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Microsoft Says Price Increases Coming For Office 2019 and Windows 10 Enterprise Users (zdnet.com)
Microsoft has price increases in store for some of its Office and Windows customers as of October 1, 2018. From a report: In a July 25 blog post, Microsoft officials acknowledged the coming increases. Office 2019, the next on-premises version of Office clients and servers which Microsoft is currently testing ahead of its launch later this year, will see increases of 10 percent over current on-premises pricing. This price increase is for commercial (business) customers) and will affect Office client, Enterprise Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL and server products, officials said.
Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.
Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.
Excel used to be MDI. At least in W10 and Office 365 it opens in separate windows now. Same process unless you start another Excel process on purpose. I recommend this if one sheet requires extensive calculations or data queries that could lock up the other workbooks.
The CSV thing is annoying. What is worse is that before Excel 2007 the scatter chart was fast and could handle 10s of thousands of rows of data with ease. Now it bogs down trying to redraw all those data points. And the trendline feature is awful if you have more than 1000 datapoints in a series. It got better between 2007 and 2010, but it's still bad compared to 2003 and earlier. I finally just wrote my own charting in .net and VSTO instead of Excel's brain dead charts (which admittedly are for business and marketing types, not really for technical use. A stat program would be better)
A co-worker showed me a trick not so long ago. When you go to open Excel from the Start menu, hold down the shift-key.
You'll open a separate instance of Excel, which will allow you to have a second window. Not sure it would scale to a 3rd or 4th window (likely depends on our RAM).
Being able to have two windows of Excel on two monitors greatly simplifies things. Why they think Excel shouldn't have that is well beyond me.
Our company uses Office 365 and Microsoft hosted Exchange email. The hosting part isn't so bad, really. Yeah, it gets really expensive when you have a lot of mailboxes -- but it works far better than the 3rd. party Exchange hosting services we used or considered previously. (Many of the remaining Exchange mail hosts are really "legacy" providers who still have enough clients so it doesn't make sense for them to shut down operations yet. But they're typically still using an older version of Exchange server that's not fully compatible with the latest features in Outlook, and won't give you as much flexibility to change things in the admin control panels as Microsoft does on their own service.)
What drives me crazy though is how the Office 2016 for Mac and Windows code-base was so lacking in features. We paid a lot of money to upgrade to it via O365 subscription vs. using our existing Office 2011 for Mac and 2013 for Windows licenses. And it felt like we lost as many features as we gained with it. Until pretty recently, Microsoft didn't even put back features as basic as allowing images to be inserted in headers or footers of Excel documents! They also broke a lot of font format related stuff on the Mac side, because they decided to scrap the old way of using a proprietary font rendering engine that was part of the code in Office 2011 and earlier, in favor of using native OS X font rendering functionality. I think this was a good move, except people's carefully crafted Outlook message signature lines got mangled and needed to be re-worked.
I'm sure we'll pay the asking price and migrate to Office 2019 eventually, since we're pretty committed to the whole Office suite after over 15 years of employees using it for the majority of our corporate documents and messaging. But I'd really like to see Microsoft do better about not subtracting features that used to work in old versions of the software and charging us money to do it!
Libreoffice is actually a perfectly good Office tool. It just doesn't have the thousand bells and whistles that most people don't use. Oh, and it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Oh and its ethical. Several goods there and quite enough for me (alt-tab back to Lbreoffice).