It’ll be like Google: everything goes in, nothing comes out unless you jump through difficult hoops, price continually goes up.
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com
on 27 Aug 13:29
nextcollapse
Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 14:02
nextcollapse
If you’re in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.
It’s a download link, on their respective dashboard you can select between the catagories you want. Like on Google you can select if you want youtube, drive, gmail, or everything at once.
With GDPR they have 7 days to comply, and it should be available to any EU citizen even when outside of EU territory. So I’m assuming you can just change your region. Either way, takeout.google.com is where I’d go.
Yeah, i ised take out before, it took 2 weeks to download my photos, i think 8 60gb downloads. It was painful, I got hopeful that youbhad discovered a workaround.
Ah, that’s unfortunate. Tbh I’ve been downloading 200GB there frequently and haven’t had any issues.
GDPR can also be called upon using a registered letter and they are required to deliver as well. I’m not sure but that might be a way to recieve a physical copy.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 13:44
nextcollapse
Anakinsmirk.jpg
ook@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Aug 14:11
nextcollapse
Mario_Kart8_deluxe.iso.docx
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Aug 16:22
collapse
No, they upload your file, delete the local file, then oopsie, you ran out of cloud storage, please pay $99/month to access your files.
Not mine, then again I use nothing Microsoft on my Mac.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 27 Aug 12:55
nextcollapse
www.libreoffice.org for anyone who wants microsoft to stop messing with their office apps.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 13:38
nextcollapse
I second this. There’s a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it’s not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it’s been great.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Aug 14:19
nextcollapse
Office would have a learning curve too if you hadn’t been using it since you were a child.
This is very true. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since 2007 and at my new workplace everyone’s using it. It’s really hard and I don’t find anything. Yesterday I was working with tables but I gave up and had IT install libreoffice instead.
Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.
Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).
Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn’t seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.
I’m on my phone, so I didn’t search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there’s a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.
I’ve no recent experience with either so I can’t comment on how well either works.
Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.
I believe Open Office and Only Office are different products.
Only Office had a major release in June, 2025.
And you are correct that Open Office last update was back in December 2023.
relativestranger@feddit.nl
on 27 Aug 16:08
nextcollapse
openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.
libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice’s status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.
onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for ‘reasons’.
mintiefresh@piefed.ca
on 27 Aug 16:29
nextcollapse
Ah I see. Thanks for the information. I use both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and generally am happy with both. I kind of just bounce around back and forth.
Man, wouldn’t it be nice if both of our counties didn’t have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?
OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it’s still Lev Bannov’s product.
The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.
Mm knowing that makes me never want to go anywhere near OnlyOffice now, oof.
petrjanda@gonzo.markets
on 28 Aug 06:31
nextcollapse
Don’t ever save your files directly on a samba share with only office. Lost hours of work twice . It doesn’t keep recovery files.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 28 Aug 16:05
collapse
Downside is ties to Russia and performance is really bad, as I understand it’s an Electron web app, not a native application. It also won’t save to network shares properly and will lose your file if you do.
Yes Ms is secretly stealing from users across the world and yet not a single security researcher has found it. AND ALEXA IS LISTENING TO ME 24X365 DAYS A YEAR!
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Aug 14:44
nextcollapse
not a single security researcher has found it
They do find it regularly. Its not even a secret, they are openly advertising it as a feature.
AND ALEXA IS LISTENING TO ME 24X365 DAYS A YEAR!
It is… thats its purpose…
I think you are in the wrong place on lemmy if you are so willingly blind to the realities of tech companies.
Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub
on 27 Aug 15:18
nextcollapse
Forgot the /s?
NotForYourStereo@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 15:40
collapse
Exaggerating what is quite literally happening to make yourself sound smart actually just makes you look like a total dumbfuck.
until your computer force reboots itself in the middle of the day to do updates it didn’t tell you about, and you log back in and later that night find it uploaded all your shit to the cloud and just for good measure deleted some of it too as a fuck you
it’s the Microsoft way
Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 17:11
nextcollapse
I don’t trust Microsoft not to flip that switch back when I’m not looking.
tip: do not write about the revolution, short stories, hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, or your teenage angst and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
tip: Only write about the revolution, short stories about your hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, your teenage angst, and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
They auto updated my 2007 to 365 when my firewall crashed (I had the updated blocked) and then required a subscription. This has happened twice and is such a pain in the ass to reverse. I switched to Libreoffice.
relativestranger@feddit.nl
on 27 Aug 14:48
nextcollapse
Let’s say this huge breach of security and privacy is okay.
How are Microsoft ensuring these sensitive documents are not being transferred via or stored on servers located in hostile countries with lax data laws (such as foreign nations like the USA?).
fullsquare@awful.systems
on 27 Aug 13:49
nextcollapse
Microsoft has already said it doesn’t matter where your data is stored, it isn’t safe from the United States.
But you can change this behaviour in settings, it’s just the default for now.
So, if you don’t trust Microsoft to handle your documents, but still somehow use MS Word and OneDrive, for the moment you can still stop it from saving your Word documents to their servers.
Ms office 2016 install still going strong with zero cloud function. That day I lose it is the day LibreOffice copies itself from the laptop to the desktop. Aint paying for O365
No for most it’s customers and an option for them all. MS is very clear in its policies. Any AI services you use, isn’t sent back for training. The policy is very clearly explained and one of the clearer ones.
Business or enterprise users data isn’t trained and individuals data can opt out
thann@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 14:48
nextcollapse
I remember when facebook had a policy to require users to opt-in to having third parties scrape users data, but then it turned out a “bug” caused FB to sell everyones data anyway and they made billions more money than they would have.
I have no doubt a similar “bug” will make its way to the MS servers if one hasnt already.
A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone.[1][2][3] The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar.
Bob_Robertson_IX@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Aug 13:50
nextcollapse
I actually appreciate this. The only place I use Word is at work, and nothing I create in Word at work is ‘mine’. I do not care at all about the security of things I do at work (that’s for our IT Security team to care about), and all this means is that if I accidentally screw up, or if my computer just up and dies on me… all of my work files should be ‘safe’.
My employer has been going very hard towards ensuring that our work computers can ONLY be used for work purposes. Once I accepted this and embraced it I found that I’m now 100% free of Microsoft for anything personal, and it is amazing.
AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 14:09
nextcollapse
there is a reaching hand that goes further than just using it for work.
lets say you open libreoffice writer and write a party invite. you send this party invite to a friend - they are invited to your party.
your friend opens it in MSWord, its uploaded to the cloud and scraped for all of your personal data to train their AI and to be sold to the lowest bidder.
you had and want nothing to do with microsoft, but they are still harvesting your data.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 27 Aug 14:25
nextcollapse
Export to a .pdf, automatically opens by default in user browser via local storage as a reader, bypasses MS
This is still problematic shit though, on the same level as enabling Recall by default and encrypting W11 storage devices by default.
AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 16:46
collapse
i have been trying to understand what information i send to people and how i send it in an attempt to try and get as lottle data into msrecall as possible.
im not quite there yet (and probably wont be before the oct cutoff) because my mother still uses windows & emails me sometimes, and a few of my friends on discord use windows. its really difficult because i have no control over my data being scraped by products i do not use and have never accepted a eula for. its… aggravating :(
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 27 Aug 16:55
collapse
The unfortunate fact is if a user who views what you post is using a windows machine, the likelihood of the information on their screen being captured by Microsoft is overwhelmingly high.
I guess you may have to approach the issue how you would the public-facing internet at large: if you cannot verify who and how people are viewing your material, do not post any material that can be accessed by windows. If you must, post it through a trusted circle of users who also understand the issue.
Bob_Robertson_IX@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Aug 14:50
collapse
I agree, however you’re never going to be able to fully control things that you’ve sent out for other people. Even this post can, and likely will, end up as training data for AI. ‘The only winning move is not to play’ applies to a lot of things in life, and if you truly want to protect your data then the best move is to not create any data. The second best move is to not share any data that you’ve created.
I mean, I’m in the same boat. This doesn’t effect me except for work stuff. But here’s the thing, all of my documents are already backed up to the cloud via OneDrive settings. So this is redundant at best.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons I hate the MS experience is because they push things on you. Its not your PC, its theirs.
Hey, you want to use OneDrive? No? Are you sure? No? Are you really sure? No? Why don’t I just turn it on for you so you can see how great it is. You must have turned it off by accident, let me turn it back on. OK, OK I get it you really don’t want to use onedrive. Oh, I forgot that fact once our annual update came out and undid that setting. You straight out uninstalled onedirve and altered your registry? Ok, how about we just upload Word documents for you.
solarvector@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 14:49
collapse
Part of why I still hate it at work; work knows almost everything about me. People with poor understanding of PII have my personal information, and use MS products. Microsoft knows all of that, and everything that I type, the notes I make, the phrases I use, inferences on my interests, and can combine that with other profiles. It helps put together a much more complete picture and profile of me and why I interface with. And I can’t opt out, can’t use Linux, and can’t just go somewhere else to avoid it.
