fj12ryder wrote:
Nice to know, all. Thank you for the information. I've not interest in Office, since I do use only spreadsheets and word processor, and OpenOffice works very well for that.
Thank you for the info on ransomware.
I wouldn't call Office 365 ransomware, MS is upfront with the fact if you don't pay it will quit working. The idea is to present a lower upfront cost on a subscription to the software and in return you get "free" upgrades to the next major release.
Subscription based products lure people in that would normally never be willing to pay full price for the software since it is priced so high to start with. MS gets a win in the fact they have pretty much guaranteed repeat business in subscriptions.
Generally perpetual license owners will often skip multiple version releases. This is often done to avoid major costs and hassles of retraining and supporting company wide users since most relase changes means the UI has changed drastically, tools may have be relocated or removed or some software they use may have dependencies which may require a specific file format which gets "enhanced" or removed.
As far are Open Office goes, yes, I have it, it works well, UI is a bit time worn (Office 97-2000 look) but for some folks that need to use documents with Visual Basic it is a non starter since Open Office does not support VB enable documents. The other issue with Open Office is it isn't actively being updated so as time goes on less and less documents will interchange.
I have looked at LibraOffice, a bit newer looking interface, it is being actively updated which should keep it a bit more compatible with other programs.
You can also still use MS Office 2000, I have loaded it on Win10 and it runs fine and yrs ago MS offered a Win2007 "compatibility pack" which can be added to Office 2000 that gives you the capability to open and save newer MS Office formats with file extensions ending in "X".
Recently had to help someone with Win11 so I got my first distaste of it.. It is more like putting more lipstick on a pig.. At least MS learned the lesson from the Win8.0 mess and left a desktop UI and not force a tablet UI on users again.. But man, what were they thinking on the task bar centering thing?
