Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription.
Two reasons.
1. I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book length).
2. CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they're all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.
So good riddance to Office365!
A third reason for ditching Office365 is that I have had a hate on for Microsoft's monopolistic business practices since the early 1990s AND a fourth is that Office is enshittifying rapidly—autosave only works to OneDrive shares now, not local storage, for example—and why am I paying for shit I don't want to use anyway?
Now the alternative is confirmed good enough, I'm out.
@cstross I can't recommend LibreOffice enough! It's intuitive, reliable, feature-rich and stable. Plus you can import or export in pretty much any document format in existence.
I have had compatibility issues in the past - a job application form which didn't work in LibreOffice because all the input fields were broken, for some inscrutable reason - but it's a rare enough occurrence to not be worth worrying about.
@cstross Nothing like a rapidly expanding userbase to force devs to listen to negative feedback!
It seems to be a pattern with FOSS: if only 500 people are stubbornly using it despite its quirks, no improvement will happen. It's an exclusive little club.
But 5,000? 5 million? A growing dev team constantly bringing in fresh ideas, perspectives and skills? Now we're talking!
I suspect LibreOffice has also benefited from funding from various EU governments who are quite angry at the US tech industry.
Charlie Stross
The Sleight Doctor 🃏
Diane
bufalo1973