 and only time saving improvement over Office 2013 is the attachment function in Outlook where you get a list of you most recently used documents.
Every fucking thing else is a complete waste of my fucking time. and to make things worse after 6 months of getting use to losing time on an hourly basis they push an update out that fucking changes the look and changes the location of buttons. Like WTF microsoft. I should fucking sue you for false advertising and changing what i didnt ask to be fucking changed.
Who did you ask when you say you asked users and had users test office 365... a bunch of fucking 3, 5, 9 year olds that have never used any software before, and fed them red lollies and one guys asking them do you want more, and at the same time the developers are asking if this new feature will work.. the fricken kids are just going yeah yeah yeah yeah to more fricken lollies you bunch of tools microsoft.
Please someone from Microsoft reply to me so we can have an adult conversation and tell me how the fuck o get office 365 to act like, work like, behave like office 2013 and not waste my fucking time.. as now since this last fucking update you cunts every time any form of fucking pop up window opens like save etc it opens on the 2nd screen. This wasn't fucking doing this last week.....
Have you ever heard of the saying "if it ain't broke don't try to fix it" well you tried and failed miserably
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