New Version of Microsoft Office Won't Require You To Pay For a Subscription (cnet.com) 165
In a company blog post Thursday, Microsoft released more details about the new, flat-price version of its Office productivity software coming later this year. The company emphasized that while its main focus remains in its subscription offering, Microsoft 365, it will release the one-time purchase Office 2021 for those who aren't ready to move to the cloud. From a report: Office 2021 will arrive in two versions: one for commercial users, called Office LTSC (which stands for Long Term Servicing Channel), and one for personal use. Office LTSC will include enhanced accessibility features, performance improvements across Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and visual improvements, like dark mode support across apps. It's meant for specialty situations, as opposed to for an entire organization, such as process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet. More details about pricing and new features for the commercial version and the personal version will be announced when Office 2021 is closer to general availability. Both will have both Windows and Mac versions, and will ship with the OneNote app. They will also ship both 32- and 64-bit versions, according to the post. Microsoft will support the software for five years, and said it does not plan to change the price at the time of release.
Renting software? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Renting software? (Score:5, Informative)
I actually picked up LibreOffiice again last month after having dropped it for a few years over some nagging compatibility issues. They've made some pretty huge strides, and I was able to work with government-supplied docx and xlsx templates for a bid we're putting in, and it handled it all without an issue. It was kind of neat using my Raspberry Pi 4b to do some real business-related work. Makes me think we're getting awfully close to the point where we won't be needing any price Windows Pro licenses anymore.
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If you are using Raspberry Pi 4b as a desktop, you are nowhere close to a typical user.
Re:Renting software? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are using Raspberry Pi 4b as a desktop, you are nowhere close to a typical user.
Isn't that the point? Not being locked into certain hardware/os combinations sounds great to me.
Microsoft does not care about LibreOffice (Score:3)
It is irrelevant to their market.
But they do care very much about Google Sheets.
Indeed, the only deep enhancement to Excel in 25 years was spilling formulas, and that was because Google Sheets could do it.
OK Lists are a moderately deep feature, done because of Sharepoint.)
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Excel added PowerQuery back in 2010 to do data analysis and has been enhancing it ever since. That puts it lightyears of any simple spreadsheet like LibreOffice or Google Sheets.
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PowerQuery is indeed powerful, but not really part of Excel, sort of bolted on the side.
And now they have their own front end, it works without Excel.
Re:Microsoft does not care about LibreOffice (Score:4, Interesting)
Google Sheets is a poor-mans' spreadsheet; it's 1/4th of what Excel has, even the browser version, in terms of usability and functions. But with Office365, with Excel I get PowerPoint (way better than Slides) Word (way better than Docs), and Outlook (actually on par with and perhaps not as good as Gmail), but our organization is now using extensively PowerBI, Visio, Power Automate, PowerApps, Teams, Forms, Bookings, Sharepoint, Dynamics, and Whiteboard, and we're evaluating Kaizala, Yammer, and Delve, none of which Google has a reasonable solution for.
Google's "office suite" is a pale shadow of Office.
Re: Microsoft does not care about LibreOffice (Score:3)
I despise Google docs, but one thing it does better is concurrent multi-user editing. The online version of Word also falls down pretty quickly when you start doing any kind of reasonable formatting. But then Google have it easy because their product has limited functionality
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Thing is most users only need about 5% of the features of Excel and Word. For them a Chromebook and Google Docs is ideal.
I'm sure Microsoft would much rather everyone pay them a subscription. Once kids get used to Google Docs at school they are going to carry on using it into adult life and work too.
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Re:Microsoft does not care about LibreOffice (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, the only deep enhancement to Excel in 25 years was spilling formulas, and that was because Google Sheets could do it.
It's still better than the primary component of Office, Word:
And that pretty much sums up everything Microsoft has done with Word in the last 24 years.
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They should just drop word and tell people to use excel instead.
It does a better job of the task.
Re:Renting software? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are using Raspberry Pi 4b as a desktop, you are nowhere close to a typical user.
A RPi4 has less power and less RAM than nearly any new laptop or desktop computer.
If LibreOffice can run well on a RPi4, then it should run well anywhere. There are even people running it on Chromebooks.
Re:Renting software? (Score:4, Insightful)
Libreoffice is already more or less usable on an rpi 3, now rpi 4 is the lap of luxury. Of course if you never use efficient software like Linux you might be surprised by that.
