Microsoft Removes Office 2019 From Its Home Use Program Benefits (zdnet.com) 119
Microsoft has quietly made a change to its Home Use Program (HUP) for its Software Assurance business customers. From a report: As some had expected when the company began revamping the HUP benefit earlier this year, Microsoft is dropping the ability to buy the non-subscription version of Office for a steeply discounted price. Microsoft instead is offering HUP customers the ability to buy Office 365 Home or Personal at a discount for home use. In an updated Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document about the program, Microsoft now notes: "Microsoft is updating the Home Use Program to offer discounts on the latest and most up to date products such as Office 365, which is always up to date with premium versions of Office apps across all your devices. Office Professional Plus 2019 and Office Home and Business 2019 are no longer available as Home Use Program offers."
Who cares (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
eBay doesn't permit fraudulent listings, so if someone sells you a bogus key, just use a lot of legal-sounding language in your dispute and you will win.
Re: Who cares (Score:1)
Been using office pro 2007 and no need to change, does what i need. Runs great on win10.
Subie
Re: (Score:1)
..until Win10 Update decides you should pay now and removes the software you bought and installed.
Can't subscribe (Score:1)
No way I'm going to pay $10 a month or even $10 a year for an Office 365 subscription.
Need software which does not require internet and does not ever phone home.
Microsoft seems to not get that point.
Hypothetical Bank Employee computer, never leaves the building, cannot get out to the internet at all via network firewall block. Can only connect to a small set of ip address and ports and cannot be connected to by another computer.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
lol. libreoffice is utter garbage. crashes every 10 minutes and doesnt have half the commonly used features of excel
The fact is that most users don't even know most of the features , never mind how to use them. Give them a 20-years-old version with an updated UI and they wouldn't know the difference.
Re: Finally caught up to the public eh? Already r (Score:2)
There is no such thing as a typical Office user, as it is a Swiss Army knife that does a lot of different things for different people. A standard tool has immense value in business though, which is why everyone keeps paying for it.
Re: (Score:2)
lol. libreoffice is utter garbage. crashes every 10 minutes and doesnt have half the commonly used features of excel
IN YOUR OPINION
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
lol. libreoffice is utter garbage. crashes every 10 minutes and doesnt have half the commonly used features of excel
Strange. I've been using spreadsheets for most of my adult life, for lots of different tasks, both with and without automation. I don't have any problems getting work done in LibreOffice, and it's very stable. I still have an old version of Excel, but I haven't fired it up in years.
I will give MS an edge when it comes to PowerPoint vs LibreOffice Impress, but most of the newer spreadsheet features seem to be oriented towards people with poor programming skills, and don't seem to be particularly useful if
LibreOffice (Score:1)
For most people, LibreOffice is more than adequate. If your job requires MS Office, tell the boss to buy it for you. Actually LibreOffice interoperates fine with MS Office for most stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Libre office rocks.
It's faster to load than MS office, as a side note.
Re: (Score:2)
Wasn't quiet. (Score:5, Informative)
For months when you went to the home use program, it informed you point blank that Office 2019 as an option was going way. No subterfuge. No skulking.
Re: (Score:3)
For months when you went to the home use program, it informed you point blank that Office 2019 as an option was going way. No subterfuge. No skulking.
I'd love it if I never saw the word "quietly" in a headline or lede sentence again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Do you actually need Microsoft Office at home? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't see why a home user - even someone with a home office - should pay a subscription for Microsoft Office.
Mac Users have the iWork applications. Windows, Mac, and Linux users have Libre Office. There are also excellent standalone applications like Abiword which are cross platform. All of them can import and export Word and Excel documents, if you need to do that.
Not to mention that the necessary core functionality of MS Office hasn't changed in 20-25 years. If you've got an older version of Office available, there's little reason to "upgrade".
Someone may mention Visio here... there are alternatives for that app as well, although there are fewer free options (if you want to import and export Visio files, anyway).
There' s just not a compelling argument for paying a recurring fee just for the privilege of using Office.
Re: (Score:3)
I haven't had Office (or any Office program) installed for years. On the rare occasion I need to deal with MS Office formats or do that sort of thing, I use Google Docs or Google Sheets.
Re: (Score:1)
You install an office program, and you can't be 100% sure it isn't using your text as samples for a natural language processing site, or mining your emails for keywords to later spam you with, etc. Oh, and you're only an update and non-optional EULA contract of adhesion away from something like this being shove
Re: (Score:1)
I have many spreadsheets from work with VBA. If I want to work on those at home, then I need Office on the computer at home.
Re: (Score:3)
I have many spreadsheets from work with VBA. If I want to work on those at home, then I need Office on the computer at home.
Does your workplace not have an O365 ProPlus or E(nterprise) license that allows installation on up to 5 personal devices (assuming RDP into the work machine isn't an option)? I suppose you could just be giving a real-world example of why you do this in response to the original post, so nevermind in that case...
Re:Do you actually need Microsoft Office at home? (Score:5, Insightful)
"I don't see why a home user - even someone with a home office"
Your accountant is probably using Excel.
Your lawyer is probably using Word.
So are your clients.
It's pretty horrific when someone is passing around super highly formatted ISO document templates, with revision tracking around between a group, when reviewing a work instruction or SOP, and it goes through LibreOffice.
Or you are collaborating on a powerpoint presentation. :)
Interestingly Quickbooks Pro and many other packages that offer excel export don't work with out excel. You can't export to XLS and open with Libreoffice because it can't generate the XLS without excel installed. They all use excel automation technology to get excel to create the files rather than actually creating excel files from scratch.
