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Comment by barney54 | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is dumb. The reason I’m on Windows is because of Office. For my needs Office on Windows is the best—otherwise I’d be on a Mac or Linux. I use AI everyday and never found a use case for Copilot. So why rebrand Office, their best product after Copilot, their worst product?

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They're not rebranding Office, the app suite.

They had Office.com, a hub website, and a desktop app called Office that was basically just a wrapper for said hub website. They also had a mobile all-in-one app called Office. As far as I can tell, those are what are being rebranded and made to default to an AI chat view on login, not Office as a whole.

Didn't they put Office in the cloud? If so, why is Windows needed?

You could run anything plus Office.

The web version is a complete reimplementation with about as many backward compatibility problems as LibreOffice.

Actually LibreOffice has better backward compatibility than MS Office now. If you have a MS Office 2003 file that current MS Office can't open, try LibreOffice.

LibreOffice can't properly render ODT files created with OpenOffice-before-Oracle. I highly doubt their DOCX support is any better.

"I don't like X, so I'm guessing Y is bad."

Doubt what you like, but I "rescued" old MS Office documents for my grandfather with that. Also this is a common fear when leaving MS Office, so you can bet they work on that. I never had someone complain over OO-compatibitlity until now, so there is that.

When LibreOffice appeared on the stage, that was actually my first test back then: opening an existing ODT document I had written. It was already displayed incorrectly at the time.

Are there test files downloadable somewhere, so I can check that myself?

Maybe Office 2003, but modern .docx files often don't work right in the web version of Office or in LibreOffice.

But that wouldn't be backward-compatibility? Also when the MS-pushed web versions can't get it right, does it matter?

Which is now piece by piece becoming the Desktop version by wrapping it in some WebView junk.

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