Microsoft Announces Office 2021 Features and Pricing (theverge.com) 102
Microsoft is launching Office 2021 on October 5th, and the company is finally detailing the features and pricing today. From a report: Office 2021 will be the next standalone version of Microsoft's Office suite, designed for businesses and consumers who want to avoid the subscription version of Office. Office Home and Student 2021 will be priced at $149.99 and include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams for PC and Mac. Office Home and Business 2021 is priced at $249.99 and will include everything in the Home version and Outlook for PC and Mac, alongside the rights to use all of the Office apps for business purposes. Office 2021 will include the collaboration features found in Microsoft 365 versions of Office, with real-time co-authoring, OneDrive support, and even Microsoft Teams integration. Office 2021 will also include the new Office design that has a refreshed ribbon interface, rounded corners, and a neutral color palette that all matches the UI changes in Windows 11.
If that does not fit your budget (Score:3)
There are a few competing products that are more affordably priced, like this [libreoffice.org] or this [openoffice.org].
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I haven't used MSOffice in a long time, but I absolutely love the PDF Generation capabilities of LibreOffice. If you understand how to set up the ToC and headings properly, it'll generate an excellent index for the PDF file.
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I haven't used MS Office in a long time, ...
Same, except for Publisher. I use it a lot to create greeting cards to send to friends/family. So far I haven't found another software product that's as good (or easy) for this as Publisher. Perhaps I'm missing something, anyone feel free to let me know.
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You know what you will love even more?
LibreOffice's files are just zips with an XML file and some other stuff in there.
Making it trivial to process them with your scripts and other software, and turn them into whatever you like.
(Try a good XPath/JQuery-like tool for your shell. Those documents will feel like object databases to you.)
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Re:If that does not fit your budget (Score:5, Funny)
Those work, yes.
But they are like the 'Christian Rock' version of an office suite. *Almost* the real thing, and people who don't understand what they really do won't see a difference, but it is there.
Have you ever seen a Christian Rock music video? Everything is great! But it sure as heck isn't rock and roll.
Libre Office is Christian Rock productivity. Some people will try to convince themselves it's just as good, but most people can instantly see the difference.
Kirk Cameron ain't no Kurt Cobain.
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That has been my POV after experimenting with OpenOffice, LibreOffice, StarOffice, etc. over many years. While these alternatives closed the gap somewhat, they still miss the mark. Especially nowadays, since Office 365 apps are tightly integrated with "the Microsoft 365 cloud." For a business environment that can take advantage of this it's a no-brainer. Not the cheapest solution granted, but it's seamless and just works.
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Most businesses don't give a shit and want to please their directors with "seamless integration" and functionalities that increase productivity, make it easy for them to work wherever they are, and things like that.
MS goes where the money is. Business users.
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Yeah well, we don't work there. And proudly never will.
Why do you think we got so much time to post here?
Re:If that does not fit your budget (Score:4)
Most of us have no desire to store all our private stuff in MS's cloud, so that tight integration is a downside of MS Office rather than a upside.
There are a large number of enterprise customers who disagree. That's really the target of M365 anyway. But thanks for hitting that "my private stuff and cloud is bad" dog whistle. Recognize that these corporate/enterprise clients are governed by all manner of regulations, not the least of which is probably SOX. They seem to manage. I'm sure your grocery list, family photos, and Quicken file will be just fine.
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Ohh snap, you learned about the term 'dog whistle'. Is that what you use to 'throw shade'? There are a lot of organizations that have more than adequate resources to store their documents and email off the cloud, and the smart ones do so to avoid security breaches and downtime due to other people's issues from using someone else's machines. You don't work for Microsoft or Solar Winds do you? Just asking.
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Every word processor since WordStar "just works". Who cares?
There was a time when you needed Microsoft Office in case someone sent you a file in their format.
That time is long gone.
Word processing is no longer a specialized application that requires proprietary software.
Businesses that are already in the habit will keep paying for it, but Office doesn't matter anymore.
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Every word processor since WordStar "just works".
Hmm, I suppose I should have qualified my statement as "just works well." There are certainly a lot of alternatives out there. But I think it does matter what tool you use for doing the job. I realize this survey is a few years old now, but it shows market share what works well and what doesn't so much --> https://community.spiceworks.c... [spiceworks.com]. And most companies don't just blindly keep paying for something that really isn't necessary or effective for years and years. At least in my professional experiences
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A survey of what companies use is closer to a survey of what they know than a survey of what would work well for the users.
