My mom still uses Office '97 (no joke). I told her it's best to stick with it.
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
187 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
85278 readers
5679 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Updating software to make it not work should be illegal.
Anyway, for people with casual office needs, the Apple apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) would suffice.
Otherwise, LibreOffice.
Really, no reason to pay for MS Office.
Germany has paragraphs about "Computersabotage" i think?
Imagine if English were like German and words like this were commonplace
A vew - less?
Aren’t the new versions of Apple office apps heavily pushing their subscriptions now?
Nope?
I use it pretty regularly at home, and haven’t seen anything that significant other than the premium templates being highlighted in the sidebar when you create a new document.
I did run into a scenario where you had the option to preview smart features while editing thereby showing you how it could be applicable in the immediate short term, but then annoyingly removed the data entered if you didn’t want to subscribe. Otherwise it works about the same as you’d come to expect the software to run.
Libreoffice
LibreOffice is generally better anyway. I'll admit there are some formatting things I find smoother in Office, but overall it's bloatware and it keeps crashing. I really hate Office and avoid it whenever I can.
I can’t recommend this enough. I have been using LibreOffice for a few years and saved myself a lot of money.
Saved even more money a few months ago when I fully switched my OS to open source and left the Microsoft/Apple walled gardens behind.
This is a piss poor excuse from Microsoft for letting a certificate expire. How fucking hard is it to renew a certificate? I do it every fucking day at work. This is purely just forced/planned obsolescence. They want users to use their subscription-based platform on the web.
Ask anyone in IT or tech and they'll confirm that this is the easiest thing for Microsoft to do, the veil is so thin here, it's purely to get people to pay them a subscription.
You only had one job
And now it has a second life... pushing people to libre office!
And it did that job for 7 years.
Just cut off the programs internet acces and any updates to it, then they cant break it.
It won’t help, Office relies on being digitally signed before it will run, and Microsoft is intentionally not renewing the certificate in order to force people off these older perpetual licenses.
It should be illegal to pull this kind of digital theft from people who paid for the software. No one who paid for this was ever told their access was time limited.
This was my favorite version of office for the Mac.
For PC, I held onto Office 2003 Professional for as long as I could.
Euro-Office
I'm looking forward to giving it a whirl. I interact with other humans when sharing and developing documents, so intercompatibility with the office and Office 2003 standards is literally the second most important thing for me, and all of the arbitrary also-ran file formats are a nice to have, not a need to have.
As evidenced by the fact that even the centers can't get on the same page about what alternative formats they feel should be mandated instead.
I think you were downvoted because Euro Office has made the mistake of supporting Microsoft document formats above all else and don't have good support for the ODF alternatives at the moment.
They have since said they want to do better, but they're off on the wrong foot.
I thought OnlyOffice has good odf support? Did the fork patch it out?
There might be any one of a number of confusions here, depending how I read your comment. Or there are none at all. Hard to be sure. But for clarification's sake:
Euro Office is not OnlyOffice. OnlyOffice is not OpenOffice, which is essentially defunct but was the most popular suite that first adopted ODF. OnlyOffice may have been named that way to lure people away from OpenOffice, which was, and is, still in use in some places despite a better non-proprietary option being available. Namely:
LibreOffice is the successor to OpenOffice and uses ODF as its default, so its support is 100%.
OnlyOffice supports* ODF too, but it's by far not the, uh, only one.
* According to their specifications anyway. I haven't used it to be able to confirm how good their support is.
Yeah, but if they don’t do that, supporting the OOXML format by default, nobody will switch, and it will become another failure.
They could have supported both by default.
Someone somewhere made the decision to concentrate on OOXML to the exclusion of everything else, either clueless as to how that would look, or hoping that few people would notice and the fall-out would be minimal.
Either way, neglect of the open alternative is not a good look.