If Microsoft had its way, Office 2021 probably wouldn’t be news at all—the Redmond giant would almost certainly prefer that everyone simply subscribe to Microsoft 365, pay a small monthly or annual fee, and get new features and fixes as they’re rolled out. For many if not most Office users, the subscription-based service is the most convenient way to get Office, even when they want to use it as locally installed software rather than doing their work in the browser and in the cloud.
For the rest of us—and for those who don’t want to put up with the Byzantine procedures necessary to install Microsoft 365 apps on Remote Desktop Servers—there’s Office 2019 now, and there will be Office 2021 later this year. There will also be a new Office LTSC (Long Term Service Channel), which trades a 10 percent price hike for a guarantee of longer support periods… longer than the consumer version of Office 2021, that is.
A new version of Microsoft Office used to be big news in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Now, with Office 365, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and several more than capable older standalone versions of Office, it feels like most people just don’t care anymore.
Yeah I also lost interest, mostly. although occasionally I still use Outlook, the best desktop calendaring application I’m aware of. But it doesn’t run on my Arch Linux XFCE desktop 🙁
Text editing –> Markdown (Ghostwriter is great)
Spreadsheets –> Gnumeric (fast and precise)
Complicated calculations –> Some light programming
Still I can imagine that folks love office suites. Microsoft offers a solid choice. The dark mode is a nice and welcome addition!
I got fed up with the treadmill and broken spell checker integration with email every time one or the other “upgraded” and the ribbon was the last straw. LibreOffice works for me. I have no desire or need to feature creep my way into being locked in to either platform. Why people keep splashing out for a product class which reached maturity approaching two decades ago I have no idea. About 90% of this I suspect like with Photoshop et al is “Fear Of Missing Out”.
People DO care about updates!!!
The updates we want are for:
1. Reliability/dependability!!! Office would get a reliability rating of a D+.
We support multiple types of computers with multiple types of OSs. We have more than 15,000 people in our company and over 20,000 computers using Windows, Mac and Linux.
Prorated for the number of average calls per year per person, Windows have 700% more calls PER PERSON than any other operating system.
It’s worse for Office. We have people using both MS Office and OpenOffice.
Our developers using Windows, Mac and Linux also and out of all the calls we get for DEVELOPERS, Windows has 86% of the calls, Linux with 9% and Mac 5%. These are based on like engineers. Meaning sr vs sr developers, etc.
2) We also use both MS Office and OpenOffice. Some people get to choose (managers more open and less afraid of tech) and others scared to use anything other than MS.
93% of those calls, averaged per person, is support for MS Office and 7% for OpenOffice. Open Office is less confusing and we have far less problems across the board with all the applications even though we use Exchange servers for all our email. Outlook has a lot more problems than the email client for Linux or Mac.
PS: Of COURSE MS wants them to pay a monthly fee. They don’t want to worry about whether or not people will find the new features not worth paying for. Especially if they don’t DRAMATICALLY improve BOTH the functionality and reliable of both Windows and Office.
Those of us who are “anti-Microsoft” became that way when we started working where I do now and found that Mac and Linux and are FAR more dependable than Windows. And the same is true for OpenOffice and other products that may not be an office suite but individually perform the same functions with the same or better end results.
Given a choice, and I used MS OSs only from 1982 through 1995 before being exposed to OS/2, BeOS, Linux and Mac Classic and later MacOS/Mac OS X, I would switch the entire company away from MS products. They are a huge financial drain on the company requiring far more support staff per person than other OSs and other Office Suites or individual applications that combined together do the same jobs.
THE biggest thing MS needs to do is a quality check on each and every programmer they have. Not in the way that Steve Balmer set things up like a Game of Thrones to see who stays and goes, but a true quality check for each programmer (there are actually programs you can buy that can determine the quality level of code in programs) and fire those that rate less than 8 out of 10 unless they have shown major improvements in their coding in the last twelve months.
I would then focus the programers that are still there to focus on the problem issues in each and every program in the office suite as well as Windows itself.
If they must, set aside 10% of staff to come up with new features. But the rest need to be focused on improving the reliability and functionality (how do I do the same thing with less steps that make more sense than how X is written now).
THAT is what people care about. I hear people all day long swearing AT their computer if they use Windows and MS Office. Meanwhile those people using Linux and Mac swear FOR their computers, especially if they are using OpenOffice or individual programs combined together to make an unofficial office suite.
PS: If I were suddenly able to buy MS, I would keep only Excel and get rid of Visual Basic.
People don’t care and are not enthusiastic about **** but they are about products that work and are reliable and help them make product products.
I lost interest also. O365 is now a crippling suite as updates are forced on a global level, crippling the User interface, and moving things around. It’s frustrating using the letency laiden Outlook 365 as oppossed to Exchange/Outlook as I search through historical emails to show proof to my boss that I’ve done the needful turns into a slideshow as critical apps move to the cloud in yuor browser. Top that off with the incompatability to Firefox, so privacy is out of the question as it’s apparently more buggy than usual. I’ll stay with Tbird and LibreOffice. Add to that 2FA has been broken with my company.