BwaHaHa
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Well they don't work well when someone sends you documents with forms created in Word documents, etc. That's an issue that can't be got around when you have to deal with them from organizations you can't control. BTW, I used Word Star when it was just dot commands, to collaborate with others to create a dozen three or four inch thick binders that became the operating procedures for a silicon smelter. I couldn't even touch type then. So yeah, I don't care what office suite people use, but I do care about int
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Every word processor since WordStar "just works". Who cares?
Today it's not just about "word processing." It's about collaboration on large complex documents across remote workforces, while tracking changes made.
Doing that via email and WordStar is a nightmare.
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Well, to be fair, that's usually a nightmare no matter how you're doing it.
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Re:If that does not fit your budget (Score:5, Insightful)
All this "tight cloud integration" is getting on my nerves. I can hardly save a Word document any more without Word trying to save it to my Oneclouddrivethingbobby (which takes ages because it has to query servers first etc.). Just let me save the damned thing on the network drive where we store all our other company documents. Also, I don't want to fucking log in to a word processor or other office software. Let me open my files and save them locally as I please, thank you very much.
We're using Office 2019, btw. - from the MS Action Pack.
Dear Microsoft... fuck off and leave me alone.
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I was of the same mindset when this "cloud first" thing started rolling out. I administer our corporate network and we already just save files into network drives and had for years. Then I realized (especially with the 2020-2021 work from home deal) how saving files to OneDrive makes them easier accessible from anywhere. Be it a laptop, a mobile device, anything with a web browser, etc. Once I started changing our corporate mindset it's been a blessing in disguise :)
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...forgot to speak to the account login mechanism. At first this too drove me nuts. But the upside I found is that licensing is so much easier to maintain. About 7 years ago we had a Microsoft audit. I had to pull each and every Windows, Office, etc. license paper with the product key and match them up against our install base. It's a lot easier to just manage them against the Microsoft Volume License Service Center and Office 365 online licensing. Portable and eliminates cardboard file boxes stacked with p
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If you enable multifactor authentication and enroll all mobile devices in mobile device management usually this isn't the worst case scenario. Maybe "accessible from anywhere by a multiple layered authenticated user." Unless someone can point me to a huge intrinsic data breach of the Office 365 infrastructure.
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Seeing that 365 has been around for awhile, and seeing how the 24x7 negative news cycle is pervasive, I'm fairly certain that if these scenarios played out we would all have heard of them. We have corporate data sitting in AWS, Azure, and Google, and I don't lose much sleep at night.
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Re:If that does not fit your budget (Score:4, Insightful)
Inherently initiated from the outside, aside from phishing? Yes I have. Mostly due to things like S3 buckets not being properly secured --> https://www.computerweekly.com... [computerweekly.com]. Hate to say it Sparky, but "the cloud" is anything out on the Internet. An on-prem endpoint that's accessible via the Internet would need to be secured just as an AWS, Azure, Google, etc. endpoint would need to be. That's not an inherent "cloud" issue as much as an issue with an incompetent IT team not properly securing things.
Most of the folks on here who cry out "Micro$oft sucks!" "Apple sucks!" "Google sucks!" and whatnot usually haven't had to occupy a position where they administer IT services for any decently sized business. I'd love to know of any decently-sized business that has zero interaction with any of these vendors. Sure I could spin up a Netware 5 server, disconnect it from the Internet, have all my clients running all sorts of Linux distro variants, etc. and be uber secure. Not sure what kind of business that would be, however.
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...and this is coming from a person who has deployed Linux in business environments going back to MySQL on Slackware in 1997, up through FreePBX on CentOS in 2019, As much as I detest rush hour commuting traffic, I'm not going to crash my car into a guard rail and walk in 95 degree heat the full 25 miles home.
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So in this scenario...there are backup "tapes?" I recall putting my eggs into that basket years ago. Where you'd have the rotating jukebox rotating them. Yes, there is more immediate physical control, and likewise the physical encumbrances of media failure. You don't stream any backup sets to "the cloud?" If so, therein lies the rub too I suppose. Any larger company that doesn't stream their backup datasets offsite somewhere is leaving themselves open for a potential train wreck. And if not streaming the ba
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I've heard of plenty of dumbasses setting their buckets to public, and then people legitimately retrieving that data when they shouldn't have been given that permission - yes.