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Of course, by "you" , I didn't mean you, and meant the other "you"s. :)
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To be fair, I do have the 8gb model, so there's a lot more RAM, but yeah, the processor is nothing to write home about. The real secret I've found to a Pi is a decent SD card or a good USB 3 SSD, most of the lag, particularly for big programs like Libreoffice, just comes from loading the damn thing. I found myself a pretty fast 128gb SD card, and Libre opens in probably about 7 or 8 seconds, and I notice no lag whatsoever. In fact, once I installed the 64 bit beta of Raspbian, I even got Eclipse up and runn
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I’ve started using Calligra sheets for my projects and it works well enough. Took me forever to find how do you a ctrl d to copy down formulas. Google wasn’t much help and I’m pretty sure I forgot the command by now.
Re:Renting software? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually picked up LibreOffiice again last month after having dropped it for a few years over some nagging compatibility issues. They've made some pretty huge strides, and I was able to work with government-supplied docx and xlsx templates for a bid we're putting in, and it handled it all without an issue. It was kind of neat using my Raspberry Pi 4b to do some real business-related work. Makes me think we're getting awfully close to the point where we won't be needing any price Windows Pro licenses anymore.
I have to have compatibility between Windows Mac, and Linux. So I've installed Libre on many machines. It has improved a lot, but was really the only option since Microsoft's offering wasn't even compatible between Windows and MacOS.
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Macros are the last big compatibility problem for documents. Every suite has its own system, its own languages and API.
We need to pick a language, a DOM and an API and make it part of the open standards. An Excel macro should work on Google Docs and Libre Office too.
Re:Renting software? (Score:5, Funny)
We need to pick a language, a DOM and an API and make it part of the open standards. An Excel macro should work on Google Docs and Libre Office too.
Considering the reach of VBA - the number of people with this skill and the widespread nature of VBA-focused forums - the selection of language etc has already taken place.
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It can only be VBA if Microsoft open source it.
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Also, the headline is incorrect. Instead, it should read: "Microsoft now sells a 5-year subscription. Also after decades of intense R&D, Microsoft now has a version that can even work offline, or when you're on airplane mode."
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Microsoft claims that they will support Office 2021 for five years, not that it stops working after five years. You're pre-paying for security fixes for that long, plus perpetual use of the software.
Do you have some software that claims it will get security fixes for as long as the seller continues to do business? What offer do you think is so much better than this? I'm no Microsoft fan, but this seems like they are fairly describing what they plan to sell.
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It will be useful until MS update the Exchange protocol again, and Outlook won't work with it. Again.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I have not tried to run Word with or without network connectivity in decades. It is very nice.
Re:Renting software? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft claims that they will support Office 2021 for five years, not that it stops working after five years.
Then again, they didn't say they wouldn't kill it after 5 years.
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Hur hur. In fact, they did say that, in the blog post that announced that version of Office: "Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021."
Re:Renting software? (Score:4, Informative)
The headline is not incorrect. The standalone version of Office will be supported with updates for 5 years. After that 5 years the software won't magically disappear. You will still be able to run Office 2021 as long as you like after that point just like you can still run Office 2007 even though it is no longer being supported.
Microsoft has had a version of Office that can run offline since the very first version of Office so I doubt that would have been in the headline.
Re: Renting software? (Score:3)
But you are still locked to a subscription and need net contact for full functionality.
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LibreOffice never asked me to pay for a subscription.
Yeah but it's SharePoint integration sucks. Yes I'm being funny here, but only slightly. The reality is the world still turns on the back of MS infrastructure, and what is pointless for the home user is a critical feature in business.
LibreOffice is great at home. That said I'm sure it's good also for what MS is advertising here as the LTSC version.
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M365 is reasonably priced for the service it offers.
My dog's collar and leash were also reasonably priced.
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One has always been able to buy a standalone copy of Office. There is nothing new here that Office 2021 will come in a standalone version. If you are the type of person that wants to upgrade every 3 years when they come out with a new version then the subscription is a better deal, and the subscription comes with online services like email. If you'd like a perpetual license then you can have that but it doesn't have the online services, its just standalone. There have always been these choices, there are s
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If you are the type of person that wants to upgrade every 3 years when they come out with a new version then the subscription is a better deal
Right now it's around $150 to buy the standalone version, and $70/year for a subscription.
Basic mathematics tells me that it's cheaper to buy the standalone version every three years.
the subscription comes with online services like email
Why would I pay Microsoft for email when I can get it for free from, well, Microsoft. Or Google, Proton Mail, dozens of other providers..
There have always been these choices, there are still these choices. This is kind of a non-story really.
Well, indeed.
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LibreOffice doesn't spy on you.
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Did LibreOffice provide you with email and other online services?
