I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
The clippy we all deserved
First thing I do with the Google Assistent on Android Phones is to tell it to disable itself. Cool thing is that it does.
You can do that??
Just call the sales team and get the classic plan. No more having to deal with Copilot and you get the old price back.
Meanwhile, smart people: I sure do love Libre Office.
Libre Office.
Honestly - and flame away - I hate the name. I hate saying it. It’s the ‘moist’ of borrowed words. Leeeeeeeebr. And I’m a Canadian who did French up to university-level conversational “explain something for 20 min” French (from a gorgeous caribbean dynamo teacher, but I justif–uh, digress) so I know how to say the word and what it means.
And I still hate it. I’m a horrible person – even before I continued French study because the prof was so engaging and energetic and brightened every room and every day and made French interesting just on inclusion.
Lee-bray
I pronounce it AbbyWord and Gnumeric. I’m too old to have need of a full office suite anymore-- Libre or not.
Lee-ber
Absolutely not
Lee-bra, like libra
Glad I’m not the only one questioning the name! I have a pet theory that if they changed it it’d be more popular.
I feel bad for canadians learning french. It’s a language that’s only useful in like, 1.5 places in the world.
I genuinely believe french canadians are hurting their next generation by filling their heads with nonsense of a dying culture. Kind of like how racists fill their kids’ heads with garbage because they’re afraid of becoming irrelevant.
We should all bow to the American overlords indeed. Coca cola and burgers are the peek of humanity
Wow… do french canadians really believe that learning french is a way to fight back against America?
Just… wow. I knew they were delusional an insecure, but this really puts things into perspective for me.
Glad we could have this conversation.
French Canadians, (Québécois), believe it’s a way to fight other Canadians. If it works against Americans? Well that’s just a bonus.
Yikes.
There are over three hundred
thousandmillion people speaking it. On all continents. It’s fairly useful. Maybe you should travel more.Over three hundred thousand million people? On all continents?
Ok, I mistyped, it’s three hundred million. Don’t know where that thousand came from. :)
Looks like if I want to learn French, I’ll be able to speak it in:
-France
-A few place in Canada that also speak English
-France’s colonies in Africa
-A tiny country in South America most people can’t name by looking at this picture
I rest my case. French canadians are pretentious about the significance of the french language. They don’t want to admit it’s a niche language and they want to waste people’s time learning it in schools because they had to waste their time learning it. They don’t want to admit it was and still is a waste of time and energy for those who are not predominantly interested in specifically French/French canadian culture.
Source for picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_French_speakers
It’s ok, you don’t have to learn French, nobody’s forcing you.
Don’t forget GPT4All or JanAI, for those rare instances that you want to converse with a dumbass.
OnlyOffice for those feeling that Office style itch.
You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.
You don’t have to contact them anymore.
That’s what the support person said to me as well, but I didn’t get that option when I tried to cancel the subscription. My guess is that it wasn’t rolled out globally just yet, so if anyone didn’t find this option you can just contact the sales team to downgrade.
This should be illegal.
I agree.
the only problem with onlyoffice is that it’s electron.
Are you positive?
No, they’re negative.
Ew
https://forum.onlyoffice.com/t/why-does-it-contain-a-web-browser/8250/3
Chromium embedded framework, not electron. Similar concept, though.
Ehh, I’m fairly sure it’s not. It certainly wasn’t in the past. When do you believe that changed?Never mind, you were talking about OO, not LO, my bad.
So Libre Office is free?
If it does what regular office suit does i would happily pay 300 dollars for it to have it as mine and not be fucked with
Free forever, and works great.
Is this your first exposure to FOSS? If so, you are in for a treat. There’s a whole world of free, open source software out there for you to enjoy.
Yeah, it’s 100% free.
I need to try onlyoffice again. The last time I tried, was the original beta, and it was faulty (being a first release beta, and all)
Oh onlyoffice works great! It’s spreadsheet function is far less buggy than excel and it’s smooth and snappy.
Sweet! I’ve been using MS at work (required) and Libre at home (because screw MS). I’ll give Only another go!