An actual S3 data *breach* - no, I've never heard of one.
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I've been using OneDrive, Dropbox etc. for years. The thing I object to is MS Word not letting me save into my OneDrive folder locally and then having OneDrive the system tray app take care of the upload. MS Word wants me to log into Onedrive within MS Word and then have the Save File dialog upload my changes directly to OneDrive. Opening the "Save as" dialog now takes 10x as long as it did back when I could just save locally - even though I'm saving to the exact same location.
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Yeah I encounter that as well. Theoretically this shouldn't behave this way. Lately I think Microsoft has turned their attention to so much 365 and Azure that their fat clients, yes even the Windows OS itself, have fallen by the wayside. A simple example is running the Team local app can drag down my users to a crawl. The only solution is to kill off the Teams app and just use it via a web browser. Then it's fine. No clue as to why it drags things down as such. And then when you look at huge Windows 10 upda
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I'd pay extra money to get rid of that crap
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I just switched one of my older Thinkpads to Ubuntu and installed Win10 in a VM for work. Same thing... holy crap that's a lot of "please sign up and consent to this and that".
And even full-blown Ubuntu with Unity (the Linux distribution with the reputation as a fat, sluggish pig of a distro) is super-responsive (pretty much instant) on this ancient Thinkpad. Oh and not a single driver installation necessary - looks like a lot has changed since the last time I tried this about 5 years ago.
Guess I can start
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Sorry, I think this is just hallucinated snobbery, and you're full of shit, no offense.
Like people who swear that their music sounds "warmer" if they replace the volume knob by a $400 wooden one from Monster.
Can you actually show what's "missing" there?
And I mean things normal people actually use. Not your obscure speciality functions that the thing is the wrong tool for anyway. (E.g. using Word for DTP -> You're doing it wrong.)
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Here's a comparison sample --> https://wiki.documentfoundatio... [documentfoundation.org]. Like I said, the past few years the gaps have shrunk between these apps to a degree. So perhaps I'm looking at this through the prism of someone who tried to save a company some money and deploy OpenOffice years back. In those days the gaps were a lot more stark. From a features and usability standpoint. Perhaps lately that might not be the case.
Re: If that does not fit your budget (Score:1)
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I argue that MS Office isn't Libre Office either. After using LO/Star Office/OO, MS feels rather poor.
Most of my irk comes from the lack of screen space by default. At least with LO you can work on your document without wasted screen space. Just feels more comfortable by default. Another helpful thing is the filter in LO, the button is on the toolbar by default. Using the ribbon to find it in Excel is just hassle.
It also seems to start much faster than MSO.
It is preference that probably comes down to what y
That has not been my experience. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have found that LibreOffice Writer and Calc do everything that I ever used MS Word and Excel to do. Not in a "similar but clearly not as good" way, but in a "complete replacement just-as-good-or-better" way.
I imagine there are sets of features that some people use in MS Office that I do not. I have read about things like tight integration with SQL Server, and as others have mentioned, cloud integration (though I found these instructions [addictivetips.com] for that, I don't actually use this feature and don't know how workable these are). So, what you are saying is probably 100% true for specific feature sets.
But for what feels to me like "ordinary officing," LibreOffice is tip-top.
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I've tried for the past year to use LibreOffice. It's perfectly fine for content you create yourself and circulate to other LibreOffice users, but if you're collaborating with MS Office people it's a pain - Particularly for Impress / PowerPoint. You get a PowerPoint deck to review so you open it in Impress. It doesn't open identically, so then when you save it and send it back to PowerPoint people it's all messed up.
I find that Microsoft's free cloud Office Suite ("competin
Re:That has not been my experience. (Score:4, Insightful)
File versions on OneDrive only for Office (Score:2)
Indeed.
A critical features of cloud storage is being able to version files. Get back yesterday's version before I stuffed it up. Drobox, GDrive etc. do it.
But although OneDrive says it does it, it is actually only through the office apps which seem to save directly to it. All the other applications that one might use that just save to files do not get versioned. Go figure!
Took a while to work that out given their misleading docs.
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Kirk Cameron ain't no Kurt Cobain.
Can confirm. Kurt Cobain is dead, while Kirk Cameron is alive and well.
Feel free to extend the analogy with the anticipated lifespan of MS Office versus LibreOffice.
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> Kirk Cameron ain't no Kurt Cobain.
But Bill Gates ain't no Jesus Christ.