Munoz backs up the decision with half a dozen advantages for saving documents to the cloud. From never losing progress and access anywhere to easy collaboration and increased security and compliance.
Munoz kept out the little details where nobody wants this and this is only a good thing for Microsoft
latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 27 Aug 14:00
nextcollapse
I don’t get it, does Microsoft WANT everyone to stop using their products? First they fuck up their OSes, then they start planting shady shit in their OSes, and now it’s down to every single goddamned piece of software they poop out! What in the fuck are they even doing!
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 27 Aug 14:27
nextcollapse
They’re rent-seeking, more than they already are. The data must flow for training, actively burned bridges be damned.
abfarid@startrek.website
on 27 Aug 14:44
nextcollapse
I’m pretty sure most regular users will not even notice the charge, and find it useful down the line. Cause one day they will mess something up, complain to MS that they “lost their work”, will be pointed to the cloud where everything was synced, and rejoice. Most users don’t really care about the implications that their documents are in the cloud.
Office is the product that helped keep Microsoft ticking over. The world is too dependant on Office and people won’t abandon it just because of this.
My fat fingers keep trying to type Microsoft Orifice.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca
on 27 Aug 14:04
nextcollapse
This will be good for the post I saw yesterday where someone was working on some story for weeks and lost it all because they didn’t have a backup lol
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 14:08
nextcollapse
Silence! The great Microsoft has decreed that from this day forward your documents belong to them! No dissension!
Proceed to the payment portal to pay your offerings immediately. Only those worthy enough to pay for the Extra^TM^ and Premium^TM^ tiers will be allowed to use the File menu.
AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 14:12
nextcollapse
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 22:37
collapse
I think it they are based in Latvia now which is in Europe. They did originally start in Russia and still supply the Russian government. Though it is free and open source. So where it is based does not really matter.
OnlyOffice is one of the few open source applications which actually puts effort into its UI. LibreOffice looks straight from 1990. I really would not recommend LibreOffice to anyone who is not technical, whereas OnlyOffice provides a great UI experience.
With the entire West supporting a livestreamed genocide the whole moral highground schtick does not really land for me anymore either.
CallMeAnAI@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 14:34
nextcollapse
Most customers don’t want their users saving locally anyway for data protection and not having to do extra compliance and workstation management.
Of course folks here are acting like setting a default they don’t like is insane chaos.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
on 27 Aug 15:20
nextcollapse
Switched to linux. No regrets so far.
Of the installs I’ve done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit “retry” and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn’t work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.
I’m not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve
Patches@ttrpg.network
on 27 Aug 15:21
nextcollapse
Isn’t this already the default?
I have to change it on every single fuckin document already. Have done so for years now at work.
It’s on per default when signed in to OneDrive. Actually a really nice feature tbh. However, you will be promoted to hell and back if you aren’t signed in to OneDrive. I like the feature for work but I don’t like the idea of it being the default setting.
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 15:27
nextcollapse
I have a Word document saved into my ‘personal account vault’ which is for personal thoughts (like a diary). Does this mean, they’ll automatically upload this too into their cloud?
If that’s the case, not sure what to do. Tempted to go back to old school diary but risk the chance of my family finding it.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
on 27 Aug 16:02
nextcollapse
Markdown is great for that. There also are some WYSIWYG and a lot of side-view editors. If you still want Word-alike, there’s lots of office suites aside from Office 365. Or is it about saving notes to cloud? Even more solutions just for that, aside from plain file-sync clouds.
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 16:26
collapse
Thanks, I’ll look into Markdown!
Or is it about saving notes to cloud?
No, that’s not it. I just want a Word-alike thing that allows me to put a password on it and use it as a ‘modern diary’ (like how you can make chapters and such in Word).
Not sure if I explained it well, English isn’t my native language. So wasn’t sure how to explain it
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Aug 16:44
collapse
Time to learn another language then mix them
Siu Mit USA De Fa Si Si Zu Yi
The Only Good Fa Xi Si Zu Yi Ze Hai Sei Zo Ge
(Destroy fascism in the USA
The only good fascist is a dead one)
Now just need to transpose that and replace some characters. Of course, making it offline would greatly reduce government/corporate surveillance threats. As long as your family aren’t cryptographers, they won’t be able to decrypt it.
(Its Tri-Lingual. Cantonese Jyutping, Mandarin Pinyin, and English of course. Romanization of characters makes it harder to guess words especially when it gets transposed with a bunch of others.)
No big corporation or state institution handling vast amounts of customer data will not allow this. Also really bad for regular consumer too. Microsoft servers will become treasure trove for hackers.
I’m not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I’m sure it’s better now.
My only problem is how Libre Office handles their style system. It’s forced use for things like Footers, and very hard to manipulate and turn off unlike Word.
My own way to bypass it was to replace a new document text into an old converted word text that had the correct footer pages from Word.
I really hate page and Style guides because they always want to propagate everything through entire documents, instead of only changing things on a page by page basis. Adding things to previous pages when you change something isn’t helpful.
otacon239@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 16:46
nextcollapse
I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.
Another user just linked some resources. Incredible the bullshit going on these days. So much going on it’s hard for me to keep up with it all but I’m glad to be enlightened.
BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 17:00
collapse
For today, you can call me Jeeves. To learn more, a quick search for “microsoft genocide” or “microsoft gaza” will give you the answers.
Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.
JigglySackles@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 23:20
collapse
I’m 99% of the way on LibreOffice. Gave it a solid go, but the main thing I use in excel is too cumbersome in Libre. I think it’s a great option for many people though.
You’re thinking as an individual. Excel in the business is what keeps Office afloat. There simply is no substitute. Even if you want to go with another spreadsheet, who’s going to trust that to faithfully import Excel data?
LOL, Excel doesn’t mangle shit. It’s best-in-class spreadsheet software for a dozen reasons. #1 being that it never changes. It’s solid, no other software like it. Business won’t risk fucking around with anything else.
SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies, and one that mainly used Google for Business. Accounting still had to have Excel.
Well, no? It would be ridiculous to expect me to be a power user over all the software I’ve administrated. I judge what people need according to business demands and orders from on high. My judgement is that, yes, some business units require Excel.
That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.
How many individuals care about what businesses do though? Usually they provide the hardware too, so it’s whatever when it comes to what the company chooses to use.
These are more individual concerns for personal hardware. So long live LibreOffice.
Not really. What software and hardware a corporation chooses to use for their workforce is something that employees will not have much control over if they aren’t in a high enough position.
Anything provided by a company is company property anyways. What matters more to me is what is used for personal use than a work computer or work phone or work etc.
So discussion wasn’t off track. You were seeing things from the company perspective assuming the person was seeing it from a corporate position. I’m seeing it from a personal usage perspective and not corporate, which most employees have little control over and it’s not their devices anyways.
deczzz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 16:48
nextcollapse
LibreOffice does everything I need except that their version of Power Point (forgot the name lol) is a mess to work with in terms of making the slide deck visual appealing. Automatic guide lines, snapping and smartart, to name a few.
Thinking about onlyoffice but I’m not sure if I can trust them since I read about then trying to hide their ties to Russia.
hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip
on 27 Aug 17:01
nextcollapse
ODT is better than whatever abomination Microsoft calls a document format.
cley_faye@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 17:03
nextcollapse
“No, I don’t think it will”
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 17:07
nextcollapse
Per the article this can be deactivated
rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 17:50
collapse
Turning it on by default (opt-out instead of opt-in) is still a huge concern and needs spreading the word about.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 Aug 17:51
collapse
Oh very much so. Casual users are going to be donating their documents for AI processing and not even know it
bitwolf@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Aug 17:30
nextcollapse
This feature doesn’t even work.
So many times I’ll save a word doc, attach it to outlook, and it’ll silently attach an older version of the word doc.
Word says its up to date, one drive says its up to date, but outlook still gets an old version.
It takes hours to resolve. Everything Microsoft wastes so much of my time.
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip
on 27 Aug 18:49
nextcollapse
How will this work for (for example) cibersecurity companies that have reports full of client’s vulnerabilities and can’t have them hosted in third parties?
I’m unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.
sonstwas@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Aug 21:25
nextcollapse
It’s still being kept barely alive for whatever reason. But it hasn’t gotten any reasonable updates (I think not even including security updates as of recently, see www.libreoffice.org/…/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/ ).
DupaCycki@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 21:27
nextcollapse
OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.
Ah. I tried that a few times and didn’t care for it myself. Weird that my brain thought it saw OpenOffice.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 10:57
collapse
Only office is designed for people who work with MS files. Libre Office is for people who work with open files.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 28 Aug 09:10
collapse
which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing
It’s not gone. It’s still around. Libre is forked from OpenOffice. When Libre was forked, everyone moved to Libre because Open has a lot of issues, which is why Libre was forked.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 23:01
collapse
“Fuck you, Microsoft.” -Everyone, at all times
Eh, that game where you had two gorillas standing on buildings lobbing exploding bananas at each other was pretty cool.
mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world
on 27 Aug 19:39
nextcollapse
What if I dont use M$ account? So it is just a local user, then where does Word back up to?
dimjim@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Aug 22:23
nextcollapse
This is why Microsoft is making it damn near impossible to set up a new computer without logging into a Microsoft account. Luckily the OOBE trick still works (for now).
