News: 1613737933

Microsoft realises all its Onedrive features are driving customers away

Hmm, didn't occur to me that these are features , but always willing to learn...

To be fair – and this is coming from someone who never thought he'd say this – I actually find OneDrive rather useful, and it's actually saved my arse on a few occasions. It's not perfect, and sometimes it's damned annoying (such as documents only autosaving if they're stored on it), but on the whole I think it's a good thing.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same: random Office 365 crashes with disabled autosave on a handicapped on-premises installation really piss me off.

The integration of OneDrive with SharePoint and Office365 is very powerful.

Working at a university pre sharepoint as a linux user was simple. Open the odd document on a Libre office or via a VDI. Now everything is a bunch of sharepoint links that half work. Office 365 opens in your browser and half work, then fails to save. If you download the file and email it back everyone is now confused by a file rather than a sharepoint link. OneDrive web interface is insane.

The issue is not whether OneDrive sucks. It is that Microsoft have an incentive to use one monopoly to prop up another.

I use OneDrive personally and I find it pretty usefull.

I also use OneDrive professionally and in conjunction with SharePoint and the many other 365 overlapping apps it's an utter PITA.

OneDrive/Sharepoint and data retention legislation do not mix. Also I can't find anything ever, but that's pretty much the norm for Sharepoint I suppose.

"The good news," it said, "is that you can deploy both Office LTSC and the Microsoft 365 version of Office with the same deployment tools."

No, the real good news is that LibreOffice 7.0 and soon 7.1 are more than up to the task, and so offer a more cost effective replacement, especially for those who really need compliance with the EU Open Document Format. That is, with the exception of the presentation side of things because that is, umm, "weak" is probably the most gentle way to describe it.

But yes, I can see those who have gone into bed with Microsoft not seeing any other option than to sponsor the next yacht purchase of Microsoft executives.

Libre Calc's support for linking to external data is nothing like as good as Excel's. I use that feature a lot.

.. yet I'm directly using SQL sources in LibreOffice.

Forced subscription for applications like this need to be curbed. For big tech companies like MS who have a clear monopoly on apps like Office they should be forced to make available a paid for once copy and not be forcing people into a yearly sub. Yes, sometimes a yearly sub could work out cheaper for people but then I'd point them to Libre. But should still be the option for Office offline. I still enjoy the 2013 Office ISO I have and I believe I have an 2016 ISO somewhere but we can no longer get 2019 as an ISO :( as it's that shitty Click To Run bollocks.

Erm, isn't this whole article about a paid for once copy?? I'm confused.

Also, there seems to be an [1]offline installer for Office 2019. It looks like it's a disk image, you could probably burn it, or it's contents to an ISO.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-office-offline-installer-f0a85fe7-118f-41cb-a791-d59cef96ad1c#OfficePlans=signinorgid

It is not a disk image. You configure an xml file with the options you want (eg language and the products you want to down load).

Then you run setup with some command line options to download the files, which are a few .cabs plus a very large "stream.x64.x-none.dat" (or substitute x64 if you go with the 32 bit option) and a smaller file where you substitute "none" with your choice of language.

Then you can run setup again to actually install it. I have it sitting on the server, and install it to desktops from there.

The 365 sub for home users is nearly £100 though (I forget the exact amount). Every year.

Office 2019 Home and Student is in a similar ballpark, but forever. In fact I see it available for £20 (professional plus with more apps is £27) and other places for even cheaper if you trust them. Most home/school users only want Word, Excel and Powerpoint anyway (Publisher might be useful for school though).

Simple choice really. Once your 365 free year that came with your laptop is over, either switch to LibreOffice if you can cope with the change, or pay less, once, for the key for the software you need that should last you a few years.

But it's a 1 computer license. Yeah, that's the only problem. But OTOH it's half-to-quarter the price, once only.

I've never paid full whack ( [1]£79.99 ) for Office 365 Home Microsoft 365 Family – this year it was only half that. There's always grey-market licence cards available from various places – although since Britain* left the EU, I've found them harder to come by. Never had a problem with them though. I used to be a full MS-hater, but I have to say, I certainly get my money's worth from my subscription these days. Then again, I'm probably breaking the terms of the licence by using it for business purposes (hence AC).

