Hard drive crashed so I lost installed word/excel programs that came installed when I bought the computer. Office Home 2019 is a monumental pain in the ass. Microsoft's ability to take something that's simple and works wonderfully and turn it into a quagmire of muck is beyond comprehension.

I don't want to use Teams.
I don't want to use Onedrive
I don't want to use Skype.
I don't want to use Onenote.

All I want is the simple stand alone program that doesn't require a signon and lets me store new files on my PC without mindbending contortions.

Damn them.

Guess I'll give Libreoffice a try.

I've used Libreoffice for years and have never had issues with it, but I'm hardly a "hardcore" user. I open it maybe once or twice a year. I use notepad ++ for most text related things and google docs for more involved documents (but that's another sign-in if you don't already have it set up). And I don't do excel stuff at all, so no idea how it'd work there. But overall it's a fantastic place to start.

I had the same problems and went to Open Office.

You know when you have a MS account it keeps track of your software and makes it super easy to reinstall on same, new or different machine.
Is that more painful than having to reinvent the wheel?
Just sayin'.

My employer is hugely in bed with Microsoft. We have hundreds of Surface Pro 7s in service, most of the folks that have actual laptops have Surface Pro laptops, we have and use O365 on an enterprise level, we make use of Azure cloud services, and we use MS InTune to push out updates to specialized systems running the various software we developed in-house for different jobs.

You should see some of the shit we're starting to have to deal with. Look up MMD (Microsoft Managed Desktop). Basically, we have it registered as such in InTune, and Microsoft manages it for us. This sounds great, until you understand that in order to install something that requires administrator approval basically we as the IT staff have to put in a support ticket to get them to either A) push the software out via InTune, B) submit a ticket so that they can create a temporary user and password that we can use to log on and install it ourselves, or C) give up and live without it. My tier 2 domain administrator password isn't completely useless yet, but it's a hell of a lot harder to install, say, an ornery printer that doesn't want to play nice with W10's autoinstall wizard.

Just last week they pushed out a new version of one of our programs via InTune and we discovered they were having an outage/bug on Microsoft's end. As a result we had to reimage at least a quarter of the tablets out on the floor at the beginning of this week.

I like Intune, but most of that other shit is for the birds.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
You know when you have a MS account it keeps track of your software and makes it super easy to reinstall on same, new or different machine.
Is that more painful than having to reinvent the wheel?
Just sayin'.

That is true and it would make a difference to some. I have really simple needs so it doesn’t matter to me. Excel and, to a much lesser degree, Word are the only Microsoft products I had. This stuff is overkill by a long shot. As far as reinventing the wheel, some of the other offerings mentioned won’t be any more difficult to use than this piece of crap.

I lack the willpower at the moment to discuss my hatred of the installation and management for Office since about version 2016. O365 is great if you have 1000+ users to manage and your budget process cares more about accurate forecasting than actual dollars. If you are a poor schlub just trying to get office for a dozen employees without going broke, it sucks ass. I wouldn’t care if they still had small business and home user friendly options, but no. They make the stand-alone installation experience hellacious if you want any customization to what you install, and they still want to force you to make an online account just to use the stand-alone retail version.

I have written multiple messages to our reps from Microsoft, Dell, and some of our other vendors who sell Office licenses about the utter bullshit we have to go through to get a customized install on an OEM pc…but nothing changes. Either be big enough to provide an OEM with your customized system image to pre-load, sign up for a subscription, or suck shit. Fucking Office!

- Bret

Adobe went in that direction before MS. Had one user that just had to have Adobe products. I absolutely hated dealing with their licensing and provisioning crap.

I really do not miss the job one little bit

Well credit where credit is due. They gave me a full refund and it only took about 15 minutes in chat.

Still hate’em though

I had a thread like this awhile back. I went Libre. Also, I went Apple to avoid Windows as well. Not perfect but much happier than with Windows. MSFT can kiss my grits.