Terms announced for the “bought” version of Office 2019

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And they aren’t pretty. In the US, $440 will buy you one copy of Office Pro 2019, good for one PC. The ad goes on to say: Classic 2019 versions of Wor
[See the full post at: Terms announced for the “bought” version of Office 2019]

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abbodi86, GreatAndPowerfulTech, wdburt1, geekdom

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Of course not. Everyone should migrate to Office 365.

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While true that MS would prefer everyone move to the subscription model, they are evidently not yet at the point of alienating those customers who still want a perpetual license. Since that is the case, they also have to take into account the greater unit cost of support for the legacy model. This explains at least a portion of the higher price. Hard to say though how they balance the increase between disincentive and support. MS is not alone on this within the industry. Adobe and Autodesk are other examples where the price for perpetual licenses has been increasing.

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No need to cry! Just install LibreOffice and done.

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MrJimPhelps, Bill C., BobbyB, lanceboil, GreatAndPowerfulTech, zero2dash

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I’m using Google’s GSuite for almost everything these days.

Big exceptions: The books are still in Word, as are a very few Computerworld submissions. And I have a legacy financial app still in Excel, but am moving the important pieces to Google Sheets.

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GreatAndPowerfulTech

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Libre Office is fair square in my sights for my next PCs. Two questions, however. Is its database compatible with Access files? And what do you suggest to replace Outlook? I use the mail, contacts and calendar, synced with my Android devices using Akruto. I would prefer not to put those files in the cloud, if possible.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Libre Office has a database component, but I don’t think it connects with MS Access. I see JDBC, Oracle JDBC, Mac OS X and Thunderbird Address Books, dBASE, MySQL, ODBC, Spreadsheet, PostgreSQL, text and Writer document.

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Chris B

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PKCano thanks. I am somewhat wedded to my Access file, because it has a lot of data in it that I keep adding to.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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LibreOffice Base can connect to Access dB’s, pretty sure both the old MDB and new ACCDB formats.

But it cannot open them directly.  You have to create a Base dB, then you can use ODBC to connect to the raw data tables in the Access dB.  You will have to recreate your forms and queries, as well as any special code Modules in Base.

Much more info here:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/Base/How_to_connect_to_a_Microsoft_Access_database

Cheers!

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Chris B

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Thanks NetDef. For the moment, I have a transferable licence for Office 2010, but one day that will become too old/unsupported. I will have a look at the links you provided. It looks as if the conversion is not as easy as I had hoped.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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LibreOffice Writer does not have a “Normal” mode. That makes it a non-starter for me.

Yes, LibreOffice claims to have the equivalent of a normal mode now – but “hide whitespace” isn’t an adequate substitute for a Normal mode. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37967#c17

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Regards Outlook, I had multiple ‘Profiles’ in Outlook, I found Thunderbird had the same capability.

greynad

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woody wrote:

I’m using Google’s GSuite for almost everything these days.
Big exceptions: The books are still in Word, as are a very few Computerworld submissions. And I have a legacy financial app still in Excel, but am moving the important pieces to Google Sheets.

Woody, is the free Microsoft Office Online sufficient for those things which you personally must do in Microsoft Office? It is stripped down, so it might not get the job done for you. But my guess is that it is more than adequate for the average user, that is, if they don’t mind working in the cloud.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM

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I was at Cyber Security Chicago last week and at least three different speakers that I heard said if you are using Office 365 you need to be using MFA. Is that really happening?

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Based on what I have personally seen in the last few months, I highly recommend you use MFA for Admins on O365 ASAP.  It’s really getting bad, the shear number of attacks is rising rapidly.

For all Admin accounts for O365 organizations:

For now MFA for Admin accounts is optional, but that is expected to change in the not distant future.  If you go into the Azure control panel from your O365 Admin screen, there is a new option to enable MFA for site admins in advance of the upcoming forced roll out.  Best of all, MS is NOT charging extra for the Admin MFA service at this time. (Nor do I expect they will.)  You can use the Azure Free sub on top of your paid O365 sub to use this feature.  Please note that provisioning MFA for your non-admin users may incur charges – I believe (but am not certain) that incurs a need to sign up for a paid Azure account.

On a side note the Azure Free plan also allows you to provision self serve password reset for your email subscribed members.

 

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Are they still charging for this stuff? That sounds counterintuitive given how free word processing and office program solutions have been on the market for years now.

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With an abundance of free options, these seem like prices geared towards people who don’t know any better or think that MS is the only game in town.

