Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline Microsoft has released what could be the penultimate perpetual licensed version of Office. A device running Office LTSC 2024 need never be attached to the outside world... Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 2024 was made available on September 16, drowned out by the company's Copilot "innovations". Microsoft would …
"In addition to dropping Publisher, Teams is also not preinstalled with Office LTSC 2024, and the Publish to Power BI feature has been stripped from Excel. ActiveX controls are also disabled by default, although administrators can re-enable them if necessary."
so, a better Office than Office... sounds good.
Just one question, Nadella : have you planned on shutting down Borkzilla in five years ? No ? Then why is your Long Term limited to five years ? Are you planning on leaving before that and you won't care any more ?
Your customers, the ones who pay for your product, definitely plan to be there in five years and long after. It is exhausting to continually read that software companies are the ones who decide how long their software is supposed to be used. It's not like that. You're a multi-billion dollar company. You put out a critical piece of business software, and YOU FUCKING SUPPORT IT UNTIL BUSINESS DOESN'T NEED IT ANYMORE.
That should be enshrined in law.
For crying out loud, it's just a fucking word processor with a bunch of generic tools attached, i.e. nothing that can't be found elsewhere.
And don't whine about 'needing support'. If the kind of support is the kind of support MS offers you really don't need support.
So get a grip, you corporate drones, cut yourselves free from the drugs and get a life.
It's just generic software with a designer label stamped on it. Your business, and you, REALLY can live without the stamp.
> Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline
We are not offline. We just want to keep using the software when *Microsoft is offline*.
Though its weird that Microsoft markets it for offline deployment when it still has online-only DRM in the "default" install.
When we are in places that do not have a reliable mobile service and do not want to pay through the nose for satellite comms.
it might come to a shock to MS employees (or the BORG) that there are places like that and will most likely never have decent mobile comms. I own a bit of woodland around 80 miles from Central London. I could get a mobile signal if... if I climbed to the top of a tree otherwise, 1 bar of 3G is a good day, until 3G is switched off. Long may they remain.
FSCK MS.
I'll acknowledge that some jobs, in some places, require features specific to MS Office. Those people are in the minority.
After a decade or more I can't see giving Microsoft any more of my money. For the vast majority of home or business related tasks LibreOffice is more than capable.
And free.
And can even save your work in MS Office formats.
(This week I find myself using a shiny new Windows laptop, and cannot grasp why the Start menu is now located in the middle of the bottom task bar, and not on the left.)
I do interact with people who use Word. Documents laid out with tabs and such like nonsense. No wonder they don't render properly. There's every chance they wouldn't render properly in a different version of Word. Or on a different version of WIndows. Or with different fonts available. Or, who knows, with different video H/W?
And anyone who thinks it's acceptable to use Word as a form to be filled in is probably ... let's think of a suitable epithet ... a Windows user who doesn't know any better.
I interacted with COMPANIES (Huawei and Nokia, technical training, as a contractor) that used MS Office.
Premade PowerPoint presententations that I had to modify (for example, translate, reshufle, merge or expand) did not render properly in libre. And I was not paid to correct formatting. And any kind of animation/ timing stuff wouldnot work.
Excel forms for expenses reinbursement, time keeping and grading of participants (using whatever formulae/macros behind the scenes) did not work properly in libre.
Word documents that I had to modify, or example supplementary documents and/or exams ((by translating, correcting, amplifying or merging) did not work/render correctly in libre, and I was not paid to correct formating.
easier, faster, cheaper, and less responsability/liability if something broke if I used MS Office , so that is what I did.
When I was teaching at the university before that, then yes, every freacking presentation, exam, paper and grade spreadsheet done by me, was done with (at the time) OpenOffice...
Anecdotal, I do know, but using libre to interact with the msoffice world is not the bed of roses some zealots claim it to be, except in the most trivial cases
"And anyone who thinks it's acceptable to use Word as a form to be filled in is probably ... let's think of a suitable epithet ... a Windows user who doesn't know any better."
I finally convinced my city to cease with putting out stuff in Word format and use .pdf instead. The argument I used was if somebody changed a document in a fairly small way that changed how it would be interpreted by a court, would they spot it? Where they running a comparison of the returned document with the original? What were the controls to prevent a doctored document from being substituted? There's also the issue of it requiring people getting the forms to have Word installed, which can be expensive and a .pdf reader being free.
