Of course you don’t want to buy Office 2019

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Nice of Microsoft to reinforce that point. https://youtu.be/aR_o2uZ4sjU Microsoft is saying more about its customers than its products with the three
[See the full post at: Of course you don’t want to buy Office 2019]

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Elly

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It’s part of the latest Advertising 101 course: How To Disparage Your Own Product.  Also mentioned in the literature on avoiding charges of anti-competitive business practices: How To Pretend You’re Your Own Competition.

Personally, having built my own personal computer, I’d just as soon not turn it into a mere terminal reliant on someone else’s network for access to my own data.  Thanks anyway, Microsoft, for the very kind offer to share it all on your servers, but no thanks.

Asus ROG Maximus XI Code board; Intel i9-9900K CPU; 32 GB DDR4-3600 RAM; Nvidia GTX1080 GPU; 2x512 GB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 NVMe; 2x2 TB Samsung 860 Pro SSDs; Windows 10.1809; Linux Mint 19.1; Terabyte Backup & Recovery

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Elly, Bill C.

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You are not forced to save anything in OneDrive. If you have set a default save location Office products honor it as the default.

--Joe

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Perhaps so, but given Microsoft’s highly questionable past record with user preference and system update settings, I’d rather not put my entire office suite’s operational and data handling at the mercy of their “honoring” anything at all. Call me cynical if you wish, but I can only be bitten so many times before I get quite cautious about offering my hand for any further experimentation.

Asus ROG Maximus XI Code board; Intel i9-9900K CPU; 32 GB DDR4-3600 RAM; Nvidia GTX1080 GPU; 2x512 GB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 NVMe; 2x2 TB Samsung 860 Pro SSDs; Windows 10.1809; Linux Mint 19.1; Terabyte Backup & Recovery

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Cybertooth

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I always choose “Save As” the first time I save a document. I make sure that it saves where I want it to. From that point until I close the document, choosing “Save” will save it where I put it with the “Save As”.

If you do this over and over, before long it will become second nature to you, and you won’t even realize that you are doing it. But everything will always save where you want it to, whether in the cloud or on your local hard drive.

This applies only when you are running the MS Office installed programs, not the web versions of the programs. It’s a more complicated process when you are using the web versions of the programs.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Lori, Elly, Arvy

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I’ve always done that with some things, especially downloads to put them where I want them, but I haven’t found it necessary with my locally installed office suite which does seem to use default settings for saving user data files consistently unless instructed otherwise. It might be a good idea to get into the habit as you suggest. As you say, the web versions are another story.

Asus ROG Maximus XI Code board; Intel i9-9900K CPU; 32 GB DDR4-3600 RAM; Nvidia GTX1080 GPU; 2x512 GB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 NVMe; 2x2 TB Samsung 860 Pro SSDs; Windows 10.1809; Linux Mint 19.1; Terabyte Backup & Recovery

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Thank goodness for OpenOffice/LibreOffice is all I can say to this!

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Fred, lurks about, Bill C.

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Of course, no program is infallible, even open-sourced ones:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/openoffice-vulnerable-to-remote-code-execution-libreoffice-patched/

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Chessie, b

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OpenOffice/LibreOffice is fine if you’re not bothered by the lack of a Normal Mode in writer. But some of us find that to be a Critical! Need to have!! Feature!!! with Bug 4914/Bug 37967 being a total showstopper and deal killer.

(And no, the “Use web view!” and “Use ‘hide whitespace’!” workarounds are Not Acceptable Substitutes.)

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Chessie

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I’m just the opposite! I hate “Normal” mode!

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I have Office 2013 perpetual license on my Windows 8.1 ASUS T-100 clamshell tablet.  I also have LibreOffice on both that and all of my 3 desktops and my laptop.

In my opinion, LibreOffice far outperforms Office.  Even on the T-100, which I take with me to write with while otherwise killing time waiting at appointments, I prefer using LibreOffice instead of Office.

And before you start with “It’s just that you are more comfortable with one than the other”, no, it’s not.  I used Office professionally, 8 hours a day for over 20 years, so I would like to think that I have a handle on most of the features used day to day in Word and Excel, and a passing familiarity with PowerPoint.  I still prefer LibreOffice for writing and spreadsheets.