Nothing wrong with free software. M365 is reasonably priced for the service it offers.
I need Windows, Mac and Linux compatibility, Does Office 365 provide that? The answer is no, of course. And online Outlook is pretty nasty. It's been actually deleting emails sent to some clients who have to use it. But they are forced to.
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Did LibreOffice provide you with email and other online services?
Office doesn't come with email either, it just comes with Outlook which is sort of a blind artist's impression of what email is.
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This is why app stores suck, not why LibreOffice sucks.
Classic Features (Score:4, Interesting)
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it will still auto number and auto paragraph even if you turn off all of those functions
Doesn't here. Maybe you didn't actually turn those functions off.
even though almost no one uses that function
Show your working. I'm sure you have the telemetry data to back it up. I mean MS is on the war path by stupefying it's entire offering, Office included, so the fact that the Footnotes function is prominent enough to have it's own section seems to point that people actually do use it, and that you just prepare nasty documents. Please don't try and decide what other people use their software for. It's bad enough we have that bullshit from corpor
Pfft. (Score:4, Informative)
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Did you win your lawsuit? :P
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I am capable of filling every workflow I need without using Outlook.
Re: Pfft. (Score:2)
You think LibreOffice doesn't have macros?
Last time I checked, it supported both Java and Python, and its file format makes scripts for more advanced changes really easy.
Re: Pfft. (Score:2)
I never got why e-mail and calendaring/tasks belonged together. Nonetheless, IMAP, LDAP and CalDav make Thunderbird perfectly capable of these tasks. And of you are a business, good luck adding features to Outlook like you can to TB. A patch for an update via provisioning takes me 5-30 minutes plus compilation.
And Outlook tasks feature is really unusably primitive. Not even acceptable for personal planning of basic tasks.
The only thing good about Outlook is that its calendaring is a bit more extensive. E-Ma
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except outlook is still crap..as are macros
FTFY
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Lived my entire professional and personal life without Outlook.
Don't see why you think it's necessary.
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Re: Pfft. (Score:2)
I don't want to buy a yearly bill (Score:4, Insightful)
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Product pretty mature, I can't see why paying... (Score:2)
Re: Product pretty mature, I can't see why paying. (Score:2)
since 2008. Although not live since it's file based. But they have a live, webhosted version. It's just Office360 and requires a subscription
Re: Product pretty mature, I can't see why paying (Score:2)
If you want live multiuser editing in the same document you should look at a different solution like Systemweaver [systemweaver.se]. But expect other quirks instead.
Re:Product pretty mature, I can't see why paying.. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem MS has had since the 2000s: When your software does everything your users want, how do you convince them to pay up for more money? Just look how difficult it was to get people to stop using Windows XP, and then windows 7. I can understand why MS (And the software industry in general) moved away from regular new version releases and into service provision.
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That's the problem MS has had since the 2000s: When your software does everything your users want, how do you convince them to pay up for more money? Just look how difficult it was to get people to stop using Windows XP, and then windows 7. I can understand why MS (And the software industry in general) moved away from regular new version releases and into service provision.
It's not a problem. You make your new OS incompatible with the older hardware, then only ship software for the new OS.
Before too long, everyone is buying new computers with your new software licenses because they have no choice.
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Was the trident ever supported, beyond a generic VESA/VGA driver?
Linux still supports 486 cpus and newer with the latest kernel, the SB16 is still supported, theres support for old IDE and many old SCSI controllers etc. There's support for all kinds of old stuff in the kernel, like zorro 2 ram cards on the amiga etc.
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> Just look how difficult it was to get people to stop using Windows XP, and then windows 7.
As hard as it was to get me to stop using win 2000 and start using XP?
As for leaving XP did it as soon as Vista SP1 came out as I needed more ram and thus a 64 bit OS. (XP 64 was only ever an unsuported POC). (Which was apain as I bought the download version and the installer would not run from XP 32bit (I guess they never considered the idea!), however extracting and burning to disk was fairly simple with 3rd par
Re:Product pretty mature, I can't see why paying.. (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.excelcampus.com/fu... [excelcampus.com]
I found that out because one of those new functions would be very valuable for something that I am currently doing for work, by my enormous megacorporation is still using Office 2013 and is unlikely to move to any solution that requires us to put ITAR controlled data on the cloud.
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Oh that's cool, I had no idea. We are using 365 here though, so I guess that's one benefit of the cloud model - users won't get stuck wit ha decade-old version of software because the CTO spent the budget on hookers and blow.