Office 365 requires an account to validate the license. Potentially it might work differently for the long term licensed versions (which features released to O365 now wouldn’t reach until the next LTSC release), but I’ve not performed the initial install and licensing of those for clients yet
Or for home users who aren’t already invested in a Microsoft ecosystem your best bet is to just use Libre Office
Edit: I accidentally made Office exclusive to leap years!
I love LibreOffice, but I wish there was an Android app. I’ve even considered learning more app development to try and help, but it’s such a daunting task.
I’ve been writing all my college papers in LaTeX and it’s been great. They look so professional, and it’s easier to work on a collection of text files than one monolithic document.
I swear typesetting your papers is worth half a grade point at least. Then once you find Zotero and realize it will automagically handle your citations and you have auto biblios and cites working in LyX…life changing, absolutely.
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 28 Aug 04:24
collapse
I’ve never learned latex but it seems like a huge learning curve. Never even proficiently learned vim yet
These days you can just use AI to make the outline for you and go from there. Should be easier than ever
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 10:44
nextcollapse
It really depends on what you will use it for. Using it for plain text doesn’t require much, some advanced layouts require a bit more digging, if you’re including fancy graphics, equations, bibliography, footnotes, etc, you’re going to look at managing the relevant libraries to gandle that (they are very well made and very convenient). All in all, it can be as complex as you want, but it can also be quite easy to use.
Also LaTeX is way simpler than plain TeX.
Not really like Vim at all. But yes its a bit of a learning curve. Imo its worth it but I’m an engineering grad student so it is especially suited to my uses.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea. Too many people are still not backing up their data, and the article says “…automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination”.
As long as they really give users full freedom to choose any cloud service, I consider that a win.
JargonWagon@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 03:00
nextcollapse
A definite plus if one option is to backup to self-hosted platforms.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 03:11
nextcollapse
“If you don’t have another cloud destination, don’t worry… we’ll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN’T turn it off! Also, we won’t let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!”
Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don’t think they can get away with it yet. I’m NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What you said is like saying “well, I need surgery, having the monkey from the forest come at me with a knife is better than nothing.”
Microsoft has proven themselves over and over to be the last company you should trust with your data. Even recently they’ve been responsible for losing a life’s worth of data because of OneDrive
They’re already uploading people’s data off of their computers to OneDrive without consent, then deleting the local copies.
Plus their tech work culture is lacking. When they screwed something up with Office 365 and Outlook wasn’t available for over 18 hours (for basically the whole world), their response was a tweet that it’s fixed.
Whereas CloudFlare messed up something for only an hour, they released a comprehensive breakdown on their blog of what happened, what the root cause was, and what they’re going to do to prevent it from happening again.
Which company seems reliable to you?
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
on 28 Aug 02:59
nextcollapse
Good thing I stopped using MS WORD a long time ago.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 10:55
collapse
I stopped at MS Word 2.0, when the Microsoft people agreed with me that it was pretty much broken for large files, and pointed me to an FTP site where there was a new version… which also was broken. Long story short, that’s when I first installed Linux and ran LaTeX and Applixware.
I actually installed WordPerfect 6 for DOS and MS Word for DOS recently. They’re very relaxing for writing and fast too. Then I use LibreOffice to convert the documents to more modern formats if needed.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 15:37
collapse
That’s dope. I recently read that George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar. Maybe that’s why that dude can’t finish a book series.
TuffNutzes@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 04:46
nextcollapse
Cool It finally gets Google docs core functionality after only 20 years. How innovative.
realitista@lemmus.org
on 28 Aug 07:46
nextcollapse
Actually it had auto save for more than a decade. It’s just that now they removed the ability to autosave locally, it must be to onedrive.
Right? People have such immensely weird notions about Office, Microsoft and telemetry, as if they stopped using computers in the 90s and then just read some rage-bait headlines for the last 35 years.
You can save locally by pressing the save icon, yes. But if you want it to autosave every 10 minutes it only allows you to use onedrive as a destination. Or else you are on one of the older versions of Word which still allowed local auto saving.
Well, “save” and “autosave” are two very different features.
Autosave, yes, that’s a OneDrive specific feature.
Which also has nothing to do with what the article is about - they’re talking about Cloud locations of the user’s choosing, which means it will try to default to things like DropBox or Filen just as much as OneDrive.
They’d break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people’s OneDrive, it’d be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they’d lose by default.
they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done, it could also be an “and” where you expected “or”, or an ommision of a specific thing… my point being - it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
it very much is how it works though? show me a lawsuit someone lost before they got caught commiting a crime. and how would you even go about proving that your unpublished documents were used to train AI? even an entire life’s work of one person is just a speck in the training data, it’s impossible to definitively prove your work was stolen and used to train an AI. besides there will always be plausible deniability that the AI just made shit up that happened to look kinda like what you once wrote
an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done
it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
No. Written law always takes precedence. If they spied on your data stored in OneDrive, they’d lose by default the moment the case hit the courthouse.
As for your second paragraph: yeah, I agree. If they did that, the damage would’ve already been done. But it would kill the business once found out. The benefit is not worth the risk.
For example: you’re saying that they would use it to train AI, right?
They don’t train AI. They get a trained model from OpenAI.
because your phone/laptop doesn’t have a global wi-fi connection, and you might want to open a document pause for dramatic effect outside of your home or work!
TheProtagonist@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 13:34
nextcollapse
Depending on your setup, you will always have an offline copy, too.
I’ve yet to see a cloud storage solution that doesn’t have offline-storage.
Like… WTF is going on? This is the Technology community, and yet you people come here and comment like you’ve only dealt with computers in the 90s…
The file is saved locally, then - as soon as there’s a network connection - gets uploaded to the Cloud and remains in both locations. You can access it from both “ends” - if you edit it in the Cloud or on a different device, the changes get sync’d down, etc.
i’ve seen my friends who never changed a setting in their life struggle with not being able to access their files when their internet died. how default settings work i do not know exactly myself, i don’t use cloud saving
There are only two possibilities here: either they were trying to access these files offline on a different device, or they had their storage completely full.
In the latter case OneDrive will kick out the oldest files to Online Only, so that you still have space to save newer stuff locally.
Oh, I guess there’s a third option - they were using some obscure third party cloud storage. Something that’s not Filen, OneDrive or DropBox.
You can definetly collect a lot of useful telemetry data without collecting any of the, lets say, “most sensitive” private information.
Just to exemplify:
you can collect telemetry on the most acessed features of a software and associate it with their location: whilst collecting their location you can definetly choose between having the person’s specific location (GPS coordinates with a few meters of accuracy) or their broad location (i.e.: their city, state, or country).
with the broad location you can have insights on how users of your software behave per region and plan accordinly actions or those regions.
Collecting someones specific location is definetly way more sensitive than their broad location…
And the full content of all textual documents a person generates has a very high chance of containing of their most sensitive private information…
“Access” as in: have anything to do with them? Then why tf are you using Word on Windows?
“Access” as in: be able to read them? That would be super illegal for them to do and the easiest class action lawsuit win in history. EU fines would eat them alive.
this has been goin on for like a year now. i have an offline profile with no onedrive on my machine, and tried the latest office. theres a slider saying autosave, but i was unable to use it. felt kinda weird that there is no autosave feature anymore. turns out autosave has been a cloud save option, and poor excel was not able to savemy private data to the onedrive datafarm. also the new excel is super slow compared to like the 2016 version, which indicates that theres more bloat under the hood.
pishadoot@sh.itjust.works
on 28 Aug 12:53
collapse
The slider you’re mentioning is specifically for cloud sync, correct. But as far as I know Word still does the thingy where it will periodically snapshot and allow you to recover previous versions.
I’m not 100% sure because I don’t use it at home anymore but I still do at work.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
on 28 Aug 06:37
nextcollapse
im using a cracked version, i also dont have cloud for ms, no problem there.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
on 28 Aug 11:48
nextcollapse
You have to click through to a third save dialogue just to choose “Browse my files…”.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 28 Aug 12:03
nextcollapse
this operating system still costs like $100
BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 12:22
nextcollapse
Operating system sold separately. Some assembly required.
Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip
on 28 Aug 13:07
nextcollapse
/ per year
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
on 28 Aug 13:22
nextcollapse
There are other ways, if you have to use it but don’t want to give Microsoft money. One way is just not to activate it. Almost everything still works. There are also ways to get cheap keys or activate it for free.
A better way is not to use Windows, but not everyone can avoid it all the time.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
on 28 Aug 15:00
nextcollapse
All good advice! I was mostly commenting on the price of it being absurd, I haven’t purchased a copy since XP possibly back in the day.
PoliteDudeInTheMood@lemmy.ca
on 29 Aug 04:07
collapse
This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?