And I am exceedingly happy to have allowed creating PowerPoint presentations or having to endure sitting through others’ presentations, behind.

Start tossing in annual license payments, and it’s not even a no-brainer to go with LibreOffice over Office 365.

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Chessie, Fred

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In my opinion, LibreOffice far outperforms Office.
…
I used Office professionally, 8 hours a day for over 20 years, so I would like to think that I have a handle on most of the features used day to day in Word and Excel

Always good to be able to get an experienced professional viewpoint. I have a few clients who use Open/Libre, and I’m at a loss to tell them how to replicate some core Word & Excel features. Appreciate any links or pointers you can provide:

Track Changes & Comments are the core of passing documents around in a professional environment. For the life of me, I just couldn’t find how Open/Libre implement them—nor can my clients.
As you’ll know, it’s no fun at all processing say 200 comments & changes in a 100K doc.

Likewise, how do you replace the functionality of macros? Preparing 25-100K docs to professional grade efficiently just can’t be done without macros. Or can it, what’s your approach to cleaning & standardizing?

If you have pointers for other Writer features I couldn’t get working, please share: auto-incrementing numbers [ToC, captions], tables in general [ToF, ToA], watermarks.

I get around issues like encryption & protection by putting the docs in protected ZIP files, so that’s not a biggie—nor are the inconsistencies with image handling—but if you know the secrets, please share.

I’ll leave the Excel issues for later, they’re mainly around printing, pivot tables, graphs/charts, and of course transferring macros—so really, they merit a separate thread.

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AlexEiffel

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Well, it took about 10 minutes of Googling to find out that there are documents, books, and help pages that discuss creating macros in LibreOffice, if that’s what you want.  The Document Foundation do admit that they really don’t have as strong a set of comment tracking tools as Word, and others have suggested they use Google drive to share documents that are being collaboratively worked on.

I don’t use macros as an individual writer; I’ve used them in a couple of professional settings where the firm I was working at had either built them in house or purchased them as a stand-alone plug-in.  My feelings on them are mixed; sometimes they save a few minutes on repetitively-formatted documents, sometimes, not so much.  In each case, when the firm upgraded to the next version of Office, everything broke and it became impossible to revise documents prepared with those macros.

Simply setting up a template in Word and putting together a short document stating which styles to use probably would have been quicker in the long run.  In one case, using a macro package to format two-to-three page procedures became a nightmare at a company I was contracting at because the upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010 (in 2015 – large corporations don’t upgrade thousands of users overnight) caused the macro package to literally crash the computer of every user who attempted to revise one of those documents and the only solution they came up with was to completely retype any document.  I convinced my boss to give me some time to try and hunt down the problem, found out after several hours of digging around that there had been a revised version of the macro application.  I dug further, found out other divisions of the corporation had been granted a license to use the update, and got a copy from the provider, ran a number of tests, and then whipped up a step-by-step sheet on how to run the macro package to convert a document to the new version, and tested it in another department.  They found it worked, and blasted it out across the plant.  All told, it took about 5 days of my time from the initial appearance of the problem, which masqueraded as a crash of Word.  It caused two days of dealing with IT repeatedly remotely reformatting my computer and reinstalling Office 2010, finding there was a problem, getting out-of-band approval to have Office 2007 reinstalled, IT remotely reformatting my computer and reinstalling Office 2007, finding out the problem with Office 2010 wasn’t related to my computer (I didn’t work as part of the main writing department), having IT remotely reformatting my computer and reinstalling Office 2010, localizing the problem to a macro package, finding out IT didn’t support macro package problems, tracking down the macro package originator, identifying that there was a solution….

The biggest problem I’ve run into in keeping documents organized and looking professional in a corporate setting is when the Document Department manager doesn’t have a set standards of templates and styles that are to be used.  It doesn’t matter what package you are using to create your documents – Flare, FrameMaker, Word, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, or even Wordpad.  If you don’t provide a framework for the people who are creating documents to use, they will design their own, and it is going to be painful to clean them up.

