Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface Microsoft is quietly testing the waters with an ad-supported version of its Office suite. On offer are desktop versions – Windows-only by the looks of things – of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The ad-supported, free version only shows up for a subset of users. Those who are offered the ad-supported versions will notice all …
"Now the guy's got Microsoft as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Microsoft. Trouble with Outlook, downloads, Edge, he can call Microsoft. But now the guy's gotta come up with Microsoft's money every month no matter what. Business bad? Screw you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Screw you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning huh? Screw you, pay me."
I have no problem if ads are used to support a free version.
However, the second I pay for something - anything - then I require zero ads. (Looks at various streaming platforms and TV providers).
I still can't believe how people willing pay to watch Sky Adverts.
> I have no problem if ads are used to support a free version.
I do. People shouldn't be using a defective product. They should switch to LibreOffice or other open alternatives.
Advertisement is theft. Theft of your attention, your privacy, of your security, of your bandwidth, your CPU cycles and thus electricity, your peace of mind.
A pox upon it!
> Fascist much?
Saying people shouldn't use defective products is "fascist"? I thought fascism was more a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
But what do I know, eh? My washing machine broke down yesterday and the repairman told me not to use it until he got the new heating element ordered and fitted. If only I'd known what you know, I'd have kicked him out on his fascist arse!
Don't hold your breath while money is still on the table for Microsoft to grab.
Here's one scenario for your consideration. Microsoft creates another tier which is ad-supported and costs about what you pay now for the ad-free minus maybe a few most-wanted functions (so as Office remain as usable as possible while still making you wish to pay more). The new ad-free will contain all functions and will cost 25% to 50% more. There it is, I solved it for you. Other companies did it before so why Microsoft would not do it.
Video ads will be incredibly distracting whilst typing, and line spacing is one feature I always make use of, as the default line spacing is really not to my liking.
Thankfully, I get a copy through work, so won't have to resort to sticking gaffer tape down the left hand side of my screen to block the ads...
> Pi Hole is your friend. I don't know if it would kill Microsoft ads out of the box, but certainly could be configured thus.
Depends on how they implemented it. All PiHole does is return 0.0.0.0 as the IP address for any domain on its list of domains to block. Normal systems look at that response and go "ok, I guess that must have been a user error in the domain, no biggie, let's just go to the next thing on my list of stuff to do".
So if these ads are implemented to deal with that properly then it may be fine and you'd see nothing. But if they implemented it where if ads don't display, the software refuses to work (think: the app keeps internal record of how many ads it's served you and if you don't meet a min-bar, the app refuses to work), well, that's a different matter.
Again, depending on how they implement it, it may put this product in a CPU death loop where every time it gets a 0.0.0.0 response for domain resolution, it immediately tries the next domain to pull instead of backing off. This could lead to your CPU maxing out because of the tight loop...
But that doesn't solve the problem of it only allowing you to save to OneDrive. You still can't save to your own machine with this edition as planned.
Surely the saving only to Onedrive restriction would be trivial to get around. Just save to Onedrive then open Onedrive from your PC and download the document locally?
But then I guess anyone who is using an ad supported version of MS Office is also probably not the most technically minded and calls their computer the 'hard drive'
This is the biggest numpty of these versions. You can't double click on a *.docx file and open it. An act trained into people since the earliest days of computing. Double click a docx and the OS does not know what to do.
Instead the user has to open the web browser, login to Hotmail, locate Word, then Open the file from OneDrive. That's a very long winded way round. And slow.
So many simple processes seem to get replaced with multiple complex clicks now in the name of "progress".
I still have not found a really good replacement for OLD MS 'Excess' (Access), so whatever the latest has morphed into ia stil not really in Libre Office last I checked.
If I had a mind to do so I'd write one.
Still when I do DB stuff it's generally with a command line thing like psql or within a web site's server-side code.
But yeah. Libre Office. Works exactly as I need it to.
If you want a free version of office with fewer features, just use LibreOffice.
It works great, compatibility is generally OK and it's ad-free to boot!
I'm not sure what demographic would choose to use an ad-infested version of MSOffice that can only save to OneDrive instead of LO, but it can't be too big.
> I'm not sure what demographic would choose to use an ad-infested version of MSOffice that can only save to OneDrive instead of LO, but it can't be too big.
You'd be surprised. I know I am continually surprised at the amount of abuse people allow themselves to be subjected to when it comes to advertisement.
MSO is what they know. It has the buttons where their users have been trained to look for the buttons. People _HATE_ change, even if it's just moving a button 20 pixels to the left. (Remember the amount of whining emanated - and continues to emanate - from some folks because Firefox made a change to its UI a while back?)
Things need to be broken the same way they are broken in MSO for people to consider the software 'working' - as contradictory as this may sound. MSFT isn't even compatible with its own Office Open XML spec. LibreOffice is more compatible (with higher fidelity) than Office itself. This is by design: it lets them cripple things deliberately to keep people on their software. People still consider MS Office as the 'standard' and even though it may be broken, people expect the thing to be broken in the same way MSO is broken.