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Well, if it's the likes of Girl Guiding, what I think they are really doing is emailing a paper form, which they expect their leaders/or the kids' parents to print out and fill in by hand. As they would have done a decade or two ago. Literally writing a paper form in WORD So they create a document with tables. And then attach it to an email- sometimes even saved as a PDF.
Formatting with tabs is nonsense? I've been doing that since WordPerfect was the big dog in documents, if not before. (I don't remember for sure that WordStar did that, but I'm pretty sure it did.) I haven't used Open Office or Libre Office for a while, but I thought they did that too.
Some of us remember the old mechanical typewriters which had a physical tab bar along which you could slide several tab stops to where you wanted them, the ensemble completed by a "Tab" key (short for Table or Tabular, to taste) to move the carriage+paper along to the next stop. You could tell where the accountants sat - the Tab and 0 keys were worn bare.
When wordprocessors came along, followed presently by proportional fonts, for 20 years or so the Tab character remained the only practical way to lay out tables.
Then WYSIWYG and onscreen windows and forms appeared, and two things happened:
1) In-page tables with a grid of cells.
2) Use of the Tab key to move the caret along to the next GUI widget.
Use of Tab stops and pressing the Tab key to enter a Tab character when typing a document remained baked in.
Then, 3) HTML abandoned Tab characters as filthy white space. The Tab key became solely a navigation aid for web forms. Initially there was a <tab> element you could insert in the paragraph of text, but even that was abandoned around HTML 3. Cue chaos for the poor sods trying to export tabbed documents as HTML.
Next up, document formats in XML. Tab stops now coded as the dev pleases: open some document in a text editor and see if you can figure it.
As far as I know, the ONLY wordprocessor to push that lead insanely far and take the Tab key to "smart" jumps of the caret to fuck knows where, so that attempts to insert a normal Tab character in the old-fashioned way result in chaos, is MS Word. All the others remain sane (caveat: never played with a Mac). I frequently find that copy-pasting the character is the quickest way to tidy a layout.
I've used LibreOffice for years. It seems to cope well enough with doc files. I send pdf files generated by LibreOffice to customers if they are 'digital only', and they seem comfortable with them. By default customers get paper invoices.
If MS gave a toss about their customers, which I doubt, they would produce a secure shell for W7 to work in on any mobo and sell this sort of standalone software for users who wanted it.
Standalone, no subs, W7-style, no reliance on MS servers, no AI, no use of the cloud. Hell, that's worth paying proper money for.
Looking ahead, AI, subscription and cloud-dependencies are so bad, we need a standalone, old skool option for basic computing. That might be a version of Linux, it might be a Pi PC, or it might be a completely new machine. MS have gone past the event horizon for utility. They are selling what they want us to buy, not what we want to buy. We need to go back to an earlier, simpler model.
We had a problem in LO with the WORD forms that Mrs 6 gets from Girl Guiding for their various bits of bureaucracy*.
When edited to add the information, and saved, and then later opened in LO the table were just weird. In effect the edited table appeared as a duplicate on top of the original table, slightly displaced, so that the original bits of text (headings etc.) were i "double vision". As if the edited version was in a different duplicate layer in the manner of a graphics editor.
*I get annoyed by their stuff at the best of times, but t'm just a bloke. It's not for me to mansplain to GG that their paperwork is by and large awful. There's no good reason to send their leaders and Brown Owls forms that are difficult or impossible to fill out on the screen. That this is the 21st C and people don't want to print them out and fill them in by hand any more </rant>
"We had a problem in LO with the WORD forms that Mrs 6 gets from Girl Guiding for their various bits of bureaucracy*."
Why would it be impossible for those bits of (virtual) paper to be in .pdf? Do they want everybody making changes other than filling in the blanks?
The fix could be to continue using LO and sending back .pdf when completed if that sorts the dog's breakfast formatting issues.
Sometimes they do. The problem with the PDF forms they send out is that they aren't at all editable, i.e as in typing stuff into the spaces where you are meant to type stuff.They're effectively images of documents, not onscreen/online forms. As noted, they seem to be written with the mindset of sending a printed paper form through the e-post.
