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Microsoft The Almighty Buck

Microsoft Is Killing Money In Excel Along With Wolfram Alpha Data Types (xda-developers.com) 73

In an email sent to Microsoft 365 subscribers, the company announced that is killing off Money and Wolfram Alpha data types in Excel starting next year. XDA Developers reports: Money in Excel was one of the big features Microsoft touted when it rebranded Office 365 consumer plans to Microsoft 365. Essentially, it allowed you to easily import data from your bank to help you keep an eye on your finances. That happened just over two years ago, so this feature will have lived just over three years by the time it's discontinued. Thankfully, you can still use it until June 30th, 2023, and your existing data won't disappear. You just won't be able to add any more data to it. Microsoft is instead offering a 60-day free trial of Tiller if you're looking for a similar service, but that means you'll eventually be spending more money on another subscription.

The other feature that's being discontinued is Wolfram Alpha data types, which are also pretty recent. Microsoft first introduced them in July 2020, and they'll stop working on June 11th next year, so they will have lasted less than three years. Excel featured over 100 Wolfram Alpha data types and it seemed to be a big investment for Microsoft, but it's falling by the wayside. This lack of support means refreshing data, following links, and most other features related to Wolfram Alpha data will stop working. Aside from these features, Microsoft is also killing off partner benefits, which could net you discounts on certain products from Microsoft partners if you were a Microsoft 365 subscriber. These will also be discontinued on June 30th, 2023, but until then, you can still check out the available offers if you're interested.

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Microsoft Is Killing Money In Excel Along With Wolfram Alpha Data Types

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  • by yakatz ( 1176317 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @09:13PM (#62582243) Homepage Journal
    Remind me why this is better than the software I purchase one time and install on my PC? I want the features in my "purchased" programs to not be tied to someone else's system and I want them to keep working for as long as I use the product. Wait, then the corporation can't force me to pay a monthly fee...
    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @10:06PM (#62582331)

      Remind me why this is better than the software I purchase one time and install on my PC?

      Because with Office365 for $8.30/month you get 6TB of online storage. This compares favorably to $10/month for 2TB from Apple, or $8.30/month for 2TB from Google, or $44/month for 1TB from AWS Elastic File Store if you decide to roll your own and forego the integration like automatic backup of your cellphone photos, or having it appear as a virtual folder on your desktop. So Office365 on that basis alone is compelling, and you'll end up paying more any other route if you store a moderate amount of stuff online, and the fact that you get Office software on top of that is just icing on the cake.

      As for why it's better than the software you purchased one time and installed on your PC? The fact that you can install it on multiple devices is handy, can download it easily, can have your parents and other relations also install it without them having to pay for it, is nice. And it's also jolly nice that if say your dad can't figure out how to get it installed, or his machine is so full of spyware that it's hard to install, well he can still just use the online Office365 versions of the software in Chrome say and will get as good support as he ever needs.

      If you're worried that the "Money" (online financial services integration) or "Wolfram Alpha Data Types" have gone away? -- well, rest assured, the same familiar Excel that you might have been using since the 90s is all still there, and none of the vast amount of functionality has gone away nor has any sign of going away. Apparently the only features that go away are ones so niche that not even power users have ever heard of them.

      • "Because with Office365 for $8.30/month you get 6TB of online storage"

          The creepy man in the windowless van gives you candy and lets you hold the puppy. But once he has you inside, he wants a whole lot more from you and you won't want to give it. Also, you don't get to keep the puppy.

        Don't fall for anyone's windowless van tactics

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          That sums it up nicely.

        • These things are self-correcting. If people don't like the windowless van deal, they can just stop paying the $8.30/month (or whatever) and do something else.

          There are lots of choices.

          • That's true, but, unless you've planned for this eventuality up front, it's may be a little more painful than expected, because:

            * You probably have to migrate a mega-crap-ton of data someplace else.

            * You probably have to pay a mega-crap-ton of money to do it.

            * The provider will probably go out of its way to make both the above as painful as possible.

            What I do when I can: back up local data to the cloud, and back up cloud data locally. So we always have the option, and so that neither the cloud, nor the lo

        • The creepy man in the windowless van gives you candy and lets you hold the puppy. But once he has you inside, he wants a whole lot more from you and you won't want to give it. Also, you don't get to keep the puppy.

          So people keep saying. Yet the price keeps dropping and dropping and ever increasing amount of features make their service as well as those of their competitors more compelling.