Re: Product pretty mature, I can't see why paying. (Score:2)
Also, how the hell is "dark mode" not a setting in the OS's theming config? Does each Windows program have to re-invent their own widget wheel?
Cloudy future (Score:4, Insightful)
I get worried enough working on confidential material, and I mis-stroke a key and it gets fed into the MS "Research" panel, presumably fed out to Bing and the AI advertisement sorters.
God knows what they're scanning in their own cloud.
Re: Cloudy future (Score:2)
Slackware Linux and Libre Office on a machine with no internet access.
Re: Cloudy future (Score:2)
"No comme stuff of the devil" at the NSA, probably. :P
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> I get worried enough working on confidential material,
Be careful if you're working on a contract that has confidentiality requirements. Cloud word-processing is 3rd-party disclosure. Make sure you're allowed to do that.
What a prize it would be for corporate espionage hackers to get into 365's storage!
Re: Cloudy future (Score:2)
Ditto for the EU's GDPR.
It is basically equivalent to treating ALL data as confidential.
(If you tell the people whose private data you process what you will do with it and who you will give it to and in both cases, why, ... *before* asking them if they agree to that, ... and they do ... you're fine though. Not nicr, but legally fine.)
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You have to do a pretty big goof to "mis-stroke" an entire document into Research. Hell unless your document has nuclear launch codes with text preceding it saying "this is the nuclear launch code:" the odds of you actually making a mistake like the one you describe are astronomically low, even before anyone questions as to whether it is even relevant or not.
Considering the number of Fortune 500 companies that happily throw secret information into an Azure cloud run Onedrive, I don't think your scenario is
Full featured entry. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's meant for specialty situations, as opposed to for an entire organization, such as process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet.
Process control devices that need word, excel, and power-point. No wonder the bad guys are traipsing through our systems.
Re: Full featured entry. (Score:2)
It's a situation that have advantages and disadvantages. And I see Excel as the key tool here for post processing of process data.
Word and powerpoint aren't as interesting there and Outlook probably won't work.
Re: Full featured entry. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most programming languages could do the same task, in a fraction of the time.
Sorry but that's bullshit. I don't care if you're Larry Wall, using a programming language to actively manipulated tabulated data is slow and painful, especially since when you're working with data you're usually not sure of the intended final result and often have to frequently change and rearrange what to display.
If you need an automated unchanging script that does the same thing every time then reach for your programing language of choice. But for the 99% reasons people generally look at tabulated data reaching for a script is nothing more than self-gratification and showing off how complex you can make something really simple.
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Process control devices that need word, excel, and power-point. No wonder the bad guys are traipsing through our systems.
Powerpoint, no, word and Excel, yes. You should have a look at a modern process control system, you'll see that is the least of your concerns when you lay out the graphics on an operator display in HTML and it's processed by the Trident engine (internet explorer) to display on the screen. You want to save alarm data you get choices between CSV so horribly formatted that it will take you a good hour to get it into a sane table (and at this point you'll want to use the Power Query editor to preserve your sani
Or just use LibreOffice. (Score:2)
When was the last time you used a feature that only MS Office has? (Have you checked?)
If you do need such special features, then it is of course OK. But I would be very curious what you do. (Feel free to comment.)
32bit?? when they stopped selling 32 bit windows? (Score:2)
32bit?? when they stopped selling 32 bit windows?
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Lot of COM controls embedded into documents are 32-bit code and thus can only run in 32-bit Excel/Word/PowerPoint. Yeah, some people are seriously "from my cold dead hand" on some of their documents.
Now, if only Adobe would do the same thing. (Score:2)
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Long story short, Affinity is a one-time purchase, it was 50% off when I got it, and cost me around $100 australian for all three packages. It will import IDML fro
Terrible Headline and Title (Score:2)
Story should be "Microsoft Still allows Perpetual Licensing on Office 2021", not "....won't require you to pay for a subscription". The current headline makes it look like the new office will be free.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
"Aren't ready to" (Score:3)
Sorry but I have more faith in my USB drives and hard drives than the infrastructure of my ISP, the national infrastructure, and the corporate infrastructure, and the power grid and the...
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Sorry but I have more faith in my USB drives and hard drives than the infrastructure of my ISP, the national infrastructure, and the corporate infrastructure, and the power grid and the...
And Microsoft's cloud services might not be there when you need them google Azure goes down.
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(shakes fist at the sky)
Re:"Aren't ready to" (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll admit that it's literally a control issue.
If I have data, I'm in control of it. It's not that I won't use a Google Doc, or that I won't throw a file into the cloud, or whatever. I just won't RELY on it.
