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
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn’t add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it’s almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
To please the shareholders. Then, when AI is no longer deemed valuable and its tremendous costs sink in, they will remove it and layoff the teams that worked on it, to please the shareholders.
But they’ll keep the prices high
That’s way too simplistic, as often.
For the shareholders, having an investment of several billions turn into an unwanted add-on for a few dollars is not a good thing. It’s the opposite, almost like a fire sale.
It’s not for you. It’s for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
And then what? Also, that won’t be legal in the EU.
I mean, you take billions of dollars to develop an AI to put into a product you already have, making it less competitive in the process to … develop a slightly better AI maybe?
Where exactly is the return on investment here?
I don’t disagree [with your comment (I absolutely disagree with what ms is doing)].
However, like with all technology in the past, where the civilian market received the obsolete military technologies (think, internet, cellphones, gps, and wifi), the consumer facing LLM/AI capabilities are likely nowhere near what the bleeding edge is in the military sector. The consumer facing Copilot is a product to make it “legal enough” to harvest your data, and the EULA people agreed to without reading is the nail on the coffin in that defense. The end product has nothing to do with copilot, office, or even us civilians. We’re just the vehicle.
[Edit in brackets]
Why would this not be legal in EU if the conditions of using the copilot are clearly stated in the agreement? GDPR etc is mostly just that: requirement for clear language + informed consent.
The AI hardware isn’t for us. It’s for Google and Microsoft, so they can steal your computer’s CPU time and hard drive space so they can build their own personal Skynets. (Same thing with CoPilot, which requires 50gigs of your hard drive space. You’re also paying for the privilege of being spied on, which is nice for them, I guess.)
First thing I do with the Google Assistent on Android Phones is to tell it to disable itself. Cool thing is that it does.
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.
If smart people love libreoffice, then I must be dumb. Working with it always seems weird and I never like it.
Fortunately, I can use LaTeX for work; it is far from without issues but while being arcane sometimes (especially when tables are involved), it never really upsets me and the result looks very good. I can say neither for libreoffice or MS office. But at least the former doesn’t charge for the experience.
I hope typst gains more traction; it seems really intuitive compared to TeX and you don’t necessarily need a macro package. And while it doesn’t produce the quality of TeX-based systems yet, it is already good. Then again, Knuth’s goal first and foremost goal was quality (and it shows); the system just had to be usable by him.
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
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.
https://forum.onlyoffice.com/t/why-does-it-contain-a-web-browser/8250/3
Chromium embedded framework, not electron. Similar concept, though.
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.
Free and open source, but if you’re willing to pay, you could donate to the project.
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.
OnlyOffice spreadsheet has less functionality than Excel but unless you are a super power user then it’s not a problem.
Sweet! I’ve been using MS at work (required) and Libre at home (because screw MS). I’ll give Only another go!
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.
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.
Everyone experiencing this should be thinking “man, I gotta ditch Microsoft before they try to fuck me again”
Absolutely. This has made me acutely aware that my days with MS are numbered.
But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back.
Should be illegal.
“You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we’re done half baking it into all our apps and now we’re almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all.”
The logic of the utterly deranged…
They did the same with 3.5 jack removal from phones, charged more for less
So glad I got a free phone from Visible after they were going to update their network and claimed my Galaxy S8 wouldn’t be compatible.
Best phone I ever had, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Suck on that, apple losers.
Oh shit maybe we’ll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
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).
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.
It’s a safe bet. I wonder if enterprise pricing is that high.
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.
Clippy is back!
GOZER The choice is made. The Traveller has come. VENKMAN We didn't choose anything?!! I didn't think of an image, did you? SPENGLER No. WINSTON My mind's a total void! [They all look at Ray] RAY I couldn't help it! It just popped in there! VENKMAN What? What just popped in there?
SPENGLER I have a radical idea... The door swings both ways. We could reverse the particle flow through the gate... RAY How? SPENGLER ... we'll resize a table in Word VENKMAN Excuse me, Egon. You said resizing a table was bad... RAY [with realisation] ... resize the table... VENKMAN You're going to endanger us. You're going to endanger our client; the nice lady who paid us in advance before she turned into a dog SPENGLER Not necessarily. There's definitely a very slim chance we'll survive.. WINSTON ... RAY ... VENKMAN I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! Let's do it!
It looks like you’re summoning a minor demon!
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
worlds most over glorified over priced office website that runs like a slug
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.
I think locally only, LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.
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
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
Some people can’t because they need updated proofing tools and that version no longer has updates.
word art > proofing tools