          It turns out that creepy man is just in the candy and petstore business and competing with others.

      • forego the integration like automatic backup of your cellphone photos, or having it appear as a virtual folder on your desktop. So Office365 on that basis alone is compelling, and you'll end up paying more any other route if you store a moderate amount of stuff online, and the fact that you get Office software on top of that is just icing on the cake.

        The lack of tight integration with mobile devices works against Office365 as well. For example, you have to delete the photos manually to free up space on your device, as where with iCloud or Google Photos you can set it up to do so automatically. I'd speculate that might be part of the reason why Microsoft is providing so much space for the price: To make up for lost convenience, which certainly does have value.

        $44/month for 1TB from AWS Elastic File Store if you decide to roll your own

        S3 would seem to be a much better fit here, and would come out to $23 a month for 1 TB. Still no

        • S3 would seem to be a much better fit here, and would come out to $23 a month for 1 TB. Still not sure why anyone would elect for that option, though.

          You'd have to actually use 1 TB to spend that much. All the cloud services count on you not actuallly using the promised amount, and the mast majority won't. If you use only 100GB (which is plenty if it's just documents and some photos backed up from your phone), it's two bucks with S3.

          • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

            You'd have to actually use 1 TB to spend that much. All the cloud services count on you not actuallly using the promised amount, and the mast majority won't. If you use only 100GB (which is plenty if it's just documents and some photos backed up from your phone), it's two bucks with S3.

            I'm currently at 0.8TB of photos+videos (I'd expect that to be kind of typical after ten years of marriage and young children) and 0.6gb of movie rips (for my kids because I trust my own archive and DVDs better than netflix+prime+disney)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by splutty ( 43475 )

        OP asks why they'd want online over local, and you're listing a lot of things that are all online that OP obviously would have 0 interest in, considering the fact they obviously do NOT want to be online, at all.

        It's kind of interesting, since this is something I see a lot. People asking basically "Why would I give up control over what I want/buy.", and people answer with a list of things that all require you to give up exactly that control.

        $8.30/month calcs out to about $100 a year. That's a significant amo

        • Some of it would depend on expertise, too. E.g. most users here can manage a NAS backup solution on a separate UPS in a separate part of the house than where the computers generally live but would I want to support a solution like that for grandma?
          • by splutty ( 43475 )

            Let me change that question a little. Would you want grandma to have to deal with Microsoft support when things go wrong? :)

            • Let me change that question a little. Would you want grandma to have to deal with Microsoft support when things go wrong? :)

              What Microsoft support? I am fascinated.

              I think grandma's safe. I've very rarely been able to contact Microsoft support.

              The benefit of Windows is, there are plenty of other people who have run into your problems, and they can probably provide useful solutions. Microsoft certainly doesn't. If anyone there actually understands what they're doing, they're kept fully insulated from the public and their fiddly little problems.

        • $8.30/month calcs out to about $100 a year. That's a significant amount of money for software and storage you have literally 0 control over. It can just disappear at any moment. (It doesn't matter how much you 'trust' Microsoft for that not to happen).

          Or worse, get some unwanted UI update pushed into the software. Outlook has been awful of late; the navigation pane went from the bottom of the window (where it was unobtrusive) to the side of the window (where it suddenly took up real estate); and now it's back to the bottom. Similar weirdness in Teams, Word, Excel. Teams is by far the worst in this regard.

          I'm not a fan of this continual updating, especially of productivity software. I want it to work today the way it worked yesterday, and I'll do the ver

        • OP asks why they'd want online over local, and you're listing a lot of things that are all online that OP obviously would have 0 interest in, considering the fact they obviously do NOT want to be online, at all.

          So he answered the OP's question directly? Look if the OP wanted to say "I don't want anything to do with anything online and thus don't have a desire to use software services," all wrapped neatly in the "Change my mind" meme, then by all means he should have just led with that instead of pretending to want to have a discussion.

          But we are having a discussion. The reality is O365 comes with a lot of additional features. Whether the OP wants to use them or not does not change the value proposition in general.

      • [pro-software rental opinion snipped]

        You make a lot of compelling arguments, which I appreciate. They remind me of all the great things about prison life:

        1) Three meals a day like clockwork, and it's all catered!

        2) The daily itinerary is planned by someone else, so there's no need to go through the effort of trying to figure out what to do every day!

        3) Loneliness is never an issue. There are close friends within arm's reach at all times! Some of them like to be closer than you'd like, but there are always s

      • Because with Office365 for $8.30/month you get 6TB of online storage.

