Would I see Copilot in the OHook’d Office 365? If not, yay!
I use ms office 2007 it runs perfectly in wine and still has the cool version of wordart
This is like adding ESPN to the live TV package.
Oh shit maybe we’ll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
I keep seeing posts by NextCloud on Mastodon. Has anyone had any experience using those guys?
Nextcloud is decent but it depends on what you want. Personally, I’d never use it again due to performance reasons but it’s a decent platform for cloud editing and stuff.
I switched to Syncthing for file management across my devices. With it, I can sync my Joplin notes. It’s all I need in life. It was also easier to set up than a Nextcloud instance.
Yeah. So it’s
- thunderbird
- some add-on
right? I forget the name of that add-on.
No, that’s not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that’s it. But it’s only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let’s ask Co-pilot again:
THERE it is.
But I learned there’s a second alternative, so that’s cool. See? Co-pilot has value!
Zentyal replaces windows server. It has active directory, file server, print server, domain controller and mail server, all in a way compatible with Microsofts products, but it’s Linux. I worked with it many years ago and it did what it says on the tin. I haven’t worked with newer versions.
In this case the AI is kinda wrong. It’s not a Thunderbird replacement in any way, rather an OWA replacement and Exchange alternative. You could use Thunderbird to connect to it probably.
What you could use is the Thunderbird extension TbSync, or Owl. Both work, but TbSync is free.
Like using Edge to download Firefox, I approve
I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it’s 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.
Think of all the new words made since 2007 you won’t be able to write on such an old version.
I will forever hate 2007’s ribbon with a passion.
Microsoft probably added or changed unnecessary shit to the OOXML format that your old version can’t handle.
Do all documents open without any problems?
Me too haha. One of the first things I install.
Same here.
For existing customers, the price hike won’t be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the “Classic” or “Basic” Microsoft 365 plans.
Thankfully we can roll back to the “Classic Family Plan” without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn’t see this article I’d be up for a big price hike when it renewed.
Everyone experiencing this should be thinking “man, I gotta ditch Microsoft before they try to fuck me again”
NO one using Microsoft is doing so by choice. If we haven’t learned in 30 years, then fuck us.
Their office suite is still the winner.
Absolutely. This has made me acutely aware that my days with MS are numbered.
Fuck the MS suite is such garbage. My work was sold in for Teams with all the BS. Now I have to either map up the filepath creating what we used to have, or I can’t see the file folder and make a call at the same time. Onenote with it’s arbitrary syncing. And good luck finding it again since it stored at some random place if you loose access.
Word and excel is decent, but for a person who likes to tinker with versions it’s a nightmare to invite people to edit it.
Cluncky interface, slow and bloated all around
The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.
Meanwhile, smart people: I sure do love Libre Office.
Libre Office.
Honestly - and flame away - I hate the name. I hate saying it. It’s the ‘moist’ of borrowed words. Leeeeeeeebr. And I’m a Canadian who did French up to university-level conversational “explain something for 20 min” French (from a gorgeous caribbean dynamo teacher, but I justif–uh, digress) so I know how to say the word and what it means.
And I still hate it. I’m a horrible person – even before I continued French study because the prof was so engaging and energetic and brightened every room and every day and made French interesting just on inclusion.
Lee-bray
Lee-ber
Absolutely not
Glad I’m not the only one questioning the name! I have a pet theory that if they changed it it’d be more popular.
Don’t forget GPT4All or JanAI, for those rare instances that you want to converse with a dumbass.
“You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we’re done half baking it into all our apps and now we’re almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all.”
The logic of the utterly deranged…
They did the same with 3.5 jack removal from phones, charged more for less
You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.
So Libre Office is free?
If it does what regular office suit does i would happily pay 300 dollars for it to have it as mine and not be fucked with
Free forever, and works great.
the only problem with onlyoffice is that it’s electron.
https://forum.onlyoffice.com/t/why-does-it-contain-a-web-browser/8250/3
Chromium embedded framework, not electron. Similar concept, though.
Are you positive?
Ew
Ehh, I’m fairly sure it’s not. It certainly wasn’t in the past. When do you believe that changed?Never mind, you were talking about OO, not LO, my bad.
Onlyoffice is apparently Russian, headquartered in Latvia.
what does it even mean to be russian then?