ThePrivacyPolicy@lemmy.ca
on 28 Aug 12:10
nextcollapse
Having switched many relatives to Linux recently too, Mint will be your best jumping off point for a familiar feel and pain free experience as someone new to Linux. If you love that and find yourself wanting more, then the world is your oyster! I started on Mint and ultimately settled on Fedora Plasma after trying out a half dozen different options.
I don’t want to type stuff into a command line. Like ever. If this is possible then I’m in.
ThePrivacyPolicy@lemmy.ca
on 02 Sep 21:14
collapse
Haven’t had a need to open one the entire time I’ve been on the OS! Other than for my own development needs, but that’s my own use case and nothing to do with operating the OS as a user.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
on 28 Aug 13:21
nextcollapse
I found popos to also be beginner friendly, and I believe at the time it was specifically for people with nvidia cards but I’m not sure that makes a difference anymore.
Either way I liked that popos was being supported as a product by a company selling hardware, it seemed more reliable at the time.
Mint is great too, I believe both have windows style desktops you can choose, and also have app stores you can install programs through instead of using command line.
I’d recommend downloading both and then load them up but dont install them as you can test them out before going through the installation wizard.
Last thing is to make sure you know the category your OS is. You will need to web search for the more general category sometimes, for example with popos it would be Ubuntu. Popos and mint both have great documentation online though and forums and such.
Just do mint. If you don’t like it, try another. I went mint and it felt comfortable and worked so I’m happy with it. Might try Debian next time for more stability and less cutting edge.
The most important choice from the beginner is not even the distro, but what window manager to use, that will be your first interface and you need to be comfortable with it first.
Yes. You may distro hop eventually, but you will not go wrong starting there from Windows.
I stuck with it. I am OK that somebody else did a really nice configuration out of the box for me. It’s still an open Linux system. I make embedded computers do the right thing all day at work, and at home I’ve been getting more outside work done than ever. So any projects like setting up an Arch install to learn more about linux will at minimum have to wait for winter.
Teams and Outlook are basically busy glorified web browsers that load the online version… Now word is going to send your shit to the cloud whether you like it or not?
Google docs does this, but they don’t have a desktop app to deceive you with. You create the doc, and edit it where it is, on the cloud, using a web interface that’s vaguely “word”-like.
The only people this will “help” is all the inept business people that can’t figure out where to put their data so it’s not lost. There’s lots of those.
This creates a circus act to protect documents. Thank goodness for great alternatives. I use a mix of LibreOffice and Cryptpad. Suits me perfectly.
TheProtagonist@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 13:08
nextcollapse
If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting
…or just use some other app for your private documents and Word only for work-related stuff or such. I use Word/Office at work and have absolutely no issue with all the documentation being saved in the cloud. But for private stuff I would have to think twice if I want this.
They’re prepared to do anything to get real user data for AI training. This little change gives them easily millions of files per day accidentally saved to cloud.
Microsoft is recognizing that their biggest threat to MS Word is Google Docs, a product they underestimated in the beginning as being a serious choice for word processing.
Saving in the cloud means automatic backups and access from all your devices. Increasingly, people are willing to choose that over the real privacy benefits of local storage.
Fedditor385@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 16:59
nextcollapse
This made my blood boil, and then I remembered I switched to Linux a month ago… all good.
ClydapusGotwald@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 17:00
nextcollapse
Why I use libreoffice.
silt_haddock@lemmy.world
on 28 Aug 18:50
nextcollapse
I would love to switch to LibreOffice (or similar) but I haven’t been able to find a way to get tables to work in the same way they do in Excel, and that’s a deal breaker for me. None of the suggested approaches come close to being able to select a range, press ctrl+t and immediately be able to filter/sort/lookup using column names from anywhere in the document.
I use that feature dozens of times a day, and so does everyone in my circles that deals with financial data.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
on 29 Aug 22:27
collapse
I think you name the range, and then you can do the same using ctrl+shit+L
I may not remember right, but I haves used calc and excel interchangeably since it was open office. Some things in excel drive me up the wall, some things in calc do to.
Either way, the best thing I found was get the data out of spread sheets and into something that can work with it better. Like sql or pandas.
But I get that for financial work, it is a staple. Which frightens me to no end.
See ya Ms Products! I hope you all like that cloud of yours!
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 28 Aug 22:18
nextcollapse
Jesus christ. So glad I ditched MS. It’s like getting out of a cult - once you see it looking in from the outside, you finally realize how terrible it is.
The breaking point for me was when I was showered with Copilot+ pop-ups on every single hover. Let me fucking copy/cut/paste/format in peace. I never asked for any of this, and neither did any user of any level of expertise.
Switched to OnlyOffice as it felt to perfectly answer my needs. There are still some quirks with non-UTF-8 documents, but you know what, I’d rather iron those issues out than be shoved a product I didn’t request nor need at every single interaction I have.
I highly encourage anyone that hasn’t done already to explore alternatives to the M*crosoft Suite, if they haven’t done it by now. Every update is just the worst form of enshittification known to humankind. Can’t wait to have an intrusive slop AI agent tell me how to do my Maths in the Calculator app next.
davidagain@lemmy.world
on 29 Aug 00:17
nextcollapse
Some executive noticed that they can’t sell you larger cloud storage if you haven’t used it up.
Then someone on the office copilot team said they wished they had access to more comprehensive data about what people write with office apps and the rest is history.
GUYS BUT NOW I CAN WORK EVEN FASTER AND EFFICIENT! I DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT SAVING BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS IN CLOUD! IT’S ALWAYS AVAILABLE! WINDOWS IS MOST USED SOFTWARE ON MARKET!
threaded - newest
I suppose this means Microsoft will not count Word doc file sizes against users’ cloud storage quotas, right? Right??
🤣
It’ll be like Google: everything goes in, nothing comes out unless you jump through difficult hoops, price continually goes up.
Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)
Where do you think Google learned it?
? Google invented it.
If you’re in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.
How is this served? Do they send a usb drive? Or a download link of some sort?
It’s a download link, on their respective dashboard you can select between the catagories you want. Like on Google you can select if you want youtube, drive, gmail, or everything at once.
With GDPR they have 7 days to comply, and it should be available to any EU citizen even when outside of EU territory. So I’m assuming you can just change your region. Either way, takeout.google.com is where I’d go.
Yeah, i ised take out before, it took 2 weeks to download my photos, i think 8 60gb downloads. It was painful, I got hopeful that youbhad discovered a workaround.
Ah, that’s unfortunate. Tbh I’ve been downloading 200GB there frequently and haven’t had any issues.
GDPR can also be called upon using a registered letter and they are required to deliver as well. I’m not sure but that might be a way to recieve a physical copy.
Anakinsmirk.jpg
Mario_Kart8_deluxe.iso.docx
No, they upload your file, delete the local file, then oopsie, you ran out of cloud storage, please pay $99/month to access your files.
Seriously, Microsoft!?!?
Is this on Macs too?!?
Not mine, then again I use nothing Microsoft on my Mac.
www.libreoffice.org for anyone who wants microsoft to stop messing with their office apps.
I second this. There’s a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it’s not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it’s been great.
Office would have a learning curve too if you hadn’t been using it since you were a child.
Tbf it was simplier back when people first used it
When people were first using it they were coming from DOS or older machines. Many were using a mouse for the first time. It wasn’t simpler to them.
This is very true. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since 2007 and at my new workplace everyone’s using it. It’s really hard and I don’t find anything. Yesterday I was working with tables but I gave up and had IT install libreoffice instead.
You can now enable a tabbed interface similar to Microsoft Office
There is also only office which has better compatibility with MSOffice file types
This here.
I wish Only Office got as much fanfare as LibreOffice. The UI is much closer to Microsoft Office and it tends to have better compatibility.
I have both installed though and use them both lol.
Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.
Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).
Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn’t seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.
I’m on my phone, so I didn’t search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there’s a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.
I’ve no recent experience with either so I can’t comment on how well either works.
Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.
I believe Open Office and Only Office are different products.
Only Office had a major release in June, 2025.
And you are correct that Open Office last update was back in December 2023.
openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.
libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice’s status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.
onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for ‘reasons’.
Ah I see. Thanks for the information. I use both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and generally am happy with both. I kind of just bounce around back and forth.
Man, wouldn’t it be nice if both of our counties didn’t have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?
You are correct. I misread ( or my brain farted ) and looked up the wrong one.
LibreOffice has a ribbon UI too.
That it does :)
LibreOffice is awesome too. No complaints really.
I tried it years ago and it was pretty garbage. Took forever to load. Looked like shit. Has this changed?
TIL! Thank you, kind stranger!
Gerne!
OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it’s still Lev Bannov’s product.
The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.
Mm knowing that makes me never want to go anywhere near OnlyOffice now, oof.
Don’t ever save your files directly on a samba share with only office. Lost hours of work twice . It doesn’t keep recovery files.
Downside is ties to Russia and performance is really bad, as I understand it’s an Electron web app, not a native application. It also won’t save to network shares properly and will lose your file if you do.
What if I’m using a pirated copy of windows and office?
You get deported to Uganda.
Uganda be kiddin’ me.
lmao
Kenya believe it?