I’ve also been brought in to do that sort of cleanup at several places when they had to switch from one type of publishing package to another or to prep documents for transformation into on-line help or paperless manufacturing procedures, and it is both expensive and time-consuming when you start talking about thousands of pages and documents.

The best way around the issue is to set the standard at the beginning of the document creation process and after that revising and reapplying styles becomes much simpler when you are remaining in the same environment but simply want to change the appearance of a document.

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It will never cease to amaze me how many people will actually pay extra to introduce new points of failure into their productivity stream.

But hey, if my employer is happy to pay me to do nothing due to a network outage, rather than just work at a slightly decreased capacity, more power to them.

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Tchalms, teuhasn

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anonymous wrote:

Thank goodness for OpenOffice/LibreOffice is all I can say to this!

Hmmm…. perhaps be a little bit circumspect about OpenOffice unless things have changed radically/magically since 2016?

(See LibreOffice 5.06 vs Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 – Comparison of supported document formats) at that time.

Since then OpenOffice has progressed from v4.1.2 to minor update 4.1.6. In that same time period LibreOffice has progressed from v5.06 to major update v6.2.0.

IMO OpenOffice has lost its way since most of its developers apparently decamped to LibreOffice.

Hope this helps…

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Chessie, Bill C., Microfix, BATcher

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I have asked vendors, repeatedly, to show me the savings in the hosted stuff from Microsoft, and I have yet to see it.  I usually get the song and dance about not having to have a server, and not worrying about backups and disasters and so on (tell that to the folks who had their SQL databases detached and lost 5 minutes of transactions a couple of weeks ago), but never have I been shown the financial savings.  Take Exchange Online.  For an E1 plan, that’s $4 a month per user.  If I take the cost of Exchange 2013, which I’ve had now for 5 years, I would have paid double to have it hosted by Microsoft and my 8-5 uptime performance has been at least as good as Office 365.  I’m not seeing the appeal.

Same goes for Office.

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UPDATE: Still confused about the differences between Office 2019 and Office 365? Gregg Keizer at Computerworld just published an in-depth look. Suffice it to say the landscape’s changed greatly, and it’ll no doubt change again.

I can now say with great confidence that the one feature every version of Office has — Click to Run, Office 2019 on PC, perpetual, ephemeral, on Mac, on iPad, on iPhone, on Android, on the web — the one feature that absolutely transcends every version is…

… they’re all called “Office.”

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Chessie, Elly, Karlston, johnf

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Pro: The ability to convert hand drawn object to rendered text and flowchart objects is a nice bit chunk of complex computer science used to solve a potential problem. Certain people can be faster drawing out their ideas.

Con: Seeing that one of these twins has excellent artistic ability as seen in the video, the handwriting conversion to sterile Arial(?) and geometrically perfect shapes is a turn off.

I would have liked to have seen the opposite scene. Something like a short project time, a complete novice struggling with using a pen on slick glass, demonstrating the conversion from a possible messy result, and then fixing up the presentation image.

Con: The music for these videos is distracting, would be better to have no background audio.

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Elly

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This sounds so like “doing a Ratner”.  This will only be familiar to the Brits, but it has gone down in the annals of consumer goods branding as an example of how easy it can be to bring a brand down.  It’s hard to add much to what WikiPedia writes on the subject: Gerald Ratner

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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b

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I have long since abandoned Microsoft Office and I use OpenOffice mainly (and sometimes LibreOffice and WordPerfect Office). I do have Office 2003 and Office 2010 in Windows XP and Windows 7 virtual machines respectively, but I almost never open them.

I don’t mind about “lack of updates” on OpenOffice as I don’t find any of the new features useful. As long as it is compatible with the OS I am using I am fine with it.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

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Chessie

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Although, lack of any updates means lack of security updates too… see https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/04/apache_openoffice_no_patch/ for example.

For those who rely on the few features of OpenOffice that just aren’t present in LibreOffice, this is particularly annoying.

anonymous wrote:

In my opinion, LibreOffice far outperforms Office. Even on the T-100, which I take with me to write with while otherwise killing time waiting at appointments, I prefer using LibreOffice instead of Office.