"They're effectively images of documents, not onscreen/online forms."
Yeah, I can see that. A lot of what they do is likely done by volunteers and they might not be that savvy with creating PDF forms. The thing is that a lot of kids in school will know how and just say "well, duh, that's easy". Sound's like volunteering to me!
I've been pushing the city council to do a deal with the high school to get students in for school credit to keep the city web site up to day and do a lot of the back end office stuff. I think the biggest issue is they'd have to be employees to be covered under insurance and that's a huge problem.
"Dear Girl Guides Administrator,
I have filled out your document and have returned it to you as a computer file created by SpeedCalc on a Commodore 64, saved to a cassette data tape (enclosed). I hope you find it just as useful and convenient as I found the Microsoft Excel data file attached in your email to me.
Sincerely,
Tommy Smythe"
> There's no good reason to send their leaders and Brown Owls forms that are difficult or impossible to fill out on the screen. That this is the 21st C and people don't want to print them out and fill them in by hand any more </rant>
The 21st C is part of the problem: it used to be that a simple web-page was perfect for this kind of simple form. Then the 21st C came along and it became obligatory to have encryption, Captchas, Wordpress etc etc that regular people such as the GG org can't cope any more. Just saying.
"Then the 21st C came along and it became obligatory to have encryption, Captchas, Wordpress etc etc that regular people such as the GG org can't cope any more. Just saying."
People Think that those things are obligatory. It's easy enough for a pdf form to be downloaded and mailed back to a designated email address without needing encryption. It might be good enough for things such as permissions forms that the parent prints it out, fills in the information and applies a signature on the bottom that the child will take back with them to go on the trip/whatever. That's how it was done when I was in school. No form, no trip so we made sure it got done since we wanted to go to the zoo, camping, etc.
"I'll acknowledge that some jobs, in some places, require features specific to MS Office."
That's the same problem as companies that create web apps that only work with a specific browser and get borked when the publisher of that browser decides to make changes. Creating a software specific workflow should come with a workaround if that functionality gets stripped in future. M$ can also move more esoteric functionality to a different distribution and triple the licensing if they get wind that a large company has boxed themselves in.
Some software that I found useful has gone by the wayside over the years and other packages have become too expensive for as little I use them as my needs change. These lessons have made me more cautious about going really deep with one app that has a particular feature exclusively. I refer people to the XKCD chart: "https://xkcd.com/1205/" and also factor in whether reliance on a sole supplier is just asking for trouble.
Microsoft's Cloud obsession seems to be a curse. I got an email today from someone preparing a talk for tomorrow night saying
I have the same problem putting my power point onto a memory stick - all seems to be linked to files going automatically to Cloud. This means that I will have to use my own laptop. [i.e. as opposed to the one in the meeting room].
I'm not sure what he means but the worst case scenario could be that, deprived of an internet connection, his laptop might not work either.
I suspect that that PowerPoint file has Information Rights Management applied to it.
As far as I can tell the functionality is to be a horrendous pain in the arse for the person trying to get work done, you can't even share your screen and show the presentation to someone as the window is blacked out. Corporate bosses go mad over it as it means their employees are safely ensconced in their silos.
MS Orifice kept screwing up some formatting in my latest novel.
LO did the job perfectly. The printer reported to me that Orifice gives them more problems than he can count on both hands and feet when you have documents > 50 pages or 10 separate chapters. His staff often have to save the docs as Office 2003 files (.doc not .docx) and then build the book again. My 450 page novel given to him as 46 open doc files gave him almost zero problems.
FU MS and FU Orifice.
including cloud storage
Cloud storage should be illegal the way it is implemented.
I never had so many questions from friends "can you help me out find my files? They are gone!!!".
I check their computer, there are like 5-10 cloud accounts.
What is the filename? "I can't remember". Where did you save it? "I just clicked save"
Can you show me? "Yeah sure"
File is saved to this account under Recipes. "I don't remember creating that? Why this system keeps messing with my files!"
Where do you want this file to go? "I don't know!"
Is the file important to you? "Yes!"
Okay let me see which account your Documents folder is syncing to... "What does it mean?"
It means files are being also saved to a remote computer, so in case your laptop dies you can recover them... "Is that computer constantly turned on?"