        You mean I get to trust them with my applications *and* my data? Why didn't you say so?!?!

        The fact that you can install it on multiple devices is handy

        I guess it *is* pretty handy to be able to install a version I don't want on as many devices as I like, rather than a proper version on just one. Then I can be frustrated by it on multiple machines.

        can download it easily

        I don't actually use 365 for anything anymore, so I'm guessing they have somehow found a way to make it easier than clicking on the 'download' button from my MS account like I always did with the local version. I assum

    • Remind me why this is better than the software I purchase one time and install on my PC? I want the features in my "purchased" programs to not be tied to someone else's system and I want them to keep working for as long as I use the product. Wait, then the corporation can't force me to pay a monthly fee...

      Right, because over the lifespan of your old pay once and use until end of software support for that product, they can milk you for much more subscription money than you would previously have paid for that one time license. This is why I ditched Photoshop for Affinity Photo. For the princely sum of $54 Affinity can 'only' do 80% of what Photoshop does and it won't serve the needs of professional graphics artists and photographers but realistically, 80% of the curren Photoshop user base would probably be per

    • Remind me why this is better than the software I purchase one time and install on my PC? I want the features in my "purchased" programs to not be tied to someone else's system and I want them to keep working for as long as I use the product. Wait, then the corporation can't force me to pay a monthly fee...

      A company prefers monthly revenue so they can budget appropriately. Software falls into 2 categories today: free or constantly updated and enhanced. One time purchases are very tough to manage. The one-time purchase model really sucks for the vendor.

      I think a thing to remember is you HAVE TO MAKE YOUR CUSTOMERS HAPPY. This really sucks. If they're unhappy, even for unreasonable reasons, you are penalized. If you pay a one time fee for a license, one would assume you get THAT version, maintained wi

      • Why should I pay for Excel if LibreOffice, Gnumeric, Google Sheets, etc. will do the job equally well, without locking me into their proprietary formats, and without locking me out of a version that works even if they issue an update that breaks or removes stuff I need?

        People will tend to pay an ongoing fee if it adds ongoing value.

        But what happens when the vendor decides to let the software stagnate, or removes needed features for whatever reason, but still charges the ongoing fee?

        "Oh, they can just switch

        • Why should I pay for Excel if LibreOffice, Gnumeric, Google Sheets, etc. will do the job equally well

          Typically because your customers/clients/bosses/providers/etc. use it. I have an Office 365 subscription because it makes it easier to share documents with people at work and acquaintances, and also because some family members need it for college work. Weren't for that and I'd go with some of the free alternatives.

          Notice that there's no point in arguing that other people should switch. They won't. Non-technical people don't want to become technical, much less learn new user interfaces. They'll stick with wh

        • Why should I pay for Excel if LibreOffice, Gnumeric, Google Sheets, etc. will do the job equally well, without locking me into their proprietary formats, and without locking me out of a version that works even if they issue an update that breaks or removes stuff I need?

          People will tend to pay an ongoing fee if it adds ongoing value.

          You're making my point there, probably without realizing it. How can a software vendor add value? What happens once a problem is solved? WinRAR is a classic example. There's no real opportunity to improve. Most OSs are there too. How much can you improve an OS or a text editor? I don't know that we've "mastered" OSes, but I think we're close. Lately, all changes are mostly cosmetic. I anticipate that we only have a few more useful OS innovations to see in our lifetime and even then, when I imagine

          • Few points.

            First, while your example of a bicycle is well-taken, and some things do become good enough and are commoditized as a result, there are many other things that don't. Innovation has a tendency to happen when it's least expected.

            Operating systems are what they are today not because they were designed, but because they evolved from WAY older designs with the constraint of still being backwardly-compatible with as much legacy software as possible. I suspect we will in fact see some serious innovati

      • Those reasonings are all valid, except for one point: if one suddenly doesn't have money to pay their monthly fee for some reason, they lose access to all they put into it.

        A good balance would be this: you stop paying, you have 3 months to download anything you have online on the service, which gives you time to either depart with the service for good, or to resubscribe if the issue you're going through is solved; and you get to keep using the version of the software you had been paying for, as you did pay

      • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Wednesday June 01, 2022 @08:38AM (#62583178)

        > Software falls into 2 categories today: free or constantly updated and enhanced.

        You DO realize that those aren't mutually exclusive, right? Because Open Source would like to have a word with you.

