I don't use Office365 much, apart from maybe Outlook (which I have to, for some of my work). However, the other day I had to use PowerPoint in the browser for the first time (I use Linux, so no native app) and… it turns out it's completely and utterly broken? I mean, the document looked nothing like the presentation my coworker ended up giving (using the desktop application on Windows(?)). What I saw in the browser was that positions were off, font faces and sizes were inconsistent, etc. etc. It was wild. How do they even manage to sell that?
Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
241–250 of 593 posts
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#242Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universities, etc.)
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job. For professionals w…
I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.
LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.
Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.
Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.
And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#243Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too. The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoin…
> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive.
I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#244Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#245Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
Track changes and collaborative editing are both pretty important features IMO
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#246Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
I came to say something similar. Office 2000 seems more than sufficient for everybody outside of some very specific niches. The success of the comparatively much more basic Google Docs and Sheets are proof of this. Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.
I don't know, I have been forced to update many times just to use Word. Win7/Word 2003 was working fine for me as a math editor. Somehow everyone changes to .docx, Equation Editor 3.0 was replaced, then one of my major client only accept Word 2019 files for consistency so I was forced to update to Windows 10 just to use that.
And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#247They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026 [0]. Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files. The solution for that? Run a powershell script to convert all your publisher files to (uneditable) PDF. There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that…
I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".
Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job. For professionals w…
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and colum…
> power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs)
But they they wouldn't be power-users anymore, they'd be developers. It's just an entirely different world.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
So please tell us what you did mean.
I am perfectly happy with the original statement.
Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that?
The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#250They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026 [0]. Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files. The solution for that? Run a powershell script to convert all your publisher files to (uneditable) PDF. There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that…
> Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint,
"Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?" "I believe he did."