Yes, so you can download the files whenever you need. "That's not green, is it?"
Well... ok it is this account and the file is moved, it is in Documents and it is backed up. "Thank you!"
5 days later
"Hey, I cannot find my document in Recipes folder!!! Can you help???"
The variant I encounter a lot with 365.
Attempt to open document in My Documents and get an error because I’ve been logged out of Onedrive/Sharepoint…
A bit later, try to save document to My Documents and it’s lost the network connection or the cloud service is being unresponsive, because clearly Onedrive can’t cache locally and save remotely later…
"What is the filename? "I can't remember". Where did you save it? "I just clicked save""
Here's another set of skills that should be taught in school, organization. A person I know took over a company that his dad started to track school athletes and sport teams. The original version was all hard copy that was carefully thought out so information was easy to find, update and track. The software version started as a close copy of the paper version and was an option at first so people could transition over time as they could get budget approvals. Eventually the paper version was discontinued and the software version had online functionality that was optional until getting online was ubiquitous and then many things went to server based, phone apps, etc. Other companies did competing products, but they didn't have origins that started from a tangible system so they weren't always intuitive to use.
I've got loads and loads of photos that I've made for clients and also for personal projects. Some things I photograph thinking maybe someday I'll license the images. It's super important that I have a clear way of organizing the images even though they're indexed in Adobe Lightroom with basic keywording. I might decide to shift to a new catalog program and can't export the metadata from Lightroom to the new program. My LR catalog might go poof. If I look on my hard drive, I can follow a logical set of nestings to come up with travel photos from Albuquerque, NM or Inverness, Scotland. I can find images of big cats without the catalog application. The workshop is getting more and more organized since I keep adding more and more stuff through going to estate sales. It's great to never have to buy sheet metal screws at the hardware store ever again only if I can find the ones I have. Adam Savage is my savior. He's fighting the same battle I am.
Personally I think OnlyOffice does a better job with compatibility than LibreOffice.
It also doesn't carry the same baggage. As an example, my colleagues know the name LibreOffice and remember how it was 10+ years ago, good luck getting that kind of person to give it a fair shake.
OnlyOffice has a better UI than LibreOffice, but compatibility is still meh. About 90% of my Excel charts display correctly in LibreOffice and maybe 75% in OnlyOffice. (Note: anything less than 99.9% means it can't be used in a work environment, unless everyone uses the same Office suite)
"As an example, my colleagues know the name LibreOffice and remember how it was 10+ years ago, good luck getting that kind of person to give it a fair shake."
Which is selective memory since I can recall plenty of M$ screwups over the last decade. Oh, let's make the desktop environment look just like a phone interface designed by Fisher-Price.
"People will be setting back the CMOS clocks in their PCs to keep LTSC Office running."
There's a patch that fools it into thinking it's always the same date you choose. The downside is having to remember to make changes if you are used to just calling the current date and time to save effort.
Enough already. It's going back in the shop tomorrow to put a real OS on. Gaming computer my aяse /s:
a. Hard drive at 100% after last forced update.
b. On boot takes ages to the desktop. Screen goes black on clicking on a App.
c. The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000001a (0x0000000000000403, 0xfffffa00f29f4de8, 0x810000009c793867, 0xfffffa00f2a297d0).
d. Faulting application name: svchost.exe_AppXSvc, version: 10.0.19041.4355, time stamp: 0x9ce47784
e. The Windows Update service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.
f. Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x8007000D: 2024-09 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 22H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5043064).
g. Some update files are missing or have problems. We'll try to download the update again later. Error code: (0x8007000d)
h. Troubleshooter couldn't identify the problem 0x80070483
>"A device running Office LTSC 2024 need never be attached to the outside world..."
A device running MsOffice 2003 (can be a Win11 machine like this one) need never be attached to the outside world. I removed the Ethernet and WiFi on the main XP writing machine. This Win11 toy coulda, but I didn't let it call-out.
It helps if you saved the Office Service Packs before MS shut-down that server. The only 'essential' update, DOCX Converter, can be found elsewhere (and side-loaded if you prefer).
There IS a persistent "error" in WinUpDate, pissing about missing Office update. I can ignore that.