        I work on a small (free) emulator and we constantly put out small, incremental yearly upgrades because myself and others on the dev team actually uses it so we understand the QoL, workflow, and the frustration of bugs for users. It is a hobby for us because we already have full-time paying jobs.

        > How can you possibly beat someone who is copying your best features?

        Gee, by offering a better product? You know, one that isn't CONSTANTLY redesigning the UI for no fucking reason? By listening to customer feedback and streamlining their workflow? This isn't fucking rocket science.

        The UI of many Open Source software is garbage. That bar is often at times so low that it takes very little work just to make a better product just by having a decent UI.

        > Running a software business the old-fashioned way really sucks.

        Customers are not interested in your business problems. They want to pay for a product that best aligns with THEIR needs. Some customers are perfectly fine being nickeled and dimed every month. Others are not.

        > I think it's reasonable and preferable to pay a monthly fee for good software.

        Myself and many others don't. The FUNDAMENTAL problem with SaaS is that there are usually NO options for a fixed-price license. It is real simple: SELL BOTH. Companies are holding customers hostage by ONLY offering SaaS -- this is complete bullshit. i.e. Photoshop CS2 is perfectly fine for my needs but Adobe refuses to sell it. I completely understand the support nightmare but it should not be a crime to pirate software that is:

          a) TWO+ (*) decades old, and
          b) That specific version is NO LONGER being sold.

        (*) Technically Photoshop CS2 was released in 2005 so it isn't quite two decades but the point remains.

        > I'd much rather pay $10 monthly for that + cloud services than $300 every 2-5 years as an example of a subscription I actually pay for.

        I buy software on a 10 year cycle. That $10/month * 12 months * 10 years = $1,200. Fuck off with your greed. I'd rather pay $500 and continue to use the software until I absolutely need to upgrade because all this constant nickeling and diming is driving me to competitor's products (proprietary OR open source.)

        > And regardless of whether you like it or not, monthly revenue is easy to manage

        For who? For the company? Because I certainly don't like being CONSTANTLY nickeled and dimed EVERY fucking month with a bullshit Software Rental Fee.

    • They can offer online storage, new features, support, etc.

      But most importantly, if they stop offering standalone installs you can't buy something that doesn't exist.

    • Remind me why this is better than the software I purchase one time and install on my PC?

      Seems like it's a service regardless, like Tiller for Excel and Google Docs. Tiller doesn't work for LibreOffice so what's the LibreOffice equivalent? Or is there not one?

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Remind me why this is better than the software I purchase one time and install on my PC? I want the features in my "purchased" programs to not be tied to someone else's system and I want them to keep working for as long as I use the product. Wait, then the corporation can't force me to pay a monthly fee..

      Because you're not the customer. For people who want to buy the one and done version of Office - go right ahead - Microsoft still sells it.

      But as an alternative, Microsoft also releases Office365. Many ente

    • Why stop at paying to rent software to WRITE or EDIT a document? Pay more to SAVE it, or PRINT it, LOL.
      • But it works, when I got my first mobile phone entire documents could be sent via email an a pc and then somebody got the idea to ask for (at the time quite a lot) money to send 120 characters via sms.
  • when you're talking about high-fallutin features in computing environments.

    Pulling them (assuming they more-or-less work) is a good way to discourage future users from even bothering with new features. After all, why bother when they can likely roll their own?

    If this is the last word on this and excel is just going to be spreadsheets because spreadsheets is what excel is good at (hehe), then so be it. If there are more features that get trotted out and get pulled, then what you've got is a rudderless projec

  • by arosenfield ( 998621 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @09:28PM (#62582273)

    The money data type in Excel is being replaced by dates. All cells are now dates! No more pesky worrying about what data types you have in which cells, when everything is now a date!

    • Heh, I'm presuming they're not talking about the "currency" type. This seemed like some sort of live import service.

      I suspect the problem with this particular feature is that it's not a one-and-done thing, but something that required a lot of ongoing maintenance just to keep it working. So it wasn't worth the non-zero maintenance cost, especially since their telemetry helpfully informed them that no one was actually using the bloody feature in the first place.

