Microsoft just changed where your Word documents live — here’s why it matters (www.windowscentral.com)
from mesamunefire@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 14:28
https://piefed.social/post/1357135

#technology

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Brkdncr@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 14:55 next collapse

You know how many times I’ve had to tell someone that document they created and have been working on for days was never saved even once and can’t really be recovered?

TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:08 next collapse

Lemme guess, hundreds-to-thousands, also the people you’re telling it to have business degrees and $100K+ salaries?

Brkdncr@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:27 collapse

$1000/hr billing rates yes. Maybe 10 ppl/year.

TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:38 next collapse
Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works on 10 Oct 15:42 collapse

I really hope they are incredibly good at a very specific thing that has nothing to do with where tf are their files.

Brkdncr@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:42 collapse

Indeed.

ErmahgherdDavid@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 10 Oct 16:50 collapse

Presumably it’s selling snake oil and convincing people to trust them?

greasewizard@slrpnk.net on 10 Oct 15:21 next collapse

well now you’ll have to instruct them on how to find anything they saved in onedrive

Brkdncr@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:27 collapse

That’s what they changed. It’s saved to onedrive by default now.

greasewizard@slrpnk.net on 10 Oct 15:31 collapse

Right, I’m saying that the users too incompetent to save a word doc will be incompetent to find the new save location

myplacedk@lemmy.world on 11 Oct 06:36 collapse

I remember this. From the 90’s.

Autosave has existed AND been the default so long that taking it for granted is now actually okay.

This is not related cloud storage or corporates spying on users. It’s just autosave. That’s all it takes.

Brkdncr@lemmy.world on 11 Oct 07:00 collapse

Gotta save once first.

myplacedk@lemmy.world on 11 Oct 12:54 collapse

Once upon a time it was like that. I don’t remember which decade I saw that last.

markz@suppo.fi on 10 Oct 14:57 next collapse

I’ll make One guess.

“Starting today, new documents in Word desktop on Windows (Insiders) now save directly to OneDrive, with autosave enabled,”

Yeah.

Jramskov@feddit.dk on 10 Oct 15:38 next collapse

Index it all and train our AI on it.

WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 18:13 collapse

Sell all your data to the Christian corporate fascist dictatorship, so they can use it to wage psychological and economic warfare on a global scale.

RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz on 10 Oct 21:29 collapse

I’d say for most, the autosave will come in handy. So many times there’s been a project and someone at the least minute freaks out over their document being gone

insight06@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 03:03 collapse

They could have easily implemented autosave and versioning on your local machine. They chose to gate it behind keeping your documents in the cloud for profit-motivated reasons.

chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:10 next collapse

Meanwhile in LibreOffice-land…

UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:57 collapse

You’ll have to take that up with my CTO.

yesman@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:30 next collapse

Onedrive is Microsoft’s attempt to make Home Windows users a revenue source by making it a subscription service. This has been SOP in smart phones for a decade now.

mephiska@fedia.io on 10 Oct 16:03 collapse

Makes me wonder if there is something in the terms that allows them to use documents stored on onedrive to train AI. Adobe is doing the same bullshit and keeps pushing you to send PDFs as Adobe cloud links instead of directly attaching the file to an email. They're doing everything they can to get your data on their servers.

We're no longer the customer. We're the product.

Treczoks@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 16:10 next collapse

Most likely, there is. In very small print.

Damage@feddit.it on 10 Oct 19:22 next collapse

I don’t think they bother with fine print anymore

alibloke@feddit.uk on 10 Oct 19:26 collapse

With a sign saying beware of the leopard?

Monument@lemmy.sdf.org on 10 Oct 22:41 collapse

You can disable the Outlook addon that nags you about Adobe cloud, btw. Small part of the puzzle, but it helps.

the_q@lemmy.zip on 10 Oct 15:40 next collapse

If only corporate agendas hadn’t built industries around a single software suite! If only!

xxce2AAb@feddit.dk on 10 Oct 15:43 next collapse

I’m sure that won’t be an issue for anybody working with confidential, privileged or private information.

wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 10 Oct 16:30 next collapse

I would be shocked if this hasn’t had some set of controls to disable it in Group Policy for months now.