OnlyOffice spreadsheet has less functionality than Excel but unless you are a super power user then it’s not a problem.
Onlyoffice is apparently Russian, headquartered in Latvia.
Latvia is not Russia, unless something recently changed
JFC it can be russian owned and russian controlled and russian employed and pay russian taxes while “headquartered” in Latvia.
Latvia is not Russia
Yet.
And if you look on a Russian map, I’m sure it’s there already.
What? Latvia is a part of NATO.
what does it even mean to be russian then?
You know, almost entirely staffed by Russians (outside of Latvia), the executive suite is Russian, shareholders are Russian, etc.
Like have you guys never heard of companies being “headquartered” in the Cayman Islands?
Sure, now why would that be a factor for choosing a software or not.
You didn’t choose the country you were born in anymore than they did.
Seriously?
yes, very much
if your only argument is the nationality of the people involved, it’s a bad one.
If you haven’t noticed there’s a war going on. This is the weirdest conversation I’ve had, at best you’re playing the fool. I’m out.
For existing customers, the price hike won’t be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the “Classic” or “Basic” Microsoft 365 plans.
Thankfully we can roll back to the “Classic Family Plan” without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn’t see this article I’d be up for a big price hike when it renewed.
But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back.
Should be illegal.
Oh shit maybe we’ll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
Yeah. So it’s
- thunderbird
- some add-on
right? I forget the name of that add-on.
No, that’s not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that’s it. But it’s only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let’s ask Co-pilot again:
THERE it is.
But I learned there’s a second alternative, so that’s cool. See? Co-pilot has value!
Like using Edge to download Firefox, I approve
Zentyal replaces windows server. It has active directory, file server, print server, domain controller and mail server, all in a way compatible with Microsofts products, but it’s Linux. I worked with it many years ago and it did what it says on the tin. I haven’t worked with newer versions.
In this case the AI is kinda wrong. It’s not a Thunderbird replacement in any way, rather an OWA replacement and Exchange alternative. You could use Thunderbird to connect to it probably.
What you could use is the Thunderbird extension TbSync, or Owl. Both work, but TbSync is free.
is there a thunderbird equivalent that looks like it was made after 1992?
This is for the personal licenses, not business or enterprise.
wack
I keep seeing posts by NextCloud on Mastodon. Has anyone had any experience using those guys?
Nextcloud is decent but it depends on what you want. Personally, I’d never use it again due to performance reasons but it’s a decent platform for cloud editing and stuff.
I switched to Syncthing for file management across my devices. With it, I can sync my Joplin notes. It’s all I need in life. It was also easier to set up than a Nextcloud instance.
nextcloud is awesome, highly recommend.
Wait, they think people want Copilot? Like enough to pay money for it?
They are banking on customers being too invested in office to switch.
I think that might be their plan for all their products at this point. Just existing though inertia.
For reasons I won’t get into, I had a chance to peruse the training program for the sales force of Azure and their strategy actually is telling their potential clients that they already subscribe to Office 365 so they might as well use their cloud too.
Yeah, it does not surprise me. The thing that does is how common the approach seems to be in big established tech companies. I mean, it generally never works out (look at IBM, Intel, Sun, and to some degree Apple).
It’s a safe bet. I wonder if enterprise pricing is that high.
That with a side of suppressing a competitor. Similar to how they include Teams for corporate plans. If it is included in your M$ apps suite, then your company might want to cut back on Slack and just make due.
MS teams sucks so fucking much, I don’t understand how such a large company can make such a deficient product.
Copilot Is literally ChatGPT With a diff logo and name.
I use both for work, copilot is worse.
It’s “ENTERPRISE”
They don’t, but by providing a “classic tier” they get to kill anyone’s argument against it by saying “just don’t get it”, until they then discontinue the “classic tier” due to a “lack of demand”, and force Office users to have AI and pay for it too.
Copilot for Teams is extremely useful. Recap meetings and being able to search for specific parts. People hate on AI but in this case they are definitely downplaying the capabilities.