      Well, I never missed it before, and apparently

      • by imidan ( 559239 )
        Yeah, I've never heard of the feature either, but my bank offers downloads of my account activity in CSV format. I rarely take advantage of it, but if I wanted to have that in my workflow, I would just download the .csv every month or whatever. This seems to be an issue with SaaS using novel APIs and formats... seems like the feature would be easily made seamless and universal if everyone just defaulted to using the existing standards.
    • The money data type in Excel is being replaced by dates.

      dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy? Will your Excel files with freedom dates work equally well with the commie socialist dates used by the rest of the world?

    • by MagicM ( 85041 )

      Parents today think Common Core Math is hard. Wait until they learn about doing multiplication in base-365-with-leap-years.

  • Yeah SaaS! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @09:30PM (#62582275)

    Software as a Service: the service is, the software vendor unilaterally decides what you can or cannot do with the service you purchased and you don't have any say about it.

    At least with installable closed source software, you could keep whatever you installed running until it was impossibly old (which could take decades - we still have a mid 90's Access database at work which works fine for the purpose) or you found a replacement. With cloudy apps, no so: Microsoft decided it'll disappear this feature at the end of June and that's final. Suck it up.

    Remember, that's paying customers being treated like they didn't exist we're talking about here. We're right back to the days of the mainframe, people!

    • It's not just SaaS. A lot of software (FOSS, SaaS or otherwise) updates automatically these days... if you don't read changelogs religiously every time your updater pops up you'll find things like this happening on many applications across many platforms.

      Whether it's Linux distros with their repositories, mobile devices with their app stores, Windows updating first-party software through Windows Update or just individual applications auto-updating through their own proprietary update routines on startup, de

      • With Linux, you can install the last package before the offending one and mark that package on hold.

        With Windows, not so much. But then, those who distrust Microsoft don't apply all their patches blindly: they wait a day or two for others to play guinea pig and test the breakage-du-jour, and if there's no massive amounts of reports of stuff not working anymore, go ahead and apply them on their machines too.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        It's not just SaaS. A lot of software (FOSS, SaaS or otherwise) updates automatically these days...

        Any any decent Linux distro lets you lock packages in place or install older ones. You can also often install packages from sources, with different levels of effort. Yes, maintenance is then your responsibility, but older versions do not simply vanish like in the SaaS "Screw me now!" model.

        • by adrn01 ( 103810 )
          I've had to roll back newer versions of WINE and the version of X that comes with Mint that broke, badly, some games I was playing, eg Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The package manager Synaptic was unable to do the rollback due to it apparently handling dependencies one at a time, rather than as a group; thus, I had to write a short script, using the logfile of that install. Just being able to lock a package is barely enough; installation ought to auto-generate a rollback script.
          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Sure, things are far from perfect in Linux as well. In particular, many distros assume there is only one current version of a software package and you have tro jump through some hoops to install an older one. Usually you can get things where you want and usually the process to get there makes some sense.

            On Windows, you often are simply screwed. When you are not, you often need to go through some really arcane manipulations.

    • And people poke fun at Stallman instead of listening:

      https://www.reddit.com/r/Progr... [reddit.com]

    • At least with installable closed source software, you could keep whatever you installed running until... you found a replacement. With cloudy apps, no so: Microsoft decided it'll disappear this feature at the end of June and that's final. Suck it up.

      I'm sorry to deflate your rant just a bit, but the features are being discontinued in June 2023, so you have a year to find a replacement. Not to say that you'll be able to find one, of course.

    • Software as a Service: the service is, the software vendor unilaterally decides what you can or cannot do with the service you purchased and you don't have any say about it.

      Software as a product is no different. If you think it is, try booting up your laptop and running your 8bit software from the early 90s. You are *always* reliant on a vendor or someone else to run your software, even if you own said software.

  • Um - OK. So what?

  • Very confusing. I first read it as "Google is killing ..."
    https://www.moviesonline.ca/go... [moviesonline.ca]

    Difficult to keep track of the carnage these days.

  • Don't depend on SaaS, period.

  • by Traf-O-Data-Hater ( 858971 ) on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @11:30PM (#62582480)
    ...with that port of Lotus 123 to Linux that someone did the other day. At least it's an honest piece of software that's not going to evaporate under you just because someone else decides to remove features.
    • No thanks. I'll wait for Systemd-123. I hear it includes an NNTP client all running at PID1 which as we all know is the most superior PID.

  • Rule #1 (Score:2, Funny)

    by Immerman ( 2627577 )

    Rule #1 of developing on Microsoft platforms - don't use any feature introduced in the last 10 years unless you want to have to rewrite your software when it's discontinued.