I would say i even t has achieved feature-parity with 15 year-old versions of Office.
And now that Publisher is gonna die Scribus is a really good alternative. The biggest problem is Excel, people in business use the thing so darn much that is what really keeps them buying Office.
When it comes to Word replacements depending on what you want, there is some alternatives.
A shame Abiword is mostly dead, I liked it even if it became Linux only.
As far back as I can remember MS seem to have wanted to kill Publisher. Mostly by omitting it from the versions of Office where it was most likely to have been wanted.
It wasn't a pro quality desk top publishing programme, so they restricted it to the Pro/corporate versions of Office.
It is perfect for SOHO and amateur use, Create a menu for a neighbourhood restaurant, a handout for a church service, a price list for a coffee shop or create a little kid's party invitations and it's all you could want.
So they omitted it from those home and student versions. It never made sense unless they just hated selling it- maybe because it didn't really earn them any revenue. Yet they include Powerpoint- just what the Home user needs most(?)
Most of the problems with wp or spreadsheet application interworking seem to be based on the fact that they are trying to do lots of things that aren't really wp or spreadsheet. Maybe what we need are a slew of small easily maintained and performant tools - eg a form filler - all nicely self contained without the incredible functionality that everyone seems to want to bung into every app.
Many industries have requirements to keep their data secure. I have background in aerospace where everything seems to be able to be used for launching nuclear weapons so we had to keep everything secure. Using cloud services was definitely out as there is no way to audit the security with something like AWS, iCloud or any other service. If Sony Entertainment is using a cloud service that gets hacked, it can mean all of their contracts, release dates and highly immoral business plans could be outed for handsome pay offs either as ransom or to other parties that would be very interested. Sony is better off with their own storage and internal network. If they can't do that in-house, they should immediately retrieve the short sword and finish themselves off.
I don't trust any of them even though my missives are hardly of great interest. It's none of their business what's in my spreadsheet that I use to analyze my budget for the next year. I do all of my accounting off-line as well. Who knows who those companies are sharing the data with or even just that there is data to be shared (and subpoenaed).
I’m not entirely sure what happened to me. I used to be a 365 family account owner but quit about a year ago. Yet my office install hasn’t even made a complaint yet. My windows 365 login icon disappeared from top right but that’s the only change I have noticed.
I moved my windows machine to a local account and forewalled it. The office install hasn’t even there just says. “Your account has expired” with an OK button. But nothing. Has changed functionally speaking.
Not entirely sure what’s going on but I’m reminded of that Friends episode called “the one with the free porn cable channel”
Regardless of what my workplace chooses to do, I will not rent a word processor.
Or, indeed, any major piece of software.
Last time I changed my laptop and had to reinstall everything was a few years ago and I noticed that pretty much everything I installed was open-source or freeware, worked just fine offline, and didn't care about accounts or nonsense.
The only exception was, I think, VMWare Workstation Pro, but even that I wouldn't bother with nowadays.
Browsers, VLC, Shotcut, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Eclipse (deliberately an older version), ...
I think that the next time, it might not even be Windows as I don't want to use Microsoft cloud accounts for the simple purpose of GETTING INTO MY OWN MACHINE. I ran a Slackware desktop for 10+ years without issue.
I've moved server things off to Raspberry Pi's. My daily stuff (including hobbyist programming) is entirely cross-platform. And I have a Steam Deck which is fast proving that even going "the long way around", gaming on Linux is perfectly viable, and potentially even better, now. Hilariously I cannot get some old games to work on modern Windows at all, but on Deck they "just work".
The push towards subscription-only has basically just pushed me out of those products. I can't say I'm lacking anything by doing so.
In about 5-10 years you will have no choice but to be online, and then I guarantee *something* malicious will happen. Either MS will start ramping up prices, or the cloud services themselves will start being targetted.
It is ridiculous that in 2024 we actually have to have a full global cloud operational in order for you to get on your computer and edit a textfile for most people. It's going to go horribly wrong. And when it does, I'm not sure I'll care.
From the linked MS page: The most significant difference between Office 2016 and Office LTSC 2024 is the shift in installation technology from Windows Installer (MSI) to Click-to-Run.
Perhaps they didn't quite mean what they wrote but that would suggest there is no real need to stop using 2016.
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