I’m not Ghana believe it.
rwanda. too.
You can turn it off. Opt-out is still bullshit.
you can turn it off for now*
You can make yourself believe that you turned it off for now*
Yes Ms is secretly stealing from users across the world and yet not a single security researcher has found it. AND ALEXA IS LISTENING TO ME 24X365 DAYS A YEAR!
They do find it regularly. Its not even a secret, they are openly advertising it as a feature.
It is… thats its purpose…
I think you are in the wrong place on lemmy if you are so willingly blind to the realities of tech companies.
Forgot the /s?
Exaggerating what is quite literally happening to make yourself sound smart actually just makes you look like a total dumbfuck.
The true opt out is to stop using Microsoft products
You can’t opt out, most healthcate providers use windows.
Mental health awareness? No thanks, I rather just write in a journal and talk to myself in the mirror as therapy.
The dentist asked me to sign a waiver so they could use AI…I’m looking for another dentist
You guys are getting healthcare?
Microsoft all about opting out rather than opting in.
until your computer force reboots itself in the middle of the day to do updates it didn’t tell you about, and you log back in and later that night find it uploaded all your shit to the cloud and just for good measure deleted some of it too as a fuck you
it’s the Microsoft way
I don’t trust Microsoft not to flip that switch back when I’m not looking.
Perks of not signing into Windows/Office with a Microsoft account… Oh wait
tip: do not write about the revolution, short stories, hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, or your teenage angst and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
tip: Only write about the revolution, short stories about your hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, your teenage angst, and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
For everything else, use LibreOffice.
directions unclear, now I’m directing a netflix special on sexy horse guerrillas.
would watch
Ugh, the ai spellcheck is broken and I’m writing a Netflix special in six hearse gorillas.
Season one was excellent, it ended on a cliff hanger though. Netflix did not renew for a second season.
Isn’t that… Just a bulky centaur?
bingo
So just bpmb threats and realistic beastiality. Got it.
Tina Belcher?
Ha! Exactly where I was going with that.
I’ve just binged the entire series twice in a row. I’m on S10 in round 2. Dunno why I like it so much.
Tina is definitely one of my favourites
Marshmallow and Rudy for me. :)
Ensure to make sure every doc has 17 giant sized images saying FU MS
I love to kill cops ~in~ ~GTA~
I’m interested in how they’re gonna enforce this with my copy of word 2007.
They auto updated my 2007 to 365 when my firewall crashed (I had the updated blocked) and then required a subscription. This has happened twice and is such a pain in the ass to reverse. I switched to Libreoffice.
the new libreoffice won’t run on your vista.
Interesting, i haven’t had any issues on that front
I do wonder how my copy of Word 2010 at my work is going to do this.
Let’s say this huge breach of security and privacy is okay.
How are Microsoft ensuring these sensitive documents are not being transferred via or stored on servers located in hostile countries with lax data laws (such as foreign nations like the USA?).
wdym, that’s the point
Microsoft has already said it doesn’t matter where your data is stored, it isn’t safe from the United States.
But you can change this behaviour in settings, it’s just the default for now.
So, if you don’t trust Microsoft to handle your documents, but still somehow use MS Word and OneDrive, for the moment you can still stop it from saving your Word documents to their servers.
Ms office 2016 install still going strong with zero cloud function. That day I lose it is the day LibreOffice copies itself from the laptop to the desktop. Aint paying for O365
You can change it for now.
Yes, that’s what I meant with my “for now” and “for the moment”.
Which means an AI scans it…
No for most it’s customers and an option for them all. MS is very clear in its policies. Any AI services you use, isn’t sent back for training. The policy is very clearly explained and one of the clearer ones.
Business or enterprise users data isn’t trained and individuals data can opt out
I remember when facebook had a policy to require users to opt-in to having third parties scrape users data, but then it turned out a “bug” caused FB to sell everyones data anyway and they made billions more money than they would have.
I have no doubt a similar “bug” will make its way to the MS servers if one hasnt already.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
I actually appreciate this. The only place I use Word is at work, and nothing I create in Word at work is ‘mine’. I do not care at all about the security of things I do at work (that’s for our IT Security team to care about), and all this means is that if I accidentally screw up, or if my computer just up and dies on me… all of my work files should be ‘safe’.
My employer has been going very hard towards ensuring that our work computers can ONLY be used for work purposes. Once I accepted this and embraced it I found that I’m now 100% free of Microsoft for anything personal, and it is amazing.
there is a reaching hand that goes further than just using it for work.
lets say you open libreoffice writer and write a party invite. you send this party invite to a friend - they are invited to your party.
your friend opens it in MSWord, its uploaded to the cloud and scraped for all of your personal data to train their AI and to be sold to the lowest bidder.
you had and want nothing to do with microsoft, but they are still harvesting your data.
Export to a .pdf, automatically opens by default in user browser via local storage as a reader, bypasses MS
This is still problematic shit though, on the same level as enabling Recall by default and encrypting W11 storage devices by default.
i have been trying to understand what information i send to people and how i send it in an attempt to try and get as lottle data into msrecall as possible.
im not quite there yet (and probably wont be before the oct cutoff) because my mother still uses windows & emails me sometimes, and a few of my friends on discord use windows. its really difficult because i have no control over my data being scraped by products i do not use and have never accepted a eula for. its… aggravating :(
The unfortunate fact is if a user who views what you post is using a windows machine, the likelihood of the information on their screen being captured by Microsoft is overwhelmingly high.
I guess you may have to approach the issue how you would the public-facing internet at large: if you cannot verify who and how people are viewing your material, do not post any material that can be accessed by windows. If you must, post it through a trusted circle of users who also understand the issue.
I agree, however you’re never going to be able to fully control things that you’ve sent out for other people. Even this post can, and likely will, end up as training data for AI. ‘The only winning move is not to play’ applies to a lot of things in life, and if you truly want to protect your data then the best move is to not create any data. The second best move is to not share any data that you’ve created.
I mean, I’m in the same boat. This doesn’t effect me except for work stuff. But here’s the thing, all of my documents are already backed up to the cloud via OneDrive settings. So this is redundant at best.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons I hate the MS experience is because they push things on you. Its not your PC, its theirs. Hey, you want to use OneDrive? No? Are you sure? No? Are you really sure? No? Why don’t I just turn it on for you so you can see how great it is. You must have turned it off by accident, let me turn it back on. OK, OK I get it you really don’t want to use onedrive. Oh, I forgot that fact once our annual update came out and undid that setting. You straight out uninstalled onedirve and altered your registry? Ok, how about we just upload Word documents for you.
Part of why I still hate it at work; work knows almost everything about me. People with poor understanding of PII have my personal information, and use MS products. Microsoft knows all of that, and everything that I type, the notes I make, the phrases I use, inferences on my interests, and can combine that with other profiles. It helps put together a much more complete picture and profile of me and why I interface with. And I can’t opt out, can’t use Linux, and can’t just go somewhere else to avoid it.
Munoz kept out the little details where nobody wants this and this is only a good thing for Microsoft
I don’t get it, does Microsoft WANT everyone to stop using their products? First they fuck up their OSes, then they start planting shady shit in their OSes, and now it’s down to every single goddamned piece of software they poop out! What in the fuck are they even doing!
They’re rent-seeking, more than they already are. The data must flow for training, actively burned bridges be damned.
I’m pretty sure most regular users will not even notice the charge, and find it useful down the line. Cause one day they will mess something up, complain to MS that they “lost their work”, will be pointed to the cloud where everything was synced, and rejoice. Most users don’t really care about the implications that their documents are in the cloud.
Office is the product that helped keep Microsoft ticking over. The world is too dependant on Office and people won’t abandon it just because of this.
My fat fingers keep trying to type Microsoft Orifice.
This will be good for the post I saw yesterday where someone was working on some story for weeks and lost it all because they didn’t have a backup lol
Silence! The great Microsoft has decreed that from this day forward your documents belong to them! No dissension!
Proceed to the payment portal to pay your offerings immediately. Only those worthy enough to pay for the Extra^TM^ and Premium^TM^ tiers will be allowed to use the File menu.
www.libreoffice.org
tell your friends.
OnlyOffice gang www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx
I like the idea of it, but it is Russian.
I think it they are based in Latvia now which is in Europe. They did originally start in Russia and still supply the Russian government. Though it is free and open source. So where it is based does not really matter.
OnlyOffice is one of the few open source applications which actually puts effort into its UI. LibreOffice looks straight from 1990. I really would not recommend LibreOffice to anyone who is not technical, whereas OnlyOffice provides a great UI experience.
With the entire West supporting a livestreamed genocide the whole moral highground schtick does not really land for me anymore either.
Most customers don’t want their users saving locally anyway for data protection and not having to do extra compliance and workstation management.
Of course folks here are acting like setting a default they don’t like is insane chaos.
Gotta feed that AI!
Me me guess - is this so they can train the LLM using the data we’re ‘giving’ them? F U!!
sounds like a ‘service problem’ someone once spoke about…
acquire your ms office ‘elsewhere’ and never link it to a ms account. same with windows. no msa, no ‘cloud’ to save to.
and there is a service problem here.
yet another reason to ditch microsoft
Switched to linux. No regrets so far.