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Kirk Cameron ain't no Kurt Cobain.
I always liked Larry Norman, though.
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I would say that since the advent of the Ribbon interface that relationship has been inverted.
Not that I really like the analogy. I think a better analogy would be that LibreOffice is that amazing underground band that totally rocks while MS Office is Nickelback. Like Nickelback, Microsoft achieved immense popularity despite completely sucking ass.
Oddly, I couldn’t remember Nickelback’s name but it was the first thing that came up when I Googed, “that Canadian band that sucks.”
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And, FWIW, for those people who *like* the ribbon, LibreOffice has both menu (default) and ribbon (a couple of clicks away) interfaces. The LO version is called the 'tabbed interface' which may have led to some ribbon fans missing it.
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Until, you get a customer or a Boss, complaining, that they cannot open your file, or complain about the formatting, even though it looks perfect on your screen.
Then you have those silly Office Application that run on VBA and other junk, that seems to be running the business together.
PORTABLE Document Format (Score:2)
Until, you get a customer or a Boss ... complain about the formatting, even though it looks perfect on your screen.
That's what PDFs are for.
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Yeah, hate to tell you, but since I think a decade, LibreOffice is better at opening old MS Office documents than MS office itself.
MS was always shit at handling old versions. Because it's horrifying spaghetti code inside.
You know how we know?
They released the OOXML spec back in the day to try to stop OpenDocument from becoming the dominating standard. Deliberately named to make people think it had something to do with OpenOffice. And OOXML is a horrible nightmare of a mess. I think 1300 pages or something
Excel (Score:3)
There are a few competing products that are more affordably priced, like this [libreoffice.org] or this [openoffice.org].
One word: Excel. It is a fantastic spreadsheet program, and nothing else touches it.
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Also, every times somebody makes statements without backing them up, like you just did, it shows that they do not actually know why, but simply express their feelings.
I'd prefer actual reasons.
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I like open source software as much as the next person, and I desperately wanted LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) to be as good or good enough, but they are just not.
Anyone who works with spreadsheets in a serious way knows this.
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Also, every times somebody makes statements without backing them up, like you just did, it shows that they do not actually know why, but simply express their feelings.
I'd prefer actual reasons.
Your sentiment is understandable. Unfortunately I'm at work and don't have time to provide a detailed explanation of why Excel is a great program.
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There was a time where I had to begrudgingly use Excel because LibreOffice had a lot of catching up to do. That was a long time ago. I deal with spreadsheets all the time—spreadsheets that often originated on Excel or I have to share with Excel users. LibreOffice works like a charm.
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There are a few competing products that are more affordably priced
I've tried for the past year to use LibreOffice. It's fine for content you create yourself and circulate to other LibreOffice users, but if you're collaborating with MS Office people it's a pain - Particularly for Impress / PowerPoint. You get a PowerPoint deck to review so you open it in Impress. It doesn't open identically, so then when you save it and send it back to PowerPoint people it's all messed up.
I find that Microsoft's free
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I downloaded Libre, and it works...fine. Much like the comment co
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Yes, but WTF? :
Office Home and Business 2021 is priced at $249.99 and will include everything in the Home version and Outlook for PC and Mac, alongside the rights to use all of the Office apps for business purposes.
An extra $100 for the "right" to use it for business purposes?
Is this a fake "sale" that is really a licensing/rental agreement?
A real purchase should include a Doctrine of First Sale, allowing you to do whatever you want with your purchase.
M$ BAD Score:11 billion insightful (Score:2)
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I suggest reading up on the history of MIcrosoft buddy. People here always say this, because they are older than you, and the have been burned. Every single one of them. Most more than once.
Yeah, the equivalent of a huge tattoed guy who literally played Leatherface with SCO and Nokia, to this day is actively hostile to the very people that financially support him, and somehow always got away by paying a fine of a fistful of peanuts... yes, you normally assume everything he does will be bad and untrustworthy
Garbage Interfface (Score:1)
The Garbage Interface that started in 2007 gets worse with each iteration.
How about getting rid of the rounded corners, swishing, and idiot bars ...
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So, when will Outlook become multithreaded? (Score:3)
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Don't install COM addins. Those are 100% guaranteed to ruin Outlook. Outlook's COM interface is completely borked as in it doesn't release refcounts when it should and addins have to do refcounting for Outlook. And even then it's bugged. Yeah, if you install any addins, you are absolutely asking for trouble.