This is just rent seeking against Home users.

People with One Drive through corporate Azure sjbscriptions (rather than the free “you have a microsoft login” tier) already have fairly robust controls available for handling and securing private data. There’s even special Azure tiers for government work that are even further secured.

This is only going to impact home users and conpanies without strong IT teams. Which is an egregious amount of people, don’t get me wrong. It’s also a horrible anti-consumer move. But this isn’t “Microsoft fucks over their golden calf: business users”.

GenosseFlosse@feddit.org on 11 Oct 05:28 collapse

As a us organization you can choose between different MS cloud tiers. I know about 3, the basic tier for private customers, tier4 for large corporations and tier 5 for us gov and military organizations. My guess would be that it has something to do with which 3 letter agency can access your cloud data.

UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 15:56 next collapse

Here’s why it matters

I’m going to have to put together a script to block any instance of a headline that includes this phrase. It’s so fucking overused.

“Why does knowing where my Word documents are stored matter?” Hmmm… let me fucking think, assholes.

turkalino@lemmy.yachts on 10 Oct 16:27 collapse

  • Here’s why it matters
  • Here’s why you should care
  • Here’s what experts have to say
  • X happened, here’s what that means for the future

It’s like they feel the need to remind us what the purpose of an article is

TommySoda@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 16:52 next collapse

You’d be surprised how many people actually need that. My boss is one of them and I constantly have to explain to him why shit like this is bad for us. We’re currently in the process of upgrading all our PCs to Windows 11 and I’m trying to convince him to let me install Linux on all the computers that don’t meet the hardware requirements. Fortunately we use an older version of Microsoft Office that doesn’t come with all the bullshit, but there will eventually be a day where we will have to “upgrade” that too. And because of this, I’m also trying to convince him to switch to something like LibreOffice.

Uploading all of our shit to OneDrive is not only a bad idea because we have our own secure servers in house, but it’s also a bad idea because we deal with a lot of files that could get us sued if it was leaked online. We don’t even let our servers connect to the internet for that very purpose. And it’s not a matter of if, but when windows starts uploading all of our shit to OneDrive it will be a complete disaster. And I’m sure there are a lot of guys doing IT at various other companies all trying to explain to their boss the same thing I am while they ignore the issue.

JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 10 Oct 21:53 collapse

I’ve worked in business IT before, so I have a (very small) bit of background I can probably share from your bosses side.

If you’re not recommending a distro that has a support contract (e.g. Red Hat), what you’re creating is a bus situation - if you get hit by a bus, who is going to maintain the Linux terminals when they go down? Would that contract cover supporting LibreOffice? How will normal staff be able to figure out how to use Linux, and will there be a measurable increase in productivity from them, or will they be slow to adjust?

Regarding OneDrive (or more realistically, SharePoint and Microsoft 365), Microsoft has a service level agreement for this. I can’t read it on my phone because it’s in docx format, but I dare say that it does have some coverage for if data is leaked, otherwise most enterprises wouldn’t even touch it.

Your boss likely doesn’t have concern in that aspect because of the SLA assurance, and thus it makes more financial sense to move completely over to M365 and away from on premise servers that require constant maintenance, upkeep and power costs.

I’m not sure of the business size you’re in, but I’d hazard a guess that its a small business if your boss is in a position to potentially change out the existing IT infrastructure. You’re facing an uphill battle in convincing your boss to move to Linux because the desktop support for it is limited and likely expensive, and the alternative is to keep you and probably hire other Linux technicians to maintain those Linux systems when they go down.