Of the installs I’ve done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit “retry” and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn’t work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.
I’m not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve
Isn’t this already the default?
I have to change it on every single fuckin document already. Have done so for years now at work.
// I don’t use Word outside of work…
It’s on per default when signed in to OneDrive. Actually a really nice feature tbh. However, you will be promoted to hell and back if you aren’t signed in to OneDrive. I like the feature for work but I don’t like the idea of it being the default setting.
I have a Word document saved into my ‘personal account vault’ which is for personal thoughts (like a diary). Does this mean, they’ll automatically upload this too into their cloud?
If that’s the case, not sure what to do. Tempted to go back to old school diary but risk the chance of my family finding it.
Markdown is great for that. There also are some WYSIWYG and a lot of side-view editors. If you still want Word-alike, there’s lots of office suites aside from Office 365. Or is it about saving notes to cloud? Even more solutions just for that, aside from plain file-sync clouds.
Thanks, I’ll look into Markdown!
No, that’s not it. I just want a Word-alike thing that allows me to put a password on it and use it as a ‘modern diary’ (like how you can make chapters and such in Word).
Not sure if I explained it well, English isn’t my native language. So wasn’t sure how to explain it
Time to learn another language then mix them
Siu Mit USA De Fa Si Si Zu Yi
The Only Good Fa Xi Si Zu Yi Ze Hai Sei Zo Ge
(Destroy fascism in the USA
The only good fascist is a dead one)
Now just need to transpose that and replace some characters. Of course, making it offline would greatly reduce government/corporate surveillance threats. As long as your family aren’t cryptographers, they won’t be able to decrypt it.
(Its Tri-Lingual. Cantonese Jyutping, Mandarin Pinyin, and English of course. Romanization of characters makes it harder to guess words especially when it gets transposed with a bunch of others.)
No big corporation or state institution handling vast amounts of customer data will not allow this. Also really bad for regular consumer too. Microsoft servers will become treasure trove for hackers.
Bullshit like like often only applies to the consumer, not the business version.
That's because we are not "customers"
People can't seem to figure out that they are the mark at the poker table
This is certainly about making sure your files are safe and definitely not about stealing your data for training AI. /s
Don’t let Murdersoft steal your data. Don’t contribute to their corruption or genocide assistance.
Step 1: fedoraproject.org
Step 2: www.libreoffice.org
Thanks, going to try out LibreOffice. Does it has same (or similar) functions as Word itself?
It’s designed to be very similar. If you are already familiar with Word, you should feel right at home.
I’m not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I’m sure it’s better now.
My only problem is how Libre Office handles their style system. It’s forced use for things like Footers, and very hard to manipulate and turn off unlike Word.
My own way to bypass it was to replace a new document text into an old converted word text that had the correct footer pages from Word.
I really hate page and Style guides because they always want to propagate everything through entire documents, instead of only changing things on a page by page basis. Adding things to previous pages when you change something isn’t helpful.
I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.
It doesn’t make it flawless (at all), but installing the microsoft fonts helps. Most distros have a package or helper tool for that.
Pretty much. It was OpenOffice years ago, but then Oracle got involved and so all the devs left and put a new name on it.
No. That’s the point. LibreOffice does not send your data to Microsoft.
LibreOffice is what Microsoft Office WAS without the bugs. If Word and Excel worked for you before the cloud, Libre is golden.
As a clueless individual, how are they assisting genocide?
Working hand in hand with the Israeli government in mass surveillance and (likely) AI-generated targeting data.
Another user just linked some resources. Incredible the bullshit going on these days. So much going on it’s hard for me to keep up with it all but I’m glad to be enlightened.
For today, you can call me Jeeves. To learn more, a quick search for “microsoft genocide” or “microsoft gaza” will give you the answers.
Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.
I’m 99% of the way on LibreOffice. Gave it a solid go, but the main thing I use in excel is too cumbersome in Libre. I think it’s a great option for many people though.
LibreOffice. No need for MS Office, ever
Tell that to my companies president.
You’re thinking as an individual. Excel in the business is what keeps Office afloat. There simply is no substitute. Even if you want to go with another spreadsheet, who’s going to trust that to faithfully import Excel data?
I’m not sure I even trust Excel to import an Excel file without mangling it.
you guys are able to save an excel file without it nuking everything?
LOL, Excel doesn’t mangle shit. It’s best-in-class spreadsheet software for a dozen reasons. #1 being that it never changes. It’s solid, no other software like it. Business won’t risk fucking around with anything else.
SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies, and one that mainly used Google for Business. Accounting still had to have Excel.
So, not actually an Excel power user then.
Well, no? It would be ridiculous to expect me to be a power user over all the software I’ve administrated. I judge what people need according to business demands and orders from on high. My judgement is that, yes, some business units require Excel.
That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.
How many individuals care about what businesses do though? Usually they provide the hardware too, so it’s whatever when it comes to what the company chooses to use.
These are more individual concerns for personal hardware. So long live LibreOffice.
Bruh. We’re talking about a certain piece of software. You’re getting a bit off track.
Not really. What software and hardware a corporation chooses to use for their workforce is something that employees will not have much control over if they aren’t in a high enough position.
Anything provided by a company is company property anyways. What matters more to me is what is used for personal use than a work computer or work phone or work etc.
So discussion wasn’t off track. You were seeing things from the company perspective assuming the person was seeing it from a corporate position. I’m seeing it from a personal usage perspective and not corporate, which most employees have little control over and it’s not their devices anyways.
LibreOffice does everything I need except that their version of Power Point (forgot the name lol) is a mess to work with in terms of making the slide deck visual appealing. Automatic guide lines, snapping and smartart, to name a few.
Thinking about onlyoffice but I’m not sure if I can trust them since I read about then trying to hide their ties to Russia.
ODT is better than whatever abomination Microsoft calls a document format.
“No, I don’t think it will”
Per the article this can be deactivated
Turning it on by default (opt-out instead of opt-in) is still a huge concern and needs spreading the word about.
Oh very much so. Casual users are going to be donating their documents for AI processing and not even know it
This will make happy many companies…
This feature doesn’t even work.
So many times I’ll save a word doc, attach it to outlook, and it’ll silently attach an older version of the word doc.
Word says its up to date, one drive says its up to date, but outlook still gets an old version.
It takes hours to resolve. Everything Microsoft wastes so much of my time.
How will this work for (for example) cibersecurity companies that have reports full of client’s vulnerabilities and can’t have them hosted in third parties?
I would guess we’re on the fuck around part and your question will be answered on the find out part
By their admins setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\General PreferCloudSaveLocations to 0 using GPO probably
A cybersecurity firm knows better.
“Fuck you, Microsoft.” -Everyone, at all times
Even if you’re not ready to come to Linux, you’re definitely ready to switch to LibreOffice. I dare you to try it.
Writer and Impress should cover Word and Powerpoint perfectly. Even if your colleagues use Windows, you can still open them just fine.
Excel though is troublesome, especially those with coded VBA or some plugins from companies. But for basic Excel? Calc can do the job ok too.
Yeah I got through school and could work just fine now with Calc. I’m sure it breaks when you get fancy but not that many people get that fancy.
I’m using OnlyOffice bins on linux and find it to be a fantastic suite for my (minimal) uses. Not sure how it works on Windows though.
I’m unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.
It’s still being kept barely alive for whatever reason. But it hasn’t gotten any reasonable updates (I think not even including security updates as of recently, see www.libreoffice.org/…/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/ ).
See also blog.documentfoundation.org/…/open-letter-to-apac…
OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.
Ah. I tried that a few times and didn’t care for it myself. Weird that my brain thought it saw OpenOffice.
Only office is designed for people who work with MS files. Libre Office is for people who work with open files.
It’s not gone. It’s still around. Libre is forked from OpenOffice. When Libre was forked, everyone moved to Libre because Open has a lot of issues, which is why Libre was forked.
Got it. Thanks.
Eh, that game where you had two gorillas standing on buildings lobbing exploding bananas at each other was pretty cool.
What if I dont use M$ account? So it is just a local user, then where does Word back up to?
This is why Microsoft is making it damn near impossible to set up a new computer without logging into a Microsoft account. Luckily the OOBE trick still works (for now).
Office 365 requires an account to validate the license. Potentially it might work differently for the long term licensed versions (which features released to O365 now wouldn’t reach until the next LTSC release), but I’ve not performed the initial install and licensing of those for clients yet
Or for home users who aren’t already invested in a Microsoft ecosystem your best bet is to just use Libre Office
Edit: I accidentally made Office exclusive to leap years!
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3407dbab-4a41-4ba4-bb19-0e269a44aba8.jpeg">
No they won’t
Thank you to the skilled developers who bailed on OpenOffice when the shit stain company Oracle bought Sun, and formed LibreOffice.
I can only hope there will always be digital freedom fighters on the side of good.
I’ve donated to LibreOffice, and you should too, if you use their suite.