Google Docs and Office Online are both free and available for basically any and every browser.
LibreOffice, OpenOffice, WPS Office, and a dozen others are free if you want a desktop app.

Publisher and Access used to be only available in Pro Plus, not Pro. I would imagine their inclusion in Pro is the basis behind the high price and more prodding to try to push people towards the monthly O365 subscriptions instead.

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Besides the ten percent price hike, support ends after seven years now. It used to be ten. Microsoft wants to hook up a vacuum to your wallet for all of eternity. I’m saying “no” and am advising customers that live on a tight budget to use LibreOffice, or when they only use the web, to move to a Chromebook when their Windows laptop dies. This hasn’t been easy, since I’m a Microsoft Partner. But, in my business customers come first, not MS’s bottom line.

GreatAndPowerfulTech

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BobbyB, AlexN, woody

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Amen, bro.

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Of course they want it to be expensive.  They’re hoping you’ll capitulate to their desire to use Office365… just like they’ve been pushing people to use OneDrive.  Why?  Then they can sell and monetize the data of people using Office365 and OneDrive.  It doesn’t take half of a brain cell to see how dangerous this is from a security standpoint.  Having data on someone else’s server is just a disaster waiting to happen.  No professional researcher I know would ever consider using such a thing.  They use a combination of very, very carefully monitored flash drives, CDs, and external hard drives (mostly the latter) because then they have access to their data anytime and on their own terms.

In my opinion, the people in charge (aka folks like Mr. Nadella) are sacrificing the long-term health of the company in order to increase their personal wealth.  Once the dumpster fire breaks out, people of his ilk will be nowhere to be found.

Fortran, C++, R, Python, Java, Matlab, HTML, CSS, etc.... coding is fun!
A weatherman that can code

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BobbyB, wdburt1

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Longterm attractiveness – and all benefits that a company can enjoy coming from that, like good reputation, customer loyalty and recommendation by customers – get since long time now sacrificed by Microsoft for the sake of pleasing short term shareholder interests. That way, a company sooner or later gets pushed over the edge. However, Microsoft invests heavily into lobbying in politics and public administration, at least here in Germany, but I strongly suppose in other nations as well. That will help to keep them afloat some time longer although they do not deserve it. They can also cross-finance via their server business and cloud business, which seem to run well and generate solid incomes (at least last time I have red about it, and that was around christmas last year, I think).

Everybody with a sane mind should read the message on the wall and use the time there still is to tailor and tune his computer needs such that he does not depend on Microsoft and Windows and Windows-based software anymore. There are alternatives. Good ones. Sometimes even free.

Marc

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For those questioning why anyone would buy Office or even the individual programs, there is a lot of software out there that requires it. If you happen to work in medical transcription, the software is archaic and often requires MS Word and Internet Explorer to function. The software simply will not call up the free word processing programs or alternate web browsers. The 365 version won’t work, either.

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So it is with much software used in specialised science environments. Scientists code it, their students refine it, everybody in the department doctors around with it and nobody cares for conventions and documentations since the initiated few do not think beyond  their own little cirle. Once they are gone, a new generation comes in and depends on this archaic software and does not know how to move beyond it since they do not understand it, and so incredibly primitive interfaces get used that may be 20, 25 years old.

There is only one way out of this dead end: standardization of modules, building new software from these modules, foolproof documentation – and leaving the old stuff behind.

So it is with Windows and Windows-depending software. Either one sticks with it and its limitations and dependencies and foreign control, or one pulls the plug on it. I see no other way out of this dead end.

How long shall the night last on?

Marc

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Standard desktop OneNote 2016 (aka Win32) still available and bundled with Office 2019 (and O365)

it’s just deprecated and won’t be installed without “intervention”
either by using Office Deployment Tool with configuration.xml
or setting this registry key prior installing Office ClickToRun
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\OneNote /f /v PreventUninstall /t REG_DWORD /d 1

Enterprise LTSB 2016 don’t need intervention, Win32 OneNote will get installed by default

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NetDef, Bill C., Microfix

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A price increase of ~ $80 for the standard suite.

I have not yet seen the new price for the Pro package.

Also waiting to see what the price increases for Visio and Project are like, assuming we will be able to get single stand alone licenses for them in 2019.  They are both available as expensive monthly fee subscriber add-ons to 365 plans.

One stumble that’s never been well documented is what version of Outlook do you need to buy to get access to O365 or local host Exchange Archives? In the past, we were forced to shell out for the full on Pro edition, the standard edition could not “see” the archives.