Data under my control, on hardware under my control, is what I want. I don't care if it's more expensive, less convenient, more difficult for someone to do, I will do that extra work to keep my data under my control.
Same for my actual machine. I want it under my control. I want to dictate when it turns on and off (Windows 10 is a nightmare of processes that start up a computer unexpectedly, for instance). Why? Well, because it's my machine. And I don't want it coming on at 3am while it's in a laptop bag with no ventilation, in my bedroom while I'm asleep, just to install Windows Updates, for instance.
And it's not that Microsoft et al want "control" of my machine themselves, really. They just don't want me to have control. So they get sidelined and overruled. I virtualise the OS and so try running at night now that you're just a disk image file.
I have no problem with cloud, I see it like wireless: It's fine while it works, it's good and convenient and useful. I make use of it and sometimes I'm glad it's so easy to just quickly do something using it.
But the fact is that at some point the airwaves are going to get so busy that it's going to become unreliable, and the interfaces are eventually going to become insecure in some manner, so I also want a way that isn't reliant on it (which is why my laptop also has an Ethernet port). Wireless has actually proven more reliable than the public Internet and billion-dollar cloud services, surprisingly, but I don't rely on it. When WEP was broken, and then WPA was broken, I wasn't reliant on them. I'd already VPN'd over my own wireless, in my own house, for all devices, to my router years before. WEP was quick and convenient and free, but I didn't rely on it for my security and that paid off in bundles when WEP was then obsoleted. And because it was my VPN in place, it was in my control to decide when to upgrade hardware.
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Well said! I can't imagine putting data vital to one's interests beyond one's own direct control. It simply doesn't make sense.
In fact, I think I might frame your statement, "Data under my control, on hardware under my control" and hang it on the wall in my office.
Like you, I use the Cloud for a variety of things (especially data backup). Also like you, I have made sure I don't rely on it. It's a convenience...an important one, but still JUST a convenience.
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Yep.
Give me the power, AND the responsibility, or neither.
If I'm responsible for the data, I want the power to control where it goes, what's done to it, and who can see it.
Fix crashes first please (Score:2)
Paying for Office 365. Hey Microsoft how about making Excel crash less on my loaded MacBook Pro touchbar? And make it not freeze when I select some columns to copy (only 1000 rows) into a new workbook? I suppose Excel is remembering that I once clicked in the last row of the file and never let me reset the extents? For 2021, it is a POS.
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If Microsoft tried to charge home users for a subscription they would just use Google Docs or Libreoffice
I never paid for Office until it was a subscription. It's 6TB of cloud storage for $100/year. That's a really good price. I get a copy of office for free along with it as far as I'm concerned.
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Different purpose, different use case.
The cloud storage you pay for is backed up and has service guarantees, you can access it from anywhere with an internet connection.
Your portable drive is not backed up unless you do so yourself, which would result in increased cost. You can access it from anywhere so long as you have it with you.
You have your portable drive forever, assuming you don't lose it or it fails in some way.
The only thing the portable drive gives you is control, you can decide wether to encrypt
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Why would anyone use Microsoft products on a Mac? Anyone who has a Mac should use Pages, Numbers and Keynote instead of helping Microsoft's quasi-monopoly on office software.
Some times ya gotta. I stopped using MS-Office because I needed compatibility between Mad, Windows, and Linux - as in files prepared on any of those had to look and print identically. MS office obviously didn't have Linux support, and didn't look the same between Windows and Mac.
That was before Pages came out, and I haven't used MS-Office, and Pages seems to handle it okay. But there's still the Linux issue.
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The incompatibility comes from unpublished MS formats, fonts or versions. Often times different versions of Office will create these issues as well. It's depressing having this conversation with people who think MS Office is standardized across time and platforms.
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If you need it to look exactly the same, then you need to use exactly the same configuration as they did - including the patch level, default printer, screen etc, and even that is no guarantee.
MS formats have tons of incompatibilities, and the only thing masking them is the fact that most document sharing takes place in corporate environments where every user is provided with identical centrally managed equipment.
Having worked in mixed windows/mac environments where every user is provided the latest msoffic
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It's not preinstalled with the OS, it's preinstalled when you buy hardware. If you install macos yourself, then it doesn't come with these apps by default.
More importantly, you can cleanly remove these apps if you don't want them.
Linux distros also typically come with fully functional software by default, and most OEMs shipping systems preinstalled with windows bundle extra stuff too. The difference is that MS want to charge you extra for what Apple and Linux distros give you as standard.
MS typically supply
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