I have had MS Office for many years. My Office 365 subscription runs $69.99/year, which I’m OK with – 1 TB of storage and all.
I recently got an email that the next time my subscription renews, the price will be $99.99/year. And I’ve noticed that Copilot is constantly intruding – very annoying.
I am convinced that Microsoft upgraded customers to a higher tier without permission or options, and have made the “Basic” subscription invisible. Upselling us without telling us. And while I like Office, I do NOT want their AI Copilot.
I don’t need Office the way I did years ago, so I’m emptying out my One Drive and using Libre Office in anticipation of ditching Office 365. These types of antics make customers leave.
Here’s a video about what Microsoft is doing with subscriptions – very dishonest.
What I was saying is that you can buy MS Office and a disk for storage for about the same price as a 1 year subscription. Granted the drive would be local but for many people that is not an issue.
I live in a hurricane zone, so I like everything online and on local portable USBs. Plus my kids like to mine the 25,000 family photos dating back to the 1930s. It’s a private online digital museum.
LibreOffice works great. I have used it on Linux, Mac, and I believe Windows (haven’t touched in years). However, I rarely use it these days. I use Google docs. It’s free and has 15GB of storage. Why not just move to Google?
I have Google Drive for certain types of documents. 15 GB is not that much storage b/c Android photos + Gmail + Google Drive are all included in the 15 GB – after which Google will delete your files.
Also – Google Drive changes formatting for certain documents – most docs are OK, but when a Word or Excel doc is uploaded, the formatting can completely change, which just creates more work for me.
So I limit Google Drive to certain docs with people/groups that also use Google docs.
In general, I’m not a fan of it.
Don’t subscribe, you don’t need 365. If you want to stick with Office, just go get a license online for 2019 for $20. Permanent. Seriously, what can you add to an “Office Suite”? I could revert back to Office 2007 and be perfectly happy.