*[sic]. I'll let you figure out why.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products

> I used to be a full MS-hater, but I have to say, I certainly get my money's worth from my subscription these days. Then again, I'm probably breaking the terms of the licence by using it for business purposes (hence AC).

It's a bit hard to attach any weight to you saying the subs are a reasonable cost if that's then followed by you saying that you're not actually keeping to the license.

Your reason for not having the correctly licensed version, presumably, is because the sub's are overly expensive, which only helps underline OPs point

For home users, it's £80/year - that allows up to six family members to use it, each for several devices (PC, tablet, etc) and 1TB of OneDrive storage each. I use the cloud space for offsite backups and archives (alongside local ones, before I get abuse for relying on the cloud) and that, alone, covers a significant proportion of the annual the cost.

My real complaint is that MS have stopped supporting Office on older Macs - my 10 yo iMac still runs briskly but can't update past High Sierra (which suits me as I still have the odd 32bit app). Microsoft updater (and the individual app) tell me almost daily that there are updates needed but, if I try to update, it tells me I need to update the OS. Apple still support High Sierra with security updates (I don't want feature updates as it is stable and works). MS, if you won't update the Office apps, STOP TELLING ME THEY NEED UPDATING!! Ironically, the Office versions installed on my Win 10 VM (via Parallels) continue to be updated.

Adobe has done the same (stopped supporting on HS), but I fixed that by cancelling my subscription and removing all my Creative Suite stuff (and switching to the Affinity suite) - but other family members use Office and I'm not about to tell them to switch to something else.

Apple stopped supplying security updates in December last year. The most recent one for sudo wasn't patched in High Sierra.

If you go to DosDude, you can get the patches to Hackintosh Mojave and later versions on it. Mojave runs fine on my Mid-2010 MacBook Pro.

Probably best to do a clean install, and remember to repatch everytime you install an OS update, otherwise it won't boot.

£59.99/year for an individual, £79.99 for 2-6 people, both with 1TB OneDrive.

I believe students at school age get Office 365 for free via their school in the UK at least, I can't speak for other countries.

Our kids have an O365 license, but that's mainly to help out with home learning with all the remote teaching going on at the moment. They were also using it for homework submission for the few months they were back at school, to avoid having to hand over (potentially) germ covered submissions.

We'll see if it's kept going once things get back to some kind of normal.

The free A1 education licence schools get gives all pupils access to the web versions of Word, Excel, Outlook etc, the A3 and A5 versions allow for download and install onto home machines. My older home PC is still running Office 2016 on a licence from when my daughter was at secondary school (she left 2 yrs ago) with no complaints!

"The cloud is where we invest, where we innovate." ®

So what you're saying is that innovation has stopped. Now you are just trying to wring out as much money as possible before you disappear into history?

Everyone with good ideas lost passion as soon as Windows Product Activation came in Windows XP. The company has been a ghost ship since.

The offline version needs a few gig of extra space to store all that rich creamy personal data you generate so it can be uploaded to the mothership the next time it sees an Internet connection.

Does anyone have time do draw a chart with all licence possibilities of Microsoft Office's solutions (online, offline, 365, 2019, enterprise, consumer oriented, mobile, for Mars colonizers, etc.). Not that important, though. Just wanted a good laugh.

If this is the way things are going, it's definitely time to give up Office. I'll stick with Office 2016 for now, but for the future no thanks.

I've no intention of going down the subscription route, or the cloud route,

Of course a lot of people will unfortunately.

Only use office at work, on work PC, with work licenced copy

All my home needs are met with LibreOffice. Only really need that at home due to peoples love of sending MS format files* (be that word, excel, PowerPoint) and so I need software that will open / edit MS format files.

*And mainly (for a reason I cannot fathom) people sending images INSIDE A WORD DOC. The doc has no text, just the image. Just WHY??? WTF is wrong with some people? Just send me a png, jpg like a normal person

" WTF is wrong with some people? "

Some business people I deal with don't know how to open an image (typically we send as .tif). They can only open it if it's embedded in a word document.