And it's not like Microsoft doesn't know about the issues. MVPs have been requesting this get fixed in Outlook since the early days of Outlook. Microsoft still makes piles of money on Office, so th
installed it (Score:2)
Its been on msdn for at least a few weeks. I've installed it, can't tell the difference from 2016.
From the linked article... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Office Home and Student 2021 will be priced at $149.99 and include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams for PC and Mac. Office Home and Business 2021 is priced at $249.99 and will include everything in the Home version and Outlook for PC and Mac, alongside the rights to use all of the Office apps for business purposes."
So $149 for a version of Office that doesn't include Outlook. Doesn't include Access either but is probably less of a concern for most people. And you can't use it for "business purposes" unless you pony up another $100.
For me it's not really the $249 - it's the audacity of selling some half baked version of it for $149 and not allowing anyone to use it for "business purposes". If all you can do with it is use it at home then you might was well download OpenOffice for free. Yes, it doesn't have every single possible feature that MS Office has but it's free and nobody is going to tell you where you can or cannot use it.
When you couple this with the restrictions for Windows 11 it's almost as if Microsoft doesn't want home customers. They are happy to soldier on with their likely more profitable monopoly with enterprise customers.
When I read stories like this it just confirms in my mind that I made the right decision to ditch Microsoft entirely about six year ago. Good riddance.
They sent out a notice today to O365 subscribers. (Score:2)
It says Outlook from Office 2013 and Office 2016 will no longer be able to connect to their servers starting in, I think it said, November. Sounds like this goes hand in hand with what you're saying.
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For $150, that's a reasonable edition. Even without business use, it's not a bad price.
When I set up a computer for my parents, that's the edition I'd go for. They don't do business stuff, but they do need their spreadsheet and word processor, and honestly, there are better things to do in life than try to get through the edge cases where LibreOffice falls flat, because while it's "good enough", if it fails, it generally fails very spectacularly.
So $150 isn't bad for software so the kid can do their schoolw
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"For $150, that's a reasonable edition. Even without business use, it's not a bad price." - Free is better :-)
"They don't do business stuff, but they do need their spreadsheet and word processor, and honestly, there are better things to do in life than try to get through the edge cases where LibreOffice falls flat, because while it's "good enough", if it fails, it generally fails very spectacularly." - I hear a lot of people say this but I haven't really found any of those edge cases in my own personal use.
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Free is better, yes, but my time isn't, and helping my parents fix up documents that got mangled will eat up that $150 savings rather quickly. Plus, if it results in them needing MS Office in the end because they want to make sure the document didn't get mangled, well, that's just a loss in the end.
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If it can disallow business use, it isn't really a sale.
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Compact list of new features since $year, anyone? (Score:2)
I wonder... is there a list of new features since e.g. Word 1.0 or the like out there?
I don't mean change logs. I mean something with a maximized information density and a hierarchical structure, so you can browse all the features that the software has above your current one, and check if you actually need them. Especially if you can compare it against current LibreOffice.
I feel like Office is finished since more than two decades ago.
But I might have missed some great things that appeared since I was extrem
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Here's your list:
https://support.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
Most features are for Excel (which I suppose die hard Excel users may appreciate). But I agree with you that Office has been a finished product for decades.
Pretty much the only reason to upgrade Office is to keep getting security updates and file format support.
How long will Office2021 be supported? (Score:1)
For how many years will Microsoft provide security/bug fixes?
Does Microsoft guarantee future versions of Windows will be supported with Office2021?
Damn! I Just Bought Office 2019 (Score:2)
A couple of weeks ago. That was a short lifespan. Did something change in the Office world that needed a full new version already? Bleeding their existing customers they are. I know us Office users are like the folks that wear little alligators on their shirts. We know a generic (LibreOffice) shirt would cover our selves just fine, but it's not the same. We HAVE to have the latest and greatest shiny from Microsoft. Such is life.
Looking at the list of apps (Score:2)
Does this mean they've finally driven a stake through the heart of that abomination known as Access?
New feature list (Score:2)
Boils down to we changed the UI so it looks different now pay us. Have there been any substantive positive changes to the MS office suite over the last decade?
LibreOffice is here .. (Score:2)
Its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity.
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LaTeX – A document preparation system [latex-project.org]
The pavlov reflex to "MS announces" (Score:2)
Can I turn it off and if, how?
Excel dynamic arrays (Score:2)