Latvia is not Russia, unless something recently changed
JFC it can be russian owned and russian controlled and russian employed and pay russian taxes while “headquartered” in Latvia.
Latvia is not Russia
Yet.
And if you look on a Russian map, I’m sure it’s there already.
What? Latvia is a part of NATO.
I need to try onlyoffice again. The last time I tried, was the original beta, and it was faulty (being a first release beta, and all)
Oh onlyoffice works great! It’s spreadsheet function is far less buggy than excel and it’s smooth and snappy.
OnlyOffice spreadsheet has less functionality than Excel but unless you are a super power user then it’s not a problem.
Sweet! I’ve been using MS at work (required) and Libre at home (because screw MS). I’ll give Only another go!
I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
First thing I do with the Google Assistent on Android Phones is to tell it to disable itself. Cool thing is that it does.
You can do that??
The clippy we all deserved
why not just do:
microsoft 365: 6.99
microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99
They did exactly that, except they changed the name of the original subscription to “classic” and upgraded everyone to the more expensive plan without asking.
This is actually illegal in some countries, and I hope they get fined for it.
… second paragraph of the article:
In addition to the basic plans getting Copilot rolled in, there are now additional “Basic,” “Personal Classic,” and “Family Classic” tiers without Copilot and “other advanced features” added for users who do not use AI in their workflows
You damn well know why they dont do that $$$
why not just do:
microsoft 365: 6.99
microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99
Make the easy thing the better-for-sales thing, obviously.
But seriously, negative-approval has been a sales enabler for ever. People will often just roll over and accept it vs churning to something else. That’s why ‘loss-leader’ works, as people will start with one product and sunk-cost fallacy will keep them from churning as the vendor tightens the screw.
Moar profit.
Make it too expensive and people will switch to Google docs.
Google workspace just pulled the same crap with Gemini
Last week at us.
First question I asked the evil twin was: “How can I deactivate Gemini and never hear from it again?” Support article poped up, where must opt out from some Labs setting or some bs, but only a workspace admin can do it.
Ended up with blocking that flare button with uBo. Problem solved.
The point is it’s free.
Excel is the deal breaker on that. My last company was all Google products and auth, but I still had to buy Excel for the accounting and HR teams.
Um excel certainly has its places, but accounting? Don’t they have actual dedicated software for accounting? HR? Like payroll? Again don’t they have actual software for that?
And I was thinking personal use, whose costs were posted. $100 a year, fuck that.
It’s hard to believe, but I work at a Fortune 100 company that’s still heavily reliant on Excel.
Sure, we have specific software as System of Record (Oracle suite, mainly). But for all the day to day estimating and calculating and reporting and other noodling, people routinely export to Excel and play with numbers from there.
The point is you can use google docs or Libreoffice for day to day mundane things.
It’s only the huge power features that you need Excel for, maybe in engineering. For accounting when you get to that power feature point I’m surprised there isn’t dedicated software.
Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it’s not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.
From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it’s clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn’t really need Excel… but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I’d probably switch to something else.
Like it’s a fun number cruncher, but for serious accounting that’s tied into point of sale, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc you really should be running something dedicated. That’s why there are all these software companies making bank when from the outside you can’t quite figure out what they do.
Protip on excel, when you start a new sheet ctrl+a, ctrl+1, change to number.
See you think that - but excel finds a way. We have what are lovingly called the “spreadsheets of doom” which accounting uses to manage all forecasts, and the bits that involve money flows. Did you know you can hook excel into Salesforce and pull all the sales records? A person who thinks her monitor is her computer (she has a Dell laptop) somehow found a way…
I remember my dad had a problem and asked if he had to take the monitor or the tower to the shop.
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
the technical breakthrough of increasing shareholder value
As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I’m sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.
As for businesses that part stinks… once you get integrated with all the services offered, it’s going to take a lot to back out since it’s not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It’s awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn’t anticipate this then they didn’t do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.
They need money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
This decade for SURE! We promise!
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that’s updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
It is. Remember when they just made a new version every 3 years and you didn’t REALLY need to buy the latest one if you had the previous one?
Well that didn’t make them enough money.
Excel has most businesses in a headlock. Can’t see why anyone else pays for M$. I have Office, but it’s a permanent license from my last job. When I upgrade, say bye bye.