Melonpoly@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 21:36 collapse

SLAMMED

mctoasterson@reddthat.com on 10 Oct 16:10 next collapse

And they wonder why some of us are still using local installed and firewalled Office 2007.

cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de on 10 Oct 18:22 collapse

Office 2003 was the last usable version.

fittedsyllabi@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 16:09 next collapse

Idiots.

brianary@lemmy.zip on 10 Oct 16:09 next collapse

Microsoft can’t seem to figure out sync, ever since Briefcase, if you involve multiple computers you invariably end up with more and more conflicting copies. It’s embarrassing.

Office itself is insanely bloated is a world with Markdown, open data formats, and easy access to scripting. They used some pretty unethical tactics to make OOXML a “standard” to stop governments from switching to an actual standard: ODF-based Libre Office.

wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 10 Oct 16:43 collapse

I mean this softly, but I’m going to guess you haven’t used OneDrive recently, and haven’t used it where it’s been set up in a competent manner. The default settings absolutely are not conpetent, espiecally for how messy computers for personal use get.

My workplace uses OneDrive to sync a specific set of user profile folders so we approximate having profiles and files that follow us without everyone needing a personal folder on a network drive that mounts at login.

The only issues we’ve had are profiles auto-downloading too mant of peoples files and eating drives on shared machines (so you just have your meeting room computers wipe all profiles every reboot and schedule reboots nightly), and I’ve had some issues where OneNote hadn’t actually synced the notebook back to the cloud before I closed on one machine and opened on a different machine so I lost some notes.

Beyond that, it’s handled even situations where I have the same file open siniltaneously on multiple machines smoothly. Syncs between login on multiple machines take 3 minutes max, and I can force it faster if I really need by pausing and resuming the sync.

I’m sure there’s situations it’s still not suited for, like editing and syncing large monolithic files (think video files over 1GB a piece). It probably sucks big time on personal machines where you’re going to have a complete mess of every file type imaginable tossed in one big unorganized heap.

But configured correctly, for general business use, it can work very well.

brianary@lemmy.zip on 11 Oct 01:32 collapse

I currently use it, and have largely mitigated issues in a similar way.

shalafi@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 18:18 next collapse

It a default change, not mandatory. Money says business users will never see this fuckery.

corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca on 10 Oct 18:35 collapse

Am biz. I see it.

Sovereignty is almost the issue that it needs to be, but our ‘security’ types totally trust MS at their word when they say “it’s only stored in your country and can’t be touched from here. Trust me, bro.”

These are security types who know to ask “how do you know” 5 times, and don’t even ask it once.

stoly@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 20:29 next collapse

Didn’t this already happen? I feel like it’s been the default for a long time now.

altphoto@lemmy.today on 10 Oct 22:46 next collapse

It doesn’t. Friends don’t let friends bring Microsoft home.

Saltarello@lemmy.world on 10 Oct 23:04 next collapse

It matters not if you use Libre Office

beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org on 11 Oct 03:30 collapse

Yup. Haven’t used Word in decades.

DudenessBoy@sh.itjust.works on 11 Oct 03:46 next collapse

I love watching the world burn while I use Linux and LibreOffice.

Joelk111@lemmy.world on 11 Oct 04:27 next collapse

LibreOffice is so refreshing after dealing with MSOffice’s bullshit and Google’s web-based solution.

TotalCourage007@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 03:30 next collapse

Wish M$ would just go full Sega and give Linux official multiplayer support. They suck giant Ds for making anticheat windows only.

Bunbury@feddit.nl on 12 Oct 05:03 collapse

I just wish work didn’t force me to take a front seat and interact with MS products anyway.

sonofearth@lemmy.world on 11 Oct 04:06 next collapse

Only office and LibreOffice FTW!

kalkulat@lemmy.world on 11 Oct 09:16 next collapse

" Word will now save new documents to OneDrive by default — and that changes everything"

Wouldn’t it be great if all your docs were stored out in the cloud? Just think, you wouldn’t need a hard drive! And someone else could guard them for you, like, say, Deputy Dan. descope.kwwhitaker.com/wallofscience.html

lightsblinken@lemmy.world on 11 Oct 14:33 next collapse

nope.

cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 11 Oct 20:59 next collapse

Honestly, even as a privacy guy, this makes sense. SkyDrive was unique in giving people 30GB, plus 5GB if you turned on photo upload (even if you turned it right back off). So even without paying, my OneDrive is still 35GB. That’s plenty for documents.

