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Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019 (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft today launched a marketing campaign pitting Office 2019 and Office 365 against each other. The goal? To prove Office 2019 isn't worth buying -- you and your company should go with Office 365 instead. In a series of three videos, twins Jeremy and Nathan calculate the differences in Excel, Cynni and Tanny present their findings in PowerPoint, while Scott and Sean type it out in Word. The ads are cringe-worthy, to say the least, but they do get the point across.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
...If you're not doing complicated macros and formulas, you have plenty of legal open source alternatives.
That's not entirely right - macros do exist, though in another language.
Open source alternatives suck big time - from the interface to speed to everything else one can imagine.
In short, not worth a try for the majority of [ordinary] users.
That explains why despite being "free" they have no traction to be proud of.
So have your employees twiddling their thumbs while MS tries to fix their broken infrastructure? That will go well...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
I hate that it doesn't actually work.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
Here's where the real confusion sets in. Office 365 is both a unique set of products/services and a unique way of paying. I use Office 365 - and I have the normal versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my computer. I don't save anything to Microsoft's cloud, and I don't use the cloud version of the apps. After factoring in the online meeting functionality and the excellent hosted email services that I would have to buy from someone anyways, it probably only costs me $50 a year. For that, I get to install Office on every PC and laptop in my house (limit 5).
So, for many people Office 365 is simply a subscription plan for good-old-Office. For others, it's a cloud service. For others, it's a combination of both. But, if I miss one payment, all I lose is the ability to edit files. And I can always choose to switch to LibreOffice as long as I'm using the subset of functionality it supports.
Office2003
+ Office2007FileFormatConverters.exe
+ Windows7
== #LastKnownGood
Why, you may ask?
Well, when I was teaching in the University in 2009, I was Happy with OpenOffice for Mac for my needs. I even had to live through the Great Fork (eventually, went LibreOffice in 2013). Did the class materials in Impress, exams in Writer, used Calc for the calification Sheets (had to use Yed for network diagrams because there was no equivalent to Visio)...
But then, I started to do Technical training for Huawei and Nokia... And guess what?
The class materials were done in PowerPoint, and if you opened them with Impress the formating would go to hell, even if the presentations were done in Office 2003 or 2007! And no one paid me to fix the formating of every!single!slide! *
The report forms were done in Excel, good luck getting the formating and the (very simple) macros to work in Calc. And good luck getting the guys in china/finland to be able to get it back completely right and trasparently in their copy of excel.
The daily assistance templates and example exams were done in word, good luck getting the formating right in writer upon opening, without wasting (unpaid) time wrestling with the formating.
And if you wanted to send some extra material to the trainees that you wanted them to be able to edit, guess what would happen if they tried to open your libreoffice docs in their company supplied copy of office? It was a coin toss if the document would display correctly or not.
So. I went office. But not standalone office for mac. I went office 365 for mac, and also got 1TB of onedrive that I do not use, and a lot of minutes for Skype calling to international phones that comes in handy from time to time, all for a very reasonable bundle price...
Oh, and on top of that, the SW is always on the latest version, pretty good when you get to an audience of very saavy telco trainees, instead of sporting your old copy of office 2007. If there is a problem with formating, the trainees can lay the blame were it belongs: in the guys who did the presentations, not on an old as hell unsupported copy of the SW (or on some very good but not compatible FOSS software).
I still have LibreOffice on my SSD, but I am thinking very seriously to remove it to save space (256GB SSD, with a 100GB Bootcamp/WinVM, had to move my steam library to an SD card**). I'll say that office is slightly better interface wise than LOffice, and MUCH better dictionary wise (specially in spanish). I realy found Open/LibreOffice good enough, but in the end, the circumstances decided against it.
JM2C YMMV
* Actually, that's the reason I declined the work of translating slides from chinglish to Spanish, the translating would break the formating, and you ended up wasting more time redoing the formating, than you got paid for the translaiton (you got paid per word, and very low at that, quite frustrating).
** When I get my next mac, I'll try to move steam to an iSCSI target drive. Moving it to a SMB 3.1 share on my NAS did not work out very well
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!