And before you start with “It’s just that you are more comfortable with one than the other”, no, it’s not. I used Office professionally, 8 hours a day for over 20 years, so I would like to think that I have a handle on most of the features used day to day in Word and Excel, and a passing familiarity with PowerPoint. I still prefer LibreOffice for writing and spreadsheets.

There are things that MS Office still just doesn’t do right.

One of those is Excel’s CSV import, more so in a non-English locale. Don’t have to do very many of those before it becames worthwhile to just install LibreOffice, and then import in LibreOffice Calc and convert to something else – even to .xlsx and then switch to Excel.

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For the occasional word document I need to write or the excel sheet I need for anything, Office 2007 still works great for me.

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I use Office 365 Business Premium in my Windows 8.1 virtual machine. One of my customers uses it, and they got me a license, allowing me to install the full Office package locally in Windows 8.1.

I really like the installed version (as opposed to the web version). It is very easy to save each document anywhere I want to – on my local hard drive, or in my customer’s iShare folders. In fact, it is effortless.

If I had to pay for the software, I wouldn’t use it; but since I don’t have to pay for it, it is my preferred Office package whenever I am in Windows.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Aw, I’m too late. Just bought a new Windows 10 desktop and Office 2016 three weeks ago. I had been using Windows 7 and Office 2003 and miss them both. They both did everything this retired guy needed and wanted.

I paid $140 for Office 2016 and I don’t need a calculator to tell me how much Office 365 would cost for the next 16 years.

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wdburt1, Cybertooth

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Still using 2003 on the offline computer, where most of the work is done.  Since it’s long out of support, I installed 2010 on the internet computer, for occasional use.  It’s not an improvement, especially Word.  I did find a couple of new functions that Excel 2010 offered.

So far as I am concerned the whole evolution since Office 2010 has been about the needs, imagined or real, of someone else.

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The blocking issue for me with LibreOffice is automatic updates without user intervention and without the user having to be an administrator.  This is handled with MS office through Windows Update rather nicely.  Without automatic update, LibreOffice is not appealing to administrators of large organizations.

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AlexEiffel

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There’s still the option to script a LibreOffice update if you have the local infrastructure for that, it’s a .msi after all…

This is fairly poorly documented at the moment though, and it doesn’t pull the update for you, but for *large* organizations it’s quite viable. Small and medium organizations, not as much.

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AlexEiffel

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Local management via MSI is not an ideal fix.  These days a large amount of users are using laptops that rarely touch the corporate network.  Windows Update keeps Office updated on those systems.

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Have a retail version of Office 2013, but chose several years ago not to not use MS Office with Windows 10. My reason was the very large MS Office monthly updates. Instead I used Open Office which was adequate for my needs. There was however an issue of not being able to update Open Office; continuously got server was not available errors when trying to update. After considerable troubleshooting, my solution was to just download the newest versions. So basically I went from an MS Office suite that would automatically continuously update, to a version that failed to ever update even on manual prompt. Thanks to those for the info on LibreOffice, trying that now. I wonder if the size of the updates for Office 365 would be any less than the size of future Office 2019 updates?

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I wonder if the size of the updates for Office 365 would be any less than the size of future Office 2019 updates?

365 updates should be larger, since you’re getting feature as well as security updates regularly. If 2019 gets service packs, they would of course be larger.

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Sizes of Office 365 updates are shown at;

Download sizes for updates to Office 365 ProPlus

The default for feature updates is twice per year:

Overview of update channels for Office 365 ProPlus

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anonymous wrote:

Track Changes & Comments are the core of passing documents around in a professional environment.
…
Likewise, how do you replace the functionality of macros?

I agree. Without those two, a WP can’t be considered for a professional environment. Even if you don’t need either now, you can’t risk investing in all the training and expertise acquisition only to find you have to change to Word in 3 years’ time because of course your needs & business environment will change going forward.

If you don’t need the power of Word, there’s a good chance the always-overlooked Wordpad [free with Windows] will meet your needs. Very simple & easy WP for basic needs.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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Track changes and Comments work great in Google Sheets. I use them all the time.

The functionality of macros… that’s a favorite topic of mine 🙂  Certainly some companies need macros. Fewer individuals.

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AlexEiffel

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Change tracking and commenting are useful features and I believe all the major office suites do that. Who does it better, I do not know.