It's a python-esque (the serpent kind, not the language) approach: every time the user exhales, constrict a little tighter, ratchet the pressure up and never unsqueeze, because ... money.
One of my clients had a problem with their Foreign Exchange spreadsheet, which they update religiously on a daily basis. I was asked to have a look at the problem and I couldn't believe that it wasn't calculating cells correctly. It was only when I realised that it had been saved and opened in the above mode that I twigged. I just don't know how Microsoft do it (screw things up) sometimes.
Oh but no... their MBA's have told them that people LOOOOVE ads, and they also LOOOVE missing functionality, and LOOOOOVE new versions of windows. They even made a presentation about it where they sliced and diced the data just so to even provide 'evidence' of it ("99% of the users we interviewed and retained for this sample said they wanted more ads, the remaining 1% were mutes who could actually say it because they're mute, but they indicated the same by pointing at the words 'we love it and want more' written on a blank piece of paper with out any other choice available to them").
I mean, why else would they shove those down everyone's throat? It must be because they are convinced people love that type of change.
"Oh but no... their MBA's have told them that people LOOOOVE ads,"
I sometimes think I often have a contrarian world view due to not having watched regular TV or listened to radio for a couple of decades. I don't get bombarded as much by the ads telling me how white my shirts should be and how he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me.
Most of this evening has been taken up with doing things in the kitchen. They'll be a load of really good apple butter all jarred up and cooled come morning. Plenty of other stuff has been prepped for more culinary activities this week. I'm trying to find a dewar flask I can use to fetch some liquid Nitrogen. I chopped up several onions and would have loved to quick freeze the pieces so I could move on to bagging them up more quickly. Putting the bits on trays to put in the freezer makes the whole fridge smell like onions. Given what is aired on TV these days, I'd rather watch onion bits freezing in LN2.
'Convenience' everything shitty about the enshitified internet can be summed up in the single word.
People are lazy, people don't care about their privacy or security until the shit hits the fan and affects them personally. I literally had some one say to me yesterday that they didn't care about apple removing encryption from icloud in the UK because it didn't affect them.
They're unable or unwilling to look beyond the end of their nose, they cannot see the bigger picture and will happily trot along in their ignorance until they're targeted and hacked/scammed by fraudsters... I'm no longer surprised why people continue to use social media, I've warned people who still use shitter that I will cut them out of my life because I want nothing to do with people who support nazi owned platforms and propaganda machines. The result... I cut them out of my life.
But I learned about 13yrs ago, that people are lazy and only care about their personal convenience when I left facebook in late 20011... I made sure my friends had my contact details, I told them I would be on places like telegram & signal... The number of people who started using those apps to stay in touch... was zero. But they always complained 'but you're not on facebook' to justify their own selfish ignorance.
The result... I stopped making an effort with people who refuse to make any... people I'd known since I was 16 are now dead to me almost 30yrs later... I mourned the loss until I realised who they really were and what they really thought of me to put their own convenience above friendship of that long. I moved on, made new friends... Moved to G+ when that was good (zero ads but still data harvesting), moved onto Mastodon after that was shut down.
Ironically, I have more interaction on masto than I ever did anywhere else.
"If you want a free version of office with fewer features, just use LibreOffice."
I don't run into an issue with "fewer features". Plenty of "features" in M$ Office are only applicable to certain needs and with the writing of things nobody will read being handled by AI, we won't be needing them at all in the future anyway. It's not like the world has a shortage of office apps.
Dumped MS Office about 10yrs ago for personal stuff, and ashamed to admit I started using google docs for non work related stuff. Then I switched to libreoffice a few years ago and haven't looked back. I only use writer and calc for letters and budgets related top my home.
Isn't this kind of what the online hotmail \ outlook.com version does?
That "free" version is tied to the cloud and stores in OneDrive.com (so they can sell your more storage).
What is a bigger headache for your Grandma is that old document your Grandpa wrote that she now wants to open on her new laptop. *.docx won't be associated to anything and no way she'll work out how to upload it to OneDrive.
I don't understand why Microsoft has to cling so hard to desktop Word \ Excel. Surely this cut down advert based version was a reason to allow that home user simple document creation on the home PC.
So now, you buy your new computer, and there is NO WAY to actually write a letter any more unless you are online. And this is Progress from the earliest application that the PC ran - the wordprocessor.
1. go online, preferably using the wireless in the county library. (Free. Good luck tracking users.)
2. download Firefox (other browsers are available) and make it the default.
3. reboot to clear old associations.
4. go back online and download LibreOffice.
5. log out or reboot again. use LO offline. You're golden.
Alternatively... borrow computer from county library, download LO to USB stick, run antimalware to ensure that USB stick is clean, install LO on new computer, never having gone online even once on new machine.
Alternatively, install Ubuntu on Grandma's machine. Make sure that LO is installed.
Alternatively, buy Grandma a Mac. Macs ship with, amongst other things, Pages and _two_ text editors. LO is available for Macs.
Alternatively, buy Grandma an iPad. IPads ship with Pages and a text editor. LO is NOT available for iPads.