A bona fide home user probably doesn't need office, but anyone who wants to bring work home, or is a freelancer / self-employed etc is really at the mercy of the tools they use and their clients. It's tautological :)
They don't need MS office... unless they do need MS office. And many of them do.
Re: (Score:2)
For the OneDrive space..... yes
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Do you actually need Microsoft Office at home? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't see why a home user - even someone with a home office - should pay a subscription for Microsoft Office.
The Office365 subscription is $95/year and comes with 5TB onedrive storage. That's substantially better than GoogleDrive at $99/year for 2TB, or $1200/year for 10TB. I'd value the Onedrive storage space at about $80/year for my personal and family needs for online storage. My wife and I are currently using ~2.5TB. (I also separately pay for Google coldline storage, but that's a different ballgame).
Beyond that, I reckon that Word and Excel and Powerpoint really are better than the OSS alternatives. I routinely find Powerpoint the easiest software for designing home projects (e.g. a bedframe, a pond cover, a table, blinds) for either building myself or passing the specs onto a contractor. I've worked with lots of other design software - including AutoCad and Chief Architect - but go back to Powerpoint for easy stuff. I value this incremental improvement over alternatives at about $15/year worth.
And I've had so many decades learning precisely how Word and Excel behave, including keyboard shortcuts that remain unchanged since the mid 1990s. I value this increased familiarity at about $10/year worth.
Finally, I love using Outlook for its calendars. I realize I'm in a minority here. But after using it professionally for years, I really am more productive with it than online email+calendars. I value this increased productivity at $15/year worth.
There you have it. Office365 subscription is definitely worth it to me.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with Office 365 is that the software subscription and the online storage are bundled and you can't buy one without the other. The most OneDrive storage you can buy separately is 100GB.
That means that the price is determined not just by the cost of online storage, which is under a lot of downward pressure from the competition, but by what Microsoft wants to charge for Office 365. As we can see here, they can alter the deal whenever they like and the bundling insulates them from price competition.
Re: (Score:2)
Compared to Visio, inkscape is hot garbage for diagramming. And so is Dia. I never thought I'd meet an interface worse than gimp, but dia has one.
Re: (Score:2)
Dia is kinda bad. I guess there just isn't much interest in making something like that.
Nice if you interact with other organizations (Score:2)
We've taken advantage of my employers Home Use programs to purchase MS Office. We volunteer with a few charity organizations, and they all use MS Office exclusively. My experience with these groups is that the handful of paid staff were competent and capable of learning another technology ... if they weren't already overworked beyond belief. The bulk of the work is handled by retired volunteers, many of whom aren't as savy. They have a hard enough time as it is with office which they have been using for yea
Re: (Score:2)
The main issue is Excel macros. Although there are open formats for spreadsheets and LibreOffice can import Excel sheets reasonably well, the macros are proprietary VBScript and nothing else supports them.
It's a huge barrier to companies switching too, because there is no way to convert their macros to another application automatically.
ODF really needs to specify a macro language.
No AbiWord for Windows. (Score:2)
There are also excellent standalone applications like Abiword which are cross platform.
The last version of AbiWord for Windows was released in 2016 and no longer available from the AbiWord site.
The geek's free alternatives to Office are all relatively modest versions of the stand-alone office suite of the nineties, sans Outlook, of course.
Re: (Score:2)
Standardize on Free Solutions (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.libreoffice.org/ [libreoffice.org]
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Free as in Free from the ability to work with your customers without messing up their files :-)
Re: (Score:1)
Free as in your time is worthless. Mine isn't.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah sure. Look folks, we have a paranoid whack job!
Just because you are paranoid, does not mean that they are not out to get you.
Not Office278! (Score:1)
No big surprise. (Score:2)
Microsoft is firing their customers. (Score:1, Insightful)
They have been for a long time.
It is only all the noobs who don't remember the past who are making the same old mistakes and being burned.
Old guys have known for decades that you can't trust Microsoft.
LibreOffice 2019 (Score:1)
Most businesses still use Office. This will likely be the last year I recommend it to clients because in the long run it will cost a business 3x more than a stand alone purchase. It's a silent tripling of Office's long term pricing model. LibreOffice is about to make a big surge thanks to Microsoft greed.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Perpetuating a lie (Score:1, Insightful)
The correct spelling is "rent". Just because Microsoft spins their income stream with a lie doesn't mean you need to perpetuate it.
What is the discount? (Score:2)
"Purchase at a 30% discount" is ambiguous. Does that mean at 30% of the retail price? Or at 30% off retail?
Even if it is 70% off, this still a huge price increase.
Before: $15 every 3 years = $5 per year
Now: 30% of $70 subscription = $21 per year.
That's a 320% increase in price.
Re: (Score:2)
Before: $10 every 5 years = $2 per year. MS just increased the HUP price to $15 for Office 2019 about a year ago. Prior to that it was $10 for Office 2016. Also, how many people purchased a new home computer every 3 years? Most update their home computer closer to 5 years.
After: 30% off a $100 subscription = $70 per year. This means that during that 5 year window the HUP user will be spending $350.
That's a 17,400% increase in price!
Note: In defense of the $100 subscript
I still use 2003 (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Ditto with Pro 2007 SP3 that I got cheap from a local estate sale last year. :D I wonder how long it will keep working in newer and future Windows versions though. D:
Re: (Score:2)
WordPerfect FTW! Bytestreams!
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
But of Course .... (Score:2)
Why let you pay once when they can collect forever for a lesser product that does not work as well.
who cares about MS (Score:2)
They will do it with Windows, sooner or later (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Time to stop wearing that ball and chain.
Re: (Score:1)
What percentage of True Scotsmen use linux?
Re: (Score:1, Troll)