Submitted 7 months ago by simple@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
Some executive noticed that they can’t sell you larger cloud storage if you haven’t used it up.
Then someone on the office copilot team said they wished they had access to more comprehensive data about what people write with office apps and the rest is history.
The breaking point for me was when I was showered with Copilot+ pop-ups on every single hover. Let me fucking copy/cut/paste/format in peace. I never asked for any of this, and neither did any user of any level of expertise.
Switched to OnlyOffice as it felt to perfectly answer my needs. There are still some quirks with non-UTF-8 documents, but you know what, I’d rather iron those issues out than be shoved a product I didn’t request nor need at every single interaction I have.
I highly encourage anyone that hasn’t done already to explore alternatives to the M*crosoft Suite, if they haven’t done it by now. Every update is just the worst form of enshittification. Can’t wait to have an intrusive slop AI agent tell me how to do my Maths in the Calculator app next.
Apps? It’s programs and applications!
Jesus christ. So glad I ditched MS. It’s like getting out of a cult - once you see it looking in from the outside, you finally realize how terrible it is.
See ya Ms Products! I hope you all like that cloud of yours!
I would love to switch to LibreOffice (or similar) but I haven’t been able to find a way to get tables to work in the same way they do in Excel, and that’s a deal breaker for me. None of the suggested approaches come close to being able to select a range, press ctrl+t and immediately be able to filter/sort/lookup using column names from anywhere in the document. I use that feature dozens of times a day, and so does everyone in my circles that deals with financial data.
I think you name the range, and then you can do the same using ctrl+shit+L
I may not remember right, but I haves used calc and excel interchangeably since it was open office. Some things in excel drive me up the wall, some things in calc do to.
Either way, the best thing I found was get the data out of spread sheets and into something that can work with it better. Like sql or pandas.
But I get that for financial work, it is a staple. Which frightens me to no end.
What about OnlyOffice?
You can purchase the Microsoft apps , would, excel, PowerPoint, as a package that you own. There are no upgrades. You own them.
I am in the process of moving to Linux and Libreoffice at the moment. I’m working at getting myself off of Onedrive at the moment.
Once complete I will start the process of getting off Google. I’ve been using Proton for years and I am going to remove any other online support.
Why I use libreoffice.
This made my blood boil, and then I remembered I switched to Linux a month ago… all good.
I switched earlier this year. No ragrets.
Holy fucking shit, what absolute trash
Microsoft is recognizing that their biggest threat to MS Word is Google Docs, a product they underestimated in the beginning as being a serious choice for word processing.
Saving in the cloud means automatic backups and access from all your devices. Increasingly, people are willing to choose that over the real privacy benefits of local storage.
They’re prepared to do anything to get real user data for AI training. This little change gives them easily millions of files per day accidentally saved to cloud.
If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting
…or just use some other app for your private documents and Word only for work-related stuff or such.
I switched to OnlyOffice for my work files. I have had no compatibility issues with my coworkers
This creates a circus act to protect documents. Thank goodness for great alternatives. I use a mix of LibreOffice and Cryptpad. Suits me perfectly.
That sounds pretty much like ransomware to me.
At this point, why even have desktop apps at all?
Teams and Outlook are basically busy glorified web browsers that load the online version… Now word is going to send your shit to the cloud whether you like it or not?
Google docs does this, but they don’t have a desktop app to deceive you with. You create the doc, and edit it where it is, on the cloud, using a web interface that’s vaguely “word”-like.
The only people this will “help” is all the inept business people that can’t figure out where to put their data so it’s not lost. There’s lots of those.
It’s way better than a web app! it ships with a separate browser the user has zero control over and with more permissions to abuse. \s
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Windows!
laughs quietly in Linux
This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?
Swoopin in to recommend: fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Yes. You may distro hop eventually, but you will not go wrong starting there from Windows.
I stuck with it. I am OK that somebody else did a really nice configuration out of the box for me. It’s still an open Linux system. I make embedded computers do the right thing all day at work, and at home I’ve been getting more outside work done than ever. So any projects like setting up an Arch install to learn more about linux will at minimum have to wait for winter.
The most important choice from the beginner is not even the distro, but what window manager to use, that will be your first interface and you need to be comfortable with it first.
Remember that most major distros now offer live ISOs, which means you can easily try them out before committing to an install.
Just do mint. If you don’t like it, try another. I went mint and it felt comfortable and worked so I’m happy with it. Might try Debian next time for more stability and less cutting edge.
