81–90 of 591 posts
30 years of their home name Office brand, known by pretty much every person that's ever had a computer let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator the main brand instead certainly a courageous decision
Worse than CoPilot is the new Notepad. Can close the program without saving the file, open it again and it is still there! WTF?
A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
It works, but its clunky, you have font shenanigans, it just overall feels weird and not smooth...
Then again, I'm one of the people who would force you to pry Office 2003 (the last version before the ribbon) out of my cold, dead hands.
Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.
We will solve the cheating problem with more AI, all essays will need to be written in 3 hour time windows in web portals with key-logging + copilot off and children on webcam the entire time. An AI will assess all the data and tell you if the child cheated or not. Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in the future, and having that skill just means you're working a low paying training data crea…
Microsoft really has to pull itself together in terms of product branding. Microsoft 365 itself was a terrible name for an office suite, but adding a "copilot" at the end is hitting too low a bar. Not sure how it even got an approval in the first place.
My guess is that the plan will be Office -> Office 365 -> Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot -> Microsoft Copilot.
Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off. I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. How long ago was this?
This was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago. It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the docu…
One time we were having a hard time exporting Word docs that a customer was able to open and view correctly. After much back and forth, it turned out they were also using OpenOffice and it was having trouble opening the emulated Word docs we sent. We cut out the middle man and started sending them OOo’s own native docs. Problem solved!
I know that’s far from the common case, but it made me so happy at the time.
I understand people who love Apple (or the OSS world) unconditionally and I understand people who hate either, but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft. Feels like there isn’t a single product person left in the company, no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing.