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This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment. Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on that comment, especially for this:

> «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"»

Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now just consistently annoying to use.

The windows experience is trash for regular users, it looks like a casino now unless you are aggressive about turning _everything_ off.

However: raising concerns is a bad career move apparently. These ideas... aren't proposed by devs; if that makes sense.

In a conversation with a pal yesterday, I realized I had LONG since stopped doing any actual writing in Word. It's just too huge and slow and clunky. I write in a plaintext environment (options vary, but probably Obsidian or emacs). If or when I fire up Word, it's to structure the document and format it for distribution.

Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.

Does it still have the smooth-animated cursor as you type? That thing messes with my brain, so that I lose my train of thought.

Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer.

It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature.

I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment.

The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.

I wantwd to only use 2003 but after the 10th time I argued with a person that sent me a docx for editing I gave up.

Office 2003 can absolutely open docx and xlsx and pptx files. It is annoying because it usually opens those in read-only mode, and then you need to "save as" to do your modifications. But it works fine otherwise.

“View” unfortunately isn’t the same as “Open and edit”, and in business you need to do the latter. Otherwise we’d be 100% libreoffice from the start. Yep, that’s the moat.

It's been a while, but I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit. Office 2003 thinks of the compressed versions as export formats rather than internal formats.

> I think what they're saying is that you have to "save as" in order to be allowed to edit.

The issue is that roundtripping between Office 2007+ and Office 2003 is unreliable and will often result in corrupted files.

Using Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack add-on to open xlsx and docx) is ok for isolated work but can be unreliable for collaborative back & forth editing depending on what features are used. E.g. cell colors used in Excel 2007 xlsx get corrupted in Excel 2003 xls.

It's a completely different format. Iirc .doc files are basically implementation defined files and consist of c-structs dumped to disk. .docx is a properly specified format of compressed xml.

It's not "C structs dumped to disk". It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage, which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file. And it has been documented for a long time, ever since Microsoft was forced to write docs for Office file formats because of antitrust:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...

Yes that's what I meant. You can edit xlsx in Excel 2003; you open, modify and save as. It's a little annoying but it works.

> The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again.

That's actually not true, Office has had activation since XP (2002), so 2003 is included in that.

There is an addon for 2003 that enables OOXML support. Look for FileFormatConverters.exe.

I used to love Office 2003, and I still do. But... just use LibreOffice at this point. It has an interface that reminds a lot of classic Office, but at least it's more updated and probably safer. It also supports newer file formats.

>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine

It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols.

I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of assigning a temp variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever the xls file containing VBA macros is opened.

I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel 2003.

You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.

>; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension)

A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638

It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.

The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.

From your linked comment:

> The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!" -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets.

There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-) Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or background color to mean wildly different things, which is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device, or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc. It's completely insane.

> I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet.

Your side lost completely. Pop a signal flare or build a bonfire, maybe someone can rescue you from the island you've been living on since the war ended.

I don't want to be rescued.

duckdb is doing fine.

If Microsoft had adopted this attitude, then by now Excel's market share would probably be 0% and Google Sheets' would be 100%. Microsoft doesn't add features because they like bloated software; they add features because the market demands them, and the market demanded support for more than 65,535 rows.

I've thankfully never had to deal with anything close to that size, what kind of super computers are they running?

Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).

Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif.

XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match).

Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.

The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining.

And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.

I seem to recall some layout issues running on a 4k display, or with scaling set to 150% or higher.

I remember Outlook clipping the last character off the email subjects, for example. Might have been Office 2010.

How can it be free if you need to buy a license?

I think the user meant that it's "free to keep", it's not a recurring subscription like modern Office versions.

Yes.

No subscription. "Free" to use forever once to obtained the licence, unliie the current crop.

I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.

I find Google docs very frustrating.

What blows my mind is how dreadful search is in Google docs. The thing that should be really good is really bad.

Strange days

Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim they're good at search. It's also always been true that their search at anything aside from the main search product is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal uselessness and has always been that way and has only gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you 10 videos related to your search before going out of its way to show other "related" categories.

Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!

The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace.

If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.

> any training is strictly scoped to that workspace

Are they really doing training separately for each workspace? I thought LLM training was enormously expensive and needed lots of data, which wouldn't make sense to do separately.

they're no so much training as providing context just when you invoke it

Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.

my recent amazon order emails actually came with a full itemized list with prices

Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts?

That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.

I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.

I do this too, however there is considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS Office.

True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end.

The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_...

[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...

Try ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it is open source and has superior compatibility with MS Office.

There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too.

We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.

I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.

> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),

Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.

Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.

> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago

I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.

> poor performance

For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities

It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.

> For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

LibreOffice isn't written in Java. It can optionally use Java for extensions and for some database reporting features: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/015

I believe you're correct, I saw some error message on start-up and always assumed it was a Java application.

I've been using OnlyOffice lately. I'm not a hardcore office user so maybe someone else can comment on how it is compared to Libre/MS Office.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

It has better compatibility with MS Office OOXML format.

I used to always have an Office installation on my computer, whether it's pirated (many years ago)/using my personal license/using my school license/etc.

Then I got a new computer without bothering to do the installation. It was a long time before I discovered that I need any of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And I was able to get by with Google Docs. If that's not good enough, I go to the free version of Office 365. In the rare occasions where I need the actual, native Office software for compatibility/functionality reasons, I do it on another machine I have access to. This has worked out surprisingly well.

I've been pretty happy with OnlyOffice. I'm pretty sure it's based on Libre or OpenOffice but looks much more similar to 2012~ era MS Office.

OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does. jfyi

No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.

I guess you already know, but you do not necessarily need a server for Syncthing if the devices are on at the same time. If they are not, a simple low-power rpi-like device would be more than enough to implement a star topology, with the pi being receive-only.

I switched to onlyoffice + joplin for notes and am very happy with both.

If you go the Syncthing-Route anyway, take a look at Softmaker Office [1], it's an almost-drop-in replacement for MS Office and would set you back 50 EUR/year for 5 devices.

We evaluated it for our migration away from MS software and would have gone with it, but it lacks an office server for Nextcloud integration.

[1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

I’d recommend switching to Obsidian and never looking back. And unless you have additional software that requires windows, Linux is also a lower-stress compute experience these days.

I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.

I was a hardcore desktop LibreOffice user both Calc and Write, but I have been using Write exclusively online through CollaboraOffice in a Nextcloud Instance and did not have any issue in two years. I know it was buggy before because I have been checked every two or three releases.

Check out ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it's open source and provides great compatibility with MS Office files.

you use OneNote? I had text search randomly stop working in that thing, no explanation just nothing found. For me this was the Microsoft last straw.

You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks.

Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.

LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).

Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.

It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes.

This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.

Nope, it's actually Menu -> User Interface: https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1

Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ

Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of organization of icons and ease of finding things.

> LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

I don't know, I quite like it, reminds me of the old Office look.

Plus, there's at least a bit of customization that you can do, which is pleasant: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0

Very much seems like a matter of preference.

It probably depends mostly on what you're used to. I find that LibreOffice looks fine - no worse than most apps, and much better than Microsoft's UI.

For the occasional user, various online office suites are also an option.

On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years.

I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point.

If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.

My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.

Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info.

If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.

OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.

LibreOffice also does this.

Correct. Thanks for the hint. I keep mixing up openoffice and libreoffice even though I only use libreoffice on my system.

Check out Only Office

It's not as bad as it was 5 years ago. It's closer to the flat office design.

MS Office is much harder to use for the casual user not already used to it - the interface is very disorienting.

To be fair, office is also hot garbage. It's just that most people are used to that kind of hot garbage.

As someone who hasn't used office much in the last 15 years, it's nearly unusable for me. I have to Google how to do basic things because everything is confusing, ugly, and hidden(or hard to find amongst the huge number of icons).