 

Edit:  Amazon is listing (as of today) the stand alone “Office Home and Business 2019” which does not include Access or Publisher for $250.

 

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Who needs thos software nowadays, many affordable alternatives available. It’s about time companies start to realize that also. It would make the world an easier place to live for sure.

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I not precisely a MS fan in some things, but the feature set in MS Office far exceeds all other lower priced and free competitors.  Many professional offices require those features for their workflow.

And one thing my clients love is the deep document sharing/tracking/versioning that comes with 2016 and up when integrated properly into Sharepoint.  At the price point (as expensive as it seems to you) nothing else comes close, and it flat out beats many much more expensive document management systems with the enhancements we’ve seen in the last 18 months.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Adaptation is the magic word. Adapt to anothe rsuite. All those many functions of Microsoft software, can be coded for alternmative software suites as well. All it needs is according incentives.

In Germany, in several cities the public administration offices were switched from Wndows to Linux. sometimes over tehj years ago already. But then  comes anothe rparty to power whose signature poltiicans are close with Microsoft lobbyists and who get bought by telling them if they enfiorce switchign back to Windows, Microsoft would do this and that for that city.

That would be not too bad, if it would be a switch from something that worked worse to somethign that worked better. But in the majority of cases it seems the feedback from the worker sin the offices was that they prefer the Linux system they have , and that maintaining them and runnign software on them works miore relibaly and leaves nothign to be desired.

Still, due to nothign else but bribery, behgind-closed-door-deals and lobbyism, Microsft often gets back into the game. Not by better performance – but lobbyism in politics.

There is all this much of complaining about Windows 10 these days. Since years. I use it since ten months, I bought brandn ew and expensive new hardware with it, and I already hate it, its worse than what I learned and red about its badness in the two years before. But whenever it is mentioned that then alternative developement for rivalling OSs must be done to replace Windows and in order to become independent from it, most complainers and immediately howl with the wolves and claim that it must stay, that one can work around it, that there is no alternative, that it is essential, that it cannot be replaced, and… and… and…

A German footballer once said: “If you have s**t on your heels, then you have s**t on your heels. ” (Andreas Brehme, German national player). And this way – of always finding reasons why Microsoft software cannot be replaced and should not be replaced –  the brown stuff will stick to our heels forever. The software compatability argument for Windows works almost like a de facto monopole, and monopoles do not go all by themselves: they must be actively broken. Why would anyone ever consider to develope more software and OS modules for other OS, if people do no request them, and if the big customers in the industry also do not request them? It takes a bit strategic medium and longterm vision instead of just beign fixiated on the most immediate present and near future, yes – but its the only way.

Demand is what changes things on the market – not good intentions and wishful dreaming. Endlessly accepting compromise and being appeased with an endless string of workarounds, will change nothing. Microsoft will not change its policies if it does not get forced to.

Marc

 

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Very belated reply, but having done tech support for WordPerfect in the past, and currently having helped plenty of patrons with Word, at least on that component of the suite I will gladly take WordPerfect’s feature set over Word’s for flexibilty and depth, especially when it comes to formatting documents (side note: whoever designed those resume templates in Word should have to be forced to help people use them, and see how non-user friendly they are). There is a reason I willingly paid to get a new copy of WordPerfect Office when I upgraded to Win10, while I would never do the same for MS Office. 😉 (The free suites are great also, but Reveal Codes is worth the money.)

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I did a back of the envelope calculation comparing Office365 with Office2019. If one assumes that a home user needs only 1 or 2 copies of Office, an assumption that is reasonable for many the monthly cost for each copy of Office2019 is $5.25 for 84 months. Checking the pricing for Office365 today, it was $10 per month or $840 for 84 months. Also, if you do not want Office2019 there are numerous alternatives, some commercial and some FOSS.

For example, Wordperfect is available for $99 (Home & Student), $249 (Standard), and $449 (Full). I did find the EOL for the version. Assuming 5 years that is $20 per year, $50 per year, and $90 per year for a desktop version. For most I would think Home & Student or Standard would be reasonable choices. If the competitors are offering a competitive product at what many might consider reasonable prices why use any version of Office?

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Maybe it is time to buy Office 2016 that will end support at the same time as 2019 for less money? I always advise people at home to use something else, but I can’t switch without hurting too much my productivity. My favorite version is 2010 and that is what I use the most every day.

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