I love LibreOffice, but I wish there was an Android app. I’ve even considered learning more app development to try and help, but it’s such a daunting task.
There’s a web port AFAIK, web dev has a lower entry level
This here. Not fully featured but a decent reader and editor which we hope will improve with time. Good effort on the devs!
LibreOffice & Open Office Document Reader | ODF f-droid.org/packages/at.tomtasche.reader/
It can edit files now? Apparently it can. It took a while but it’s finally there. Finally. Good job.
Check out the Collabra Office android app. It probably covers your needs.
No, I don’t think they will. LibreOffice
Laughs in LaTeX?
I’ve been writing all my college papers in LaTeX and it’s been great. They look so professional, and it’s easier to work on a collection of text files than one monolithic document.
I swear typesetting your papers is worth half a grade point at least. Then once you find Zotero and realize it will automagically handle your citations and you have auto biblios and cites working in LyX…life changing, absolutely.
I’ve never learned latex but it seems like a huge learning curve. Never even proficiently learned vim yet
These days you can just use AI to make the outline for you and go from there. Should be easier than ever
It really depends on what you will use it for. Using it for plain text doesn’t require much, some advanced layouts require a bit more digging, if you’re including fancy graphics, equations, bibliography, footnotes, etc, you’re going to look at managing the relevant libraries to gandle that (they are very well made and very convenient). All in all, it can be as complex as you want, but it can also be quite easy to use.
Also LaTeX is way simpler than plain TeX.
Not really like Vim at all. But yes its a bit of a learning curve. Imo its worth it but I’m an engineering grad student so it is especially suited to my uses.
Not too bad with LyX. Get templates and modify them. It is a learning curve but entirely doable.
Google doc for me. It is free and it is good enough. /S
That’s interesting, since Google Docs has always automatically saved files to the cloud.
I’m waiting for them to edit the comment and add an /s tag.
Tbf, if they are in K-12 as a student or teacher, they’d probably have to use google docs anyways.
L I B R E O F F I C E
Meanwhile here I am with
ghostwriterI used nano for over 10y, I’m a nvimer now.
I just can’t ever go back to office UI stuff. For my designs I still have Krita and Inkscape.
Idiots will still not know where anything is saved. Catering to the technologically illiterate has made society way more illiterate.
this is their patch for the whole disk data loss debacle
and also “let us train copilot on your college essays”.
Joke’s on them, because those were all written by Chat GPT 😂
still valuable to microsoft!
Received an email this morning. Copilot is now powered by GPT5.
I recently started using VisiData and it’s amazing.
To anyone thinking “LibreOffice still has issues”, here’s the LibreOffice donation page to help them fix it up and be rid of MS Office forever.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea. Too many people are still not backing up their data, and the article says “…automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination”.
As long as they really give users full freedom to choose any cloud service, I consider that a win.
A definite plus if one option is to backup to self-hosted platforms.
“If you don’t have another cloud destination, don’t worry… we’ll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN’T turn it off! Also, we won’t let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!”
Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don’t think they can get away with it yet. I’m NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
No, this is a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea.
What you said is like saying “well, I need surgery, having the monkey from the forest come at me with a knife is better than nothing.”
Microsoft has proven themselves over and over to be the last company you should trust with your data. Even recently they’ve been responsible for losing a life’s worth of data because of OneDrive
They’re already uploading people’s data off of their computers to OneDrive without consent, then deleting the local copies.
Plus their tech work culture is lacking. When they screwed something up with Office 365 and Outlook wasn’t available for over 18 hours (for basically the whole world), their response was a tweet that it’s fixed.
Whereas CloudFlare messed up something for only an hour, they released a comprehensive breakdown on their blog of what happened, what the root cause was, and what they’re going to do to prevent it from happening again.
Which company seems reliable to you?
Good thing I stopped using MS WORD a long time ago.
I stopped at MS Word 2.0, when the Microsoft people agreed with me that it was pretty much broken for large files, and pointed me to an FTP site where there was a new version… which also was broken. Long story short, that’s when I first installed Linux and ran LaTeX and Applixware.
I still use Wordpad to write all my gay dinosaur erotica, am I safe?
For now… Next update they’ll add Copilot to it for reasons.
Mr Tingle, its an honor, and you should be at the moment, but please consider a more proper way of writing literature such as LaTeX or Vim
“or” ?
Last time I checked there was Copilot integration in NotePad. So I wouldn’t assume WordPad is safe from anything
Scrivener ftw
It depends how gay is it? And do dinosaurs mate in packs?
Chuck Tingle, is that you?
I wish…
I’d rather use old ass word perfect at this point
Just use libreoffice
I’d rather chisel text onto stone tablets than that bs.
xkcd.com/378/
I actually installed WordPerfect 6 for DOS and MS Word for DOS recently. They’re very relaxing for writing and fast too. Then I use LibreOffice to convert the documents to more modern formats if needed.
That’s dope. I recently read that George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar. Maybe that’s why that dude can’t finish a book series.
Cool It finally gets Google docs core functionality after only 20 years. How innovative.
Actually it had auto save for more than a decade. It’s just that now they removed the ability to autosave locally, it must be to onedrive.
It didn’t remove anything, they’re just changing the default save location. You can revert it if you want, it’s all in the article…
This is extremely minor. I don’t understand the fuss.
Right? People have such immensely weird notions about Office, Microsoft and telemetry, as if they stopped using computers in the 90s and then just read some rage-bait headlines for the last 35 years.
You haven’t been able to autosave locally for many years already. Changing the default save location is just for when you press save.
WTF are you talking about, mate?
I’m using Office daily at work. I save data locally non-stop.
I swear to God, this community should be renamed from “Technology” to “Technologically Illiterate”…
You can save locally by pressing the save icon, yes. But if you want it to autosave every 10 minutes it only allows you to use onedrive as a destination. Or else you are on one of the older versions of Word which still allowed local auto saving.
Well, “save” and “autosave” are two very different features.
Autosave, yes, that’s a OneDrive specific feature.
Which also has nothing to do with what the article is about - they’re talking about Cloud locations of the user’s choosing, which means it will try to default to things like DropBox or Filen just as much as OneDrive.
Now go back and read the thread where I have been talking about autosave the whole time, which is also discussed in the article.
You’re right, my bad for misunderstanding.
No worries my dude.
Google Docs has been a thing for 20 years? Wow I feel old
Started using Google Docs around 4th/5th grade. I’m a Sophomore in college now…
Still like Google online collaboration more than Microsoft online collaboration, so it’s still dogshit after 20 years…
I’ll just use LibreOffice, but… a lot of people just don’t care. Which does also impact us.
Not to be used to train AI. We promise.
They’d break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people’s OneDrive, it’d be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they’d lose by default.
they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
As soon as you find proof, you have literally free money up for the taking at any court.
That’s… not how any of this works…
an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done, it could also be an “and” where you expected “or”, or an ommision of a specific thing… my point being - it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
it very much is how it works though? show me a lawsuit someone lost before they got caught commiting a crime. and how would you even go about proving that your unpublished documents were used to train AI? even an entire life’s work of one person is just a speck in the training data, it’s impossible to definitively prove your work was stolen and used to train an AI. besides there will always be plausible deniability that the AI just made shit up that happened to look kinda like what you once wrote
That means nothing. Illegal terms can’t be enforced in contracts or terms of service.
No. Written law always takes precedence. If they spied on your data stored in OneDrive, they’d lose by default the moment the case hit the courthouse.
As for your second paragraph: yeah, I agree. If they did that, the damage would’ve already been done. But it would kill the business once found out. The benefit is not worth the risk.
For example: you’re saying that they would use it to train AI, right?
They don’t train AI. They get a trained model from OpenAI.
LLM’s out here running wild. How Rude.Maybe I should switch to Linux again.
.
Libre office does the job for me! Auto save on cloud sucks. At least you can turn it off! For now.
Why?
because your phone/laptop doesn’t have a global wi-fi connection, and you might want to open a document pause for dramatic effect outside of your home or work!
Depending on your setup, you will always have an offline copy, too.
I have never seen a setup where that’s not the case.
I’ve yet to see a cloud storage solution that doesn’t have offline-storage.
Like… WTF is going on? This is the Technology community, and yet you people come here and comment like you’ve only dealt with computers in the 90s…
The file is saved locally, then - as soon as there’s a network connection - gets uploaded to the Cloud and remains in both locations. You can access it from both “ends” - if you edit it in the Cloud or on a different device, the changes get sync’d down, etc.
i’ve seen my friends who never changed a setting in their life struggle with not being able to access their files when their internet died. how default settings work i do not know exactly myself, i don’t use cloud saving
There are only two possibilities here: either they were trying to access these files offline on a different device, or they had their storage completely full.
In the latter case OneDrive will kick out the oldest files to Online Only, so that you still have space to save newer stuff locally.
Oh, I guess there’s a third option - they were using some obscure third party cloud storage. Something that’s not Filen, OneDrive or DropBox.
Because I do not want Microsoft to have access to all my documents.