Macros where an fair idea back in the day of standalone or office only networks as they covered for some of the major deficiencies of the applications available then. However, as functionality was added to the applications, macros became much less important. With the Internet, they have become a serious security hole as macros can access the OS from within an application. So running a macro in a Word or Excel document risks allowing an attack on your computer. Given that macros are generally not needed, it is a functionality that should be stripped out of Office and the other office suites. If you need a macro, a safer solution is a standalone script in something like Python that either generates or modifies the file outside of the application.

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Libreoffice is the go-to for me, but I keep a retail copy of Office2010 that is seldom used.

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Well, yes, I think I do want to buy Office 2016 not 2019 or 365. One of my clients is a small medical office. Follow me here: HIPAA requires security of all patient information. Office 365 relies on constant data communication with Microsoft servers and it automatically sets up OneDrive. Right or wrong?

And just how trustworthy is Microsoft’s security for OneDrive?

And what are the chances that Microsoft would sign a Business Associate Agreement with my client? Yeeeaaaah … Zero.

So, for my client, I need a version of Office that does not rely on an individual’s email address to get the software installed and running. My client needs a version of Office that installs on a PC and doesn’t need to communicate with Microsoft constantly.

I have looked at OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but have found enough differences from the MS Office 2010 that they have been running on their Windows 7 PCs that getting people to switch over to LibreOffice would be a problem. (Remember these are medical people, not geeks. Turn the coin over: geeks would be terrible at medical tasks. So don’t disparage them. They are great at what they do.)

I’m thinking I should buy up a few copies of Office 2016 for the move to Windows 10 this year.

So what would you do in my shoes?

Edit to remove HTML. Please use the “Text” tab in the entry box when you copy/paste

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Elly

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Hello tchalms, welcome to AskWoody forums 🙂

Office 365 … automatically sets up OneDrive. Right or wrong?

Wrong.

what would you do in my shoes?

Walk a mile 🙂 If Office 2010 does what they need, why change to anything? It’ll work fine with Win10.

If 2010 going out of support next year is a legal/ethical problem for your client, then I would get 365 or 2019—I see only disadvantages to getting 2016, the most out-of-date of your 3 choices.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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Tchalms

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Hi Lugh:

Thanks for your reply.

The three copies of Office 2010 in the office are the free Office Starter edition that was preinstalled when I bought those Win7 systems in 2012. I don’t know how to move those copies over to Win10 legitimately. (I will be upgrading or replacing  PCs this year.) So, I think the existing copies of Office 2010 are at the end of their life.

The business owner does not want to pay for the annual subscription of Office 365 if at all possible.

So, the next question is: Can Office 2019 be installed without using a Microsoft Account and setting up a connection to OneDrive? If not, is Office 2016 the next best choice?

Thanks again.

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Office 2016 and Office 2019 have the exact same end of support dates and the new features in 2019 are geared toward online use.  So, getting 2016 is not a bad choice this time around.

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The important difference for some might be that 2016 is available in a fully-offline MSI version, which you don’t need a Microsoft account to use. (Well, it does do license activation checks by default but this can be worked around, with the KMS and phone activation…)

2019 is always click-to-run and thus needs to associate with a Microsoft account.

HOWEVER… the only ways to get 2016 now are 1) old retail stock or 2) downgrade rights from 2019. The MSI version is only the latter, volume licensed (minimum 5 items but that may include products other than Office) and significantly more expensive in small volumes than retail.

And then there’s another little thing… even 2016 does use network assist for a number of things. Spelling check was found to be a big thing actually, (I understand 2016 uses the same spelling check engine as that version checked in that one Dutch study…?) and occasionally sends fragments of the checked text to Microsoft servers. UNLESS you turn off the network assist in Office global settings, that is.

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Lugh

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Regarding Office, Microsoft just announced that The Office app for Windows 10 Now Available to Everyone.

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-office-app-is-now-available-for-all-windows-10-users

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One thing not discussed above is addins or plugins. May seem trivial, but I save a lot of time every month using just one feature of an addin suite for Excel. An admittedly perfunctory search has not found a similar item for LibreOffice.

(I used to use Woody’s Power Pack for Word 2000 back in the day…)

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