What Windows 10+ does with backing stuff up to OneDrive and sharing it across builds is smart, if not the best execution. I kind of have that between my Macs and iPhone with Safari bookmarks and passwords.

I would be asking how safe OneDrive is and if it had any major breaches, if I were a Windows user. I’m actually using iWork and iCloud though, and I trust that a little more, but OneDrive doesn’t seem that problematic to me. There’s a lot I don’t like about Microsoft, but OneDrive doesn’t earn any ire from me. Should it? (Probably not since I’m a Mac user and it’s all abstract anyway.)

Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 04:08 next collapse

Counterpoint, I lost an unknown number of files (unknown because I have no idea what all I failed to recover) years ago when my OneDrive backup filled up and my attempts to clear out space in the cloud backup propogated to my local storage, deleting everything I had in my local documents folder.

4am@lemmy.zip on 12 Oct 04:13 next collapse

MS will probably use everyone’s documents to train AI and build profiles on you. I’m not sure there are any guarantees that your information is stored or transmitted entirely E2EE.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today on 12 Oct 07:22 collapse

i have a cracked version of 365 office or is it an earlier version, so it stays on my pc with no connection to onedrive at all.

rodneylives@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 07:37 collapse
Kolanaki@pawb.social on 12 Oct 03:04 next collapse

Is there no longer a “save as…” option to select where you want to save the file? 🤔

I have used Open Office for over a decade now so this is kind of a genuine question.

WereCat@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 08:01 next collapse

There is

Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 23:47 collapse

It’s probably hiding somewhere in the ribbon. I had the mispleaure of using word and outlook the other day, on someone else’s computer. Somehow I managed to save as an odt, somehow managed to attach end send it, only for the iPad not to be able to open the odt. Just said fuck it and went back to my lunix machine

MidsizedSedan@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 03:57 next collapse

Is this just for home edition? Or other editions as well. I work at a school with education edition, and I have a co-worker who said when I was helping the with their file management problems

me: just save to Desktop for now. We will fix it later. Them: I don’t think I have a desktop.

I can’t imagine how many other offices having to train their staff about all these new features.

dbtng@eviltoast.org on 12 Oct 04:49 next collapse

I’ve been watching this thread, expected to hear this, but not yet …
I know Google’s office products are essentially the same problem, but they are at very least free (in dollars).
I haven’t used MS Office in years. We use Google at work. I use my NextCloud at home.

shirro@aussie.zone on 12 Oct 05:02 next collapse

Libreoffice puts my docs where I tell it and they get synced to my other machines. Don’t understand why people store docs on other people’s computers. The business world is full of dumbarses leading dumbarses. You can’t tell them though.

Frenchgeek@lemmy.ml on 12 Oct 08:20 next collapse

Could someone tell Microsoft I switched to Linux ten years ago? They don’t have to encourage me anymore.

ftmpch@lemmy.world on 12 Oct 08:21 next collapse

Surely this is a minor problem with an easy solution: choose “Save As…” from the menu, then select a folder on your local drive.

Alaknar@sopuli.xyz on 12 Oct 08:57 collapse

My God, THANK YOU! I’ve seen this article in five different places and everyone is losing their minds over this, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that:

  1. This ONLY affects people who are using OneDrive in the first place.
  2. It’s a setting that you can change any time.
  3. If you want to keep the default but have a specific file outside of OneDrive just - exactly like you said - click “Save As” and store it locally.

It’s mind boggling how much people switch off their brains whenever they see Microsoft doing literally anything, and the entire conversation devolves into “Microsoft bad”.

eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 12 Oct 09:08 collapse

WHY?