As if windows does not send telemetry
Telemetry ≠ Uploading whole documents Which does not mean I defend Windows telemetry but it’s quite different
Comes from a person who hasn’t written telemetry. It’s either useless or contains private information
Private information doesn’t necessarily mean “entire contents of all word documents I have ever created”
Cloud storage has nothing to do with anything/anyone reading the contents of your files.
It’s absolutely mind boggling to me how many completely ignorant people are on the Technology community here.
Just imagining the fines from the “won by default” lawsuits that MS would suffer at the hands of their EU users makes this whole notion hilarious!
There are many tiers of private information.
You can definetly collect a lot of useful telemetry data without collecting any of the, lets say, “most sensitive” private information.
Just to exemplify:
you can collect telemetry on the most acessed features of a software and associate it with their location: whilst collecting their location you can definetly choose between having the person’s specific location (GPS coordinates with a few meters of accuracy) or their broad location (i.e.: their city, state, or country).
Collecting someones specific location is definetly way more sensitive than their broad location…
And the full content of all textual documents a person generates has a very high chance of containing of their most sensitive private information…
What an ignorant thing to say…
Don’t use Windows either.
This
That’s not how cloud save works!
The files are saved to local storage that then gets sync’d up to the Cloud. The files are available both on- and offline.
.
You need to explain why you think the second statement refutes the first.
I think I accidentally posted that on the wrong comment. My bad.
“Access” as in: have anything to do with them? Then why tf are you using Word on Windows?
“Access” as in: be able to read them? That would be super illegal for them to do and the easiest class action lawsuit win in history. EU fines would eat them alive.
Depends on the cloud. I like my files being automatically backed up to my private Nextcloud server.
I understand, everyone has different options on this! I prefer to choose what stays local and what on cloud.
this has been goin on for like a year now. i have an offline profile with no onedrive on my machine, and tried the latest office. theres a slider saying autosave, but i was unable to use it. felt kinda weird that there is no autosave feature anymore. turns out autosave has been a cloud save option, and poor excel was not able to savemy private data to the onedrive datafarm. also the new excel is super slow compared to like the 2016 version, which indicates that theres more bloat under the hood.
The slider you’re mentioning is specifically for cloud sync, correct. But as far as I know Word still does the thingy where it will periodically snapshot and allow you to recover previous versions.
I’m not 100% sure because I don’t use it at home anymore but I still do at work.
im using a cracked version, i also dont have cloud for ms, no problem there.
You have to click through to a third save dialogue just to choose “Browse my files…”.
this operating system still costs like $100
Operating system sold separately. Some assembly required.
/ per year
Try 150$ :(
There are other ways, if you have to use it but don’t want to give Microsoft money. One way is just not to activate it. Almost everything still works. There are also ways to get cheap keys or activate it for free.
A better way is not to use Windows, but not everyone can avoid it all the time.
All good advice! I was mostly commenting on the price of it being absurd, I haven’t purchased a copy since XP possibly back in the day.
I’ll just leave this here… massgrave.dev
Who the fuck pays full price for windows? Just buy an oem license for like $15.
i don’t need a license to kick myself in the nuts
I use a big glass water bottle for that. But a steel bar would work well.
massgrave.dev
This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?
Having switched many relatives to Linux recently too, Mint will be your best jumping off point for a familiar feel and pain free experience as someone new to Linux. If you love that and find yourself wanting more, then the world is your oyster! I started on Mint and ultimately settled on Fedora Plasma after trying out a half dozen different options.
I don’t want to type stuff into a command line. Like ever. If this is possible then I’m in.
Haven’t had a need to open one the entire time I’ve been on the OS! Other than for my own development needs, but that’s my own use case and nothing to do with operating the OS as a user.
I found popos to also be beginner friendly, and I believe at the time it was specifically for people with nvidia cards but I’m not sure that makes a difference anymore.
Either way I liked that popos was being supported as a product by a company selling hardware, it seemed more reliable at the time.
Mint is great too, I believe both have windows style desktops you can choose, and also have app stores you can install programs through instead of using command line.
I’d recommend downloading both and then load them up but dont install them as you can test them out before going through the installation wizard.
Last thing is to make sure you know the category your OS is. You will need to web search for the more general category sometimes, for example with popos it would be Ubuntu. Popos and mint both have great documentation online though and forums and such.
Just do mint. If you don’t like it, try another. I went mint and it felt comfortable and worked so I’m happy with it. Might try Debian next time for more stability and less cutting edge.
Remember that most major distros now offer live ISOs, which means you can easily try them out before committing to an install.
Aurora is my go-to nowadays
The most important choice from the beginner is not even the distro, but what window manager to use, that will be your first interface and you need to be comfortable with it first.
Before doing anything you can try out different Linux Distros at Distrosea
Yes. You may distro hop eventually, but you will not go wrong starting there from Windows.
I stuck with it. I am OK that somebody else did a really nice configuration out of the box for me. It’s still an open Linux system. I make embedded computers do the right thing all day at work, and at home I’ve been getting more outside work done than ever. So any projects like setting up an Arch install to learn more about linux will at minimum have to wait for winter.
Swoopin in to recommend: fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Windows!
laughs quietly in Linux
At this point that’s almost like ransomware.
At this point, why even have desktop apps at all?
Teams and Outlook are basically busy glorified web browsers that load the online version… Now word is going to send your shit to the cloud whether you like it or not?
Google docs does this, but they don’t have a desktop app to deceive you with. You create the doc, and edit it where it is, on the cloud, using a web interface that’s vaguely “word”-like.
The only people this will “help” is all the inept business people that can’t figure out where to put their data so it’s not lost. There’s lots of those.
It’s way better than a web app! it ships with a separate browser the user has zero control over and with more permissions to abuse. /s
Yay webview2!
also /s
This creates a circus act to protect documents. Thank goodness for great alternatives. I use a mix of LibreOffice and Cryptpad. Suits me perfectly.
…or just use some other app for your private documents and Word only for work-related stuff or such. I use Word/Office at work and have absolutely no issue with all the documentation being saved in the cloud. But for private stuff I would have to think twice if I want this.
I switched to OnlyOffice for my work files. I have had no compatibility issues with my coworkers
Holy fucking shit, what absolute trash
They’re prepared to do anything to get real user data for AI training. This little change gives them easily millions of files per day accidentally saved to cloud.
Microsoft is recognizing that their biggest threat to MS Word is Google Docs, a product they underestimated in the beginning as being a serious choice for word processing.
Saving in the cloud means automatic backups and access from all your devices. Increasingly, people are willing to choose that over the real privacy benefits of local storage.
This made my blood boil, and then I remembered I switched to Linux a month ago… all good.
I switched earlier this year. No ragrets.
Why I use libreoffice.
I would love to switch to LibreOffice (or similar) but I haven’t been able to find a way to get tables to work in the same way they do in Excel, and that’s a deal breaker for me. None of the suggested approaches come close to being able to select a range, press ctrl+t and immediately be able to filter/sort/lookup using column names from anywhere in the document. I use that feature dozens of times a day, and so does everyone in my circles that deals with financial data.
You can purchase the Microsoft apps , word, excel, PowerPoint, as a package that you own. There are no upgrades. You own them.
I am in the process of moving to Linux and Libreoffice at the moment. I’m working at getting myself off of Onedrive.
Once complete I will start the process of getting off Google. I’ve been using Proton for years and I am going to remove any other online support.
What about OnlyOffice?
I think you name the range, and then you can do the same using ctrl+shit+L
I may not remember right, but I haves used calc and excel interchangeably since it was open office. Some things in excel drive me up the wall, some things in calc do to.
Either way, the best thing I found was get the data out of spread sheets and into something that can work with it better. Like sql or pandas.
But I get that for financial work, it is a staple. Which frightens me to no end.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7b05472a-627d-4f56-94bf-afb151c23864.jpeg">
See ya Ms Products! I hope you all like that cloud of yours!
Jesus christ. So glad I ditched MS. It’s like getting out of a cult - once you see it looking in from the outside, you finally realize how terrible it is.
The breaking point for me was when I was showered with Copilot+ pop-ups on every single hover. Let me fucking copy/cut/paste/format in peace. I never asked for any of this, and neither did any user of any level of expertise.
Switched to OnlyOffice as it felt to perfectly answer my needs. There are still some quirks with non-UTF-8 documents, but you know what, I’d rather iron those issues out than be shoved a product I didn’t request nor need at every single interaction I have.
I highly encourage anyone that hasn’t done already to explore alternatives to the M*crosoft Suite, if they haven’t done it by now. Every update is just the worst form of enshittification known to humankind. Can’t wait to have an intrusive slop AI agent tell me how to do my Maths in the Calculator app next.
Let apps be apps again 🗣️🗣️📢
Apps? It’s programs and applications!
Some executive noticed that they can’t sell you larger cloud storage if you haven’t used it up.
Then someone on the office copilot team said they wished they had access to more comprehensive data about what people write with office apps and the rest is history.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.wtf/pictrs/image/71e56cdb-815d-4b4e-9f7e-cd58182cac03.png">