I gave my 93-year-old mother an iPad. I didn't have to buy one, it was an older one which I had replaced with a newer one. Her laptop has been gathering dust for at least 18 months now, while she used the iPad daily. The iPad will be replaced by a new M2 iPad Air next month. The laptop will be reformatted and Ubuntu will be installed. The old iPad will be deployed as a portable TV; thanks to the app from her cableco, she can stream everything the cableco provides directly to the iPad; the main problem is that the screen is a bit small. Hence the laptop, the cableco will stream to Linux and the laptop has an 16" display. She would use the iPad for computer stuff and the laptop as a mobile TV.
"Alternatively, buy Grandma a Mac."
An older Mac without the storage soldered to the board and upgradable RAM. With the legacy patcher, many old boxes can run the latest OS. So it's not blazing fast. What does grandma need with speed? A 2012-2018 Mini is small and suitable for most things one might want to do at home. My 2014 iMac 27" Retina was bought for $25 (cracked glass, but display is fine). I'm running a very unsupported MacOS Sonoma with no issues.
"What does grandma need with speed?"
SWMBO is definitely in your grandma's age class. The HDD is her laptop started to throw wobbles a few days ago so I've just replaced it with an SSD. She's pleased it's so much faster. No MacOS of any variety, just Devuan. She would not appreciate your comment.
"What is a bigger headache for your Grandma is that old document your Grandpa wrote that she now wants to open on her new laptop. *.docx won't be associated to anything and no way she'll work out how to upload it to OneDrive."
Never mind when everything that somebody has goes 'poof' for not paying their bill and relatives don't find out about the documents until after they are gone. I already see plenty of that when I help an estate disposal company sell off possessions. I have a late model MacBookPro, iPads and a Mini that are iCloud locked. There's no way I've found out to free them from being shackled. The person's mother and he were estranged for years so she has no insight and isn't interested in what he's left behind. (She really doesn't want to know what was on many of the external hard drives). The bummer for me is the expensive kit is worth less than half of what it could fetch since it's landfill/spare parts if it's iCloud locked. There's no way I can get the person's death certificate and beg Apple to unlock the devices. The stuff is erased, that can be done. Just not re-registered under a new owner.
I've also seen that when people are still alive and loosing memory. "I didn't know I had a password, the computer just goes to that page". Modern security has no way to help someone who has a stroke and forgets things. Too many times I have hit a dead end on the "free" Outlook.com\Gmail.com accounts with an oldie who has now lost access to all their data because they trusted the cloud. No one to contact at those companies to prove ownership even when still alive.
Or the lady in tears the other month when her childhood hotmail account had been stolen. With those last photos and emails of the dead sister. Yeah, her fault for a bad password, but not having anyone to contact at Microsoft for these situations is heartless.
Once dead, all photos locked away for ever. No more discovering those old photo albums.
You can always spot those whose only knowledge is what they've read which was written by someone whose only knowledge was what they'd read written....etc...by a Microsoft PR person.
Even her Windows using 50-yr old children manage to use my cousin-in-law's Zorin box so it's not really that hard.
So considering all the shit pointless functions MS has crammed into word over the years, they choose to take out something basic and useful rather than one of the pointless features.
I’m surprised they didn’t remove the “print the letter ’e’” feature. Because nobody uses that do they?
You honestly couldn’t make this up. God, I hate MS
They still prefer you to use the subscription. They probably have to provide s free option for PR purposes so they have that box ticked but in such a way that if you seriously want to use it then the subscription is your only real (MS) alternative.
"They still prefer you to use the subscription. They probably have to provide s free option for PR purposes so they have that box ticked but in such a way that if you seriously want to use it then the subscription is your only real (MS) alternative."
I see plenty of government dolts that send out documents in M$ formats and just assume everybody can parse the format. Of course, all of that stuff shouldn't go out as editable documents, but many levels of government are strictly an amateur shop.
Hell of a "productivity tool" that pops up attention-distracting video ads every few minutes over a spreadsheet you're working on. And if M$ have taught us anything about such features, in 18 months time they'll be in the paid full versions too, as the next quarter's ever higher profit expectations have to be met. Probably followed by Copilot generated ads related to whatever it thinks you're working on at a particular moment. Buying shares in companies specialising in recycling still-working components from PCs that have been hurled out of windows in office blocks is probably a good move right now.
Okay, okay, I know about Enterprise/Legacy compatibility, but for personal users and small organizations, why tf are people sticking around in the Microsoft ecosystm? These days the flavors of Linux are more accessible than ever, and these days FOSS is the clear, unchallenged leader in software.
I'd rather use libre than ever touch office.
So, the $billions of current obscene profit isn't enough?
The solution is to avoid Office. I dropped it in 2023. My current employer is in receipt of feedback from me and another employee - and is aware that ALL of my documents have been generated using the free alternative (although I output them as Office-compatible for my employers - so they can see how other-users-friendly it is).
I don't think my employer feels like lining the pockets of Microshite and longer...
Yesterday the Reg reported on Google's changes to eliminate ad-blockers in the browser. Today the Reg is reporting advertising in Microsoft Office. Maybe tomorrow Intel will roll out a secure on-chip advertising enclave...
We have seen the future, and it is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO7p1p5_yg4
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