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Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

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Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#311
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.

Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to make money. I don't know what kind of weird projection power fantasy roleplaying is going on in your head, but Microsoft is not going to cut off Australia even if they are made to honour this petty little clause that will not actually cost them any…

"Microsoft won't get very far as a business if [they do what they've been doing for decades]"

Story doesn't check out.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to make money. I don't know what kind of weird projection power fantasy roleplaying is going on in your head, but Microsoft is not going to cut off Australia even if they are made to honour this petty little clause that will not actually cost them any…

"Microsoft won't get very far as a business if [they do what they've been doing for decades]" Story doesn't check out.

Microsoft has been cutting off the EU and Australia for decades? That's news to me!

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#314
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's Office 2019, but they were officially selling it until the end of 2021, and third-party sellers were selling through their boxed inventory for years after too. So, this isn't even that old a piece of software. And, let's not forget, this is trillion dollar corporation. They could find one of their Mac devs to write an update for this in a week. The negative publicity from this is measured in millions of do…

Presumably copilot could do it in record time. (Right..?)

Yes, that's what i don't understand.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades. MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for sev…

I started migrating away for VSCode, piece by piece. But if you need it: Theia/Positron/VSCodium For Python/Julia? Many alternatives. For C family? Similar Java/Go? Similar.

I keep VSCode because their seamless SSH integration (remote files editing) is so damn good.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#317
post #14

I believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0] There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days. Buying a single…

Extremely unlikely. Automating Office (the desktop application suite) simply does not scale. It's not needed, either. Libraries exist that can extract information from Office documents (both legacy and OOXML) much faster. Many(!) orders of magnitude faster, in fact.

AI is entirely unrelated. This is simply yet another push to get more SaaS subscribers.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be amusingly ironic if someone used Copilot to do it.

Pretty sure this is beyond copilots abilities... It's really bad at any kind of binary analysis.

Really? It's been pretty good with a Ghidra MCP at signature scanning for extremely niche undocumented software.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#319

Been using LibreOffice for years. Everyone should. If we don't vote with our choices companies like Microsoft will keep pushing the envelope until you have to pay a monthly fee to turn on your own computer. https://www.libreoffice.org/

In general, I also am a LO fan, but recently it left me hanging quite a bit.

I wrote my CV in LO, to avoid my endless tinkering mode, that I had with my LaTeX CV, that still never looked exactly how I wanted it to look. Then 2 things happened:

I upgraded my desktop computer from Debian 12 to 13. Now LO can no longer start. I am only getting a crash without UI error, and on command line I get a nothing saying C++ error, saying "std::alloc bad alloc" or so, and that's it. No details, nothing. Already tried reinstalling a few things, including LO, but apparently it doesn't come with all it needs.

On my laptop, which is the same OS, Debian 13 LO still works, so at least I can edit my CV. However, there is another issue there. Scrolling takes approximately 1s, before the document is re-rendered. I found out I need to set an env var to make LO use XWayland compatibility layer, instead of using Wayland directly, because if it uses Wayland directly, it is just pure laaaag, unbearable scrolling experience.

Needed: Way better error messages, not just slinging low level C++ crap at me.

Needed: Why doesn't it recognize Wayland and perform properly when scrolling?? Or act through XWayland by itself, rather than me having to search for a solution for an hour? If the Wayland experience is that rough, maybe it should not use Wayland at all and use the XWayland instead from the start?

In short, a very bumpy experience recently. But once it works, which it still doesn't on my desktop PC, it is maybe the best word processor tool. Briefly I looked at OnlyOffice, thinking it is also free/libre software and maybe it is good, but alas it is a child's toy, when it comes to editing styles. Character styles don't even work properly, so it's an instant no-go for me.

Maybe I will investigate Calligra, which has been mentioned here.

EDIT: Tried Calligra. Couldn't even open the first fairly trivial odt document I tried: My CV. My CV document is basically just a few tables with text in them, one photo, bullet lists, some paragrah styles for headings and such, and some character styles to highlight words. The writer tool of Calligra instantly crashed, with no error message dialog whatsoever. It does have paragraph styles and character styles, but the font rendering looks weird, blurred as well and often users a way too small font in the styles editor. Aside from paragraph styles and character styles I didn't see any other styles in the styles editor though. What about list styles, table styles, page styles ... To me the writer tool of Calligra looks also very immature at this point. (version 1:25.04.2+dfsg-1, as shown in "Discover" on Debian 13, KDE)

EDIT: Maybe I will truly have to invest more time and create a good looking LaTeX CV. Or just be lazy and use something pre-made I find online. Though I already know there will be something that will not satisfy me or that is not anticipated by some pre-made template and then I will probably be fiddling with it again ...

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#320
post #182

Been using LibreOffice for years. Everyone should. If we don't vote with our choices companies like Microsoft will keep pushing the envelope until you have to pay a monthly fee to turn on your own computer. https://www.libreoffice.org/

OnlyOffice is better than LibreOffice for people who want a more direct alternative to Microsoft Office https://www.onlyoffice.com/ (it's AGPL... there is an ongoing dispute with a fork now)

I tried it just a few days ago, and I can't recommend OnlyOffice. Well, I am not an MS Word user, but I think even MS Word, at least the desktop apps, used to support styles better. What I mean is naming and defining various types of styles, paragraph styles, character styles, table styles, etc. OnlyOffice basically has no character styles that work properly. What you can find online about how to do character styles are hacks for using paragraph styles in such a way that they become character styles. But they are still mixed up with paragraph styles at the top style selection bar thingy. Of course this is an area where LO excels, above and beyond MS products. But I have come to expect what LO can do in terms of styles as the baseline. If a word processor can't even give me those style type choices, it is a child's toy, for writing actually well made documents.
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