I found popos to also be beginner friendly, and I believe at the time it was specifically for people with nvidia cards but I’m not sure that makes a difference anymore.
Either way I liked that popos was being supported as a product by a company selling hardware, it seemed more reliable at the time.
Mint is great too, I believe both have windows style desktops you can choose, and also have app stores you can install programs through instead of using command line.
I’d recommend downloading both and then load them up but dont install them as you can test them out before going through the installation wizard.
Last thing is to make sure you know the category your OS is. You will need to web search for the more general category sometimes, for example with popos it would be Ubuntu. Popos and mint both have great documentation online though and forums and such.
Having switched many relatives to Linux recently too, Mint will be your best jumping off point for a familiar feel and pain free experience as someone new to Linux. If you love that and find yourself wanting more, then the world is your oyster! I started on Mint and ultimately settled on Fedora Plasma after trying out a half dozen different options.
I don’t want to type stuff into a command line. Like ever. If this is possible then I’m in.
this operating system still costs like $100
Who the fuck pays full price for windows? Just buy an oem license for like $15.
i don’t need a license to kick myself in the nuts
Try 150$ :(
There are other ways, if you have to use it but don’t want to give Microsoft money. One way is just not to activate it. Almost everything still works.
A better way is not to use Windows, but not everyone can avoid it all the time.
/ per year
Operating system sold separately. Some assembly required.
im using a cracked version, i also dont have cloud for ms, no problem there.
this has been goin on for like a year now. i have an offline profile with no onedrive on my machine, and tried the latest office. theres a slider saying autosave, but i was unable to use it. felt kinda weird that there is no autosave feature anymore. turns out autosave has been a cloud save option, and poor excel was not able to savemy private data to the onedrive datafarm. also the new excel is super slow compared to like the 2016 version, which indicates that theres more bloat under the hood.
The slider you’re mentioning is specifically for cloud sync, correct. But as far as I know Word still does the thingy where it will periodically snapshot and allow you to recover previous versions.
I’m not 100% sure because I don’t use it at home anymore but I still do at work.
Libre office does the job for me! Auto save on cloud sucks. At least you can turn it off! For now.
Auto save on cloud sucks.
Depends on the cloud. I like my files being automatically backed up to my private Nextcloud server.
I understand, everyone has different options on this! I prefer to choose what stays local and what on cloud.
Auto save on cloud sucks
Why?
Because I do not want Microsoft to have access to all my documents.
because your phone/laptop doesn’t have a global wi-fi connection, and you might want to open a document pause for dramatic effect outside of your home or work!
Not to be used to train AI. We promise.
LLM’s out here running wild. Co-Pilot my butt. How Rude. Pun not intended. Maybe I should switch to Linux again.
They’d break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people’s OneDrive, it’d be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they’d lose by default.
they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
I’ll just use LibreOffice, but… a lot of people just don’t care. Which does also impact us.
Cool It finally gets Google docs core functionality after 20 years.
Google Docs has been a thing for 20 years? Wow I feel old
Started using Google Docs around 4th/5th grade. I’m a Sophomore in college now…
Still like Google online collaboration more than Microsoft online collaboration, so it’s still dogshit after 20 years…
Actually it had auto save for more than a decade. It’s just that now they removed the ability to autosave locally, it must be to onedrive.
It didn’t remove anything, they’re just changing the default save location. You can revert it if you want, it’s all in the article…
I’d rather use old ass word perfect at this point
I actually installed WordPerfect 6 for DOS and MS Word for DOS recently. They’re very relaxing for writing compared to the Windows versions. Very fast too. Then I use LibreOffice to convert the documents to more modern formats if needed.
That’s dope. I recently read that George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar. Maybe that’s why that dude can’t finish a book series.
I still use Wordpad to write all my gay dinosaur erotica, am I safe?
Good thing I stopped using MS WORD a long time ago.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea. Too many people are still not backing up their data, and the article says “…automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination”.
As long as they really give users full freedom to choose any cloud service, I consider that a win.
To anyone thinking “LibreOffice still has issues”, here’s the LibreOffice donation page to help them fix it up and be rid of MS Office forever.
I recently started using VisiData and it’s amazing.
Idiots will still not know where anything is saved. Catering to the technologically illiterate has made society way more illiterate.
edgyspazkid@lemmy.wtf 7 months ago
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