But to be fair I’m not the one paying the bill
Man, I don’t know about even that… It gets stuff wrong all the time. My boss LOVES his AI bot that joins all meetings (even if he doesn’t) to summarize stuff. Occasionally I look over the summary it produces; it’s about 50% actually correct, 25% ambiguous not wrong but not what I meant, and 25% flat out wrong / opposite of what I meant. I’m sure he relies on the results, ugh. One time I went through the summary and corrected it all, but I don’t have time for that for all meetings.
Copilot in my experience is pretty accurate, even if not perfect. Plus it timestamps the meeting so you know where it’s drawing it’s conclusions from.
If meetings are happening so long and going in so frequently that nobody can make sense of them without an ai summary, might I suggest there are too many meetings?
I say this as someone who used to work at a place that had meetings about meetings to figure out why so much time was wasted in meetings.
I mean we can debate root cause and corporate culture and everything, but at the end of the day these meetings exist and copilot make them better.
I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it’s 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.
Think of all the new words made since 2007 you won’t be able to write on such an old version.
Like skibidi
Microsoft probably added or changed unnecessary shit to the OOXML format that your old version can’t handle.
Do all documents open without any problems?
I will forever hate 2007’s ribbon with a passion.
Me too haha. One of the first things I install.
It hasn’t.
Same here.
worlds most over glorified over priced office website that runs like a slug
For anyone who doesn’t already know the good FOSS alternatives:
- Local: Libreoffice
- Cloud/self-hosted: Nextcloud Office
additionally Onlyoffice (But Onlyoffice isnt fully open source)
OnlyOffice, you say?
😏
OnlyOffice doesn’t like open document formats though.
Oh
FOSS GPT: GPT4ALL
I’m so glad I work in an industry where I can get away with using Libre Office.
I use ms office 2007 it runs perfectly in wine and still has the cool version of wordart
Some people can’t because they need updated proofing tools and that version no longer has updates.
word art > proofing tools
Huh, do you think I can run Office 2013 in Wine? It’d the best version of office IMHO.
No idea, that one has the boring word art
Love your criteria
Preaching to the choir here but LibreOffice has been excellent since my MSOffice license expired. Unless you’re working in an enterprise setting with MS-specific macros or online collaboration, there’s no reason to be paying for basic document editing software in 2025.
There are also self-hosted and open-sourced collaborative editing suites available that I haven’t tried yet, but there are plenty of options
Even if you need microsoft office for some random file you can use their free web version. Well it’s been a couple years since I last needed it I’m assuming it still exists
Fair enough, but if you’re trying to avoid data collection then open-sourced projects are preferable
Does it save files locally or only cloud? I want to move away from google docs/sheets.
Fun story, it’s called office 365 as when you see the price you’ll turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Ok that doesn’t really work but God I love that stupid joke.
Anyway I haven’t used office personally for ages and never seem to run into real compatibility issues with the meager personal/business overlap in my situation.
It made me chuckle a little imaging that you do a full 365 degree spin Infront of Microsoft and then walk away (in an awkward way), instead of 180 degrees to walk the opposite direction haha
Technically speaking with 365* of rotation if you are far enough away you will be able to walk past microsoft, so this is possible.
Because of the Earth’s curvature you mean?
No not the curvature. For every one degree off you are of a target at 60 miles away you will miss your target by one mile. So if you were 60 miles from your target and you rotated 365, you would miss it by 5 miles. Hence you could spin 365 and miss it, if you were far enough away.
You mean you could accidentally spin 364.9° or 365.1° instead of 365° exactly and you’d be off by a large amount? Might be dumb but still not getting how a perfect pivot right back to 0°/365° would still miss!
Because a perfect circle is 360* not 365 so you would be 5* off perfect thereby miss by 5 miles at 60 miles distance.
God damn I am dumb. Thanks for spelling it out lol!
365 spin, then realizing your mistake and awkwardly walking backwards out of the room
At the right distance it’s just enough pivot to give them a spiteful shoulder check on the way out.
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Subscriptions like these have always been a scam.