    Rule #2 is, of course, don't use any feature that are more than 10 years old since they're obsolete and poorly designed messes only kept around for backwards compatibility.

    • When you've been in the business for a while, you learn to somewhat predict what new stuff is going to be a fad, versus what will stick.

      I think for instance Framework will likely fall to the side. .NET Core/5/6/7 is a superior and largely compatible, but open-source and cross-platform replacement.

      UI technologies are a little harder to read right now. I still do a lot of WPF, but it looks like MAUI might be the intended cross-platform replacement. I'd like to see Linux become a first-class, Microsoft-suppo

    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Rule #1 of developing on Microsoft platforms - don't use any feature introduced in the last 10 years unless you want to have to rewrite your software when it's discontinued. Rule #2 is, of course, don't use any feature that are more than 10 years old since they're obsolete and poorly designed messes only kept around for backwards compatibility.

      I used to maintain my own home linux server for storing personal files starting around 2002. I had to upgrade periodically, swap out hardware components that failed like the PSU and failing HDDs, taking backups which took quite a lot of my time so they fell by the wayside until I was only doing them once a year or so, and then only for the crucial data. Then in 2011 something went wrong with my RAID and I never managed to get back any of my data. Everything since my last backup 6 months ago was lost. Moreov

  • What about new and more useful data types in Excel?

    Why can will still not have elapsed time data in Excel? If they are reducing the data types, that would mean a reduction in, "features," to maintain, thus a reduction in money to produce Excel, could MS provide data types that would allow us to collect and analyze real world data? It is ridiculous that one cannot easily add hours/minutes/seconds/... to a clock time in MS's spreadsheet, is but a single example.

    Yes, one can do it in VBA, but there again, not

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Subscription based software is merely a way for developers to deliver the least value. Watch what Broadcom doe to VMware...

      Looks like it. The only question with Broadcom is how hard it will screw its customers and how fast. Probably depends on their estimate how many realistic alternatives the customers have. Those that were smart and did not tie themselves strongly to VMware are in luck. The rest, not so much.

  • Office keys go on sale. For the price of one year of subscription, you can buy two keys for two computers, and then you don't have to worry about this kind of thing. You also don't have to worry about whether you remembered to update your credit card information when you get a new card. You also don't have to worry about having access to your files when the internet goes down.

  • It's been at least 10 years since the last time I used Alpha. I had no idea it even produced its own data types, let alone could be ported into Excel. Is it actually heavily used?

    I'm not sure why it's worth pointing out the time since the feature was introduced. This sounds like MS made the feature, gave it a few years, saw it wasn't being utilized to be worth supporting, so they're killing it. If so, shouldn't we be approving of them getting rid of unused features to reduce bloat? Or do we just like hamme

    • ... MS made the feature, gave it a few years ...

      ... realized they weren't stealing low-volume customers from Wolfram, so they're killing it. Wolfram can do much more data-collection, number-crunching, plotting than Excel, so why would anyone want to move Wolfram data into Excel? It looks like Microsoft tried to create a poor-man's math engine (at a much higher price) then realized they didn't.

  • Money in Excel was one of the big features ...

    Why won't anyone support XBRL/FIX? Use the wheel that's already been invented, for free. Instead we get subscription services like Tiller, charting and spread-sheeting as an online service. Of course, Microsoft is giving them a 'sweetheart' deal.

  • Microsoft does still let you purchase Office without having to go the subscription route. (I'm honestly surprised, because I'd heard they'd move to *only* a subscription model years ago. Yet they haven't.)

    Granted, they don't make it easy or obvious anymore that Office can be purchased as a one-time thing. They'd like everyone to just subscribe to O365. But it's still an alternative.

    For corporate use though? The real "gotcha" is the fact that Microsoft has been building out the whole ecosystem in the cloud,

  • The funny thing about Excel is that it's not even a decent spreadsheet! Excel tries to be an application that does it all, and can julienne your fries, but doesn't do anything well, and does most of it's tasks very poorly, if not in an outright broken manner (protected mode).

    The only reason Microsoft still has a foot hold in the office suite sphere, is that people don't want to change, and companies don't want to invest in training their staff. People, and companies, are happy to use broken, and buggy s
    • by groebke ( 313135 )

      The funny thing about Excel is that it's not even a decent spreadsheet!

      I would use Quattro Pro, however, it is not made anymore, and, one does have to use what is supported in the business world.

  • Second time Microsoft is killing a Money product. First time was 2009 [wikipedia.org].

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