Are you Still using Microsoft Office? Time to Move On. An Alternative. 

"Cloud computing" is just the latest buzzword instead of saying client - server

I used to be an instrument rated pilot and I can confirm that clouds do not contain RAM. I once picked up insects in my pitot tube and had a wierd ASI reading on landing.

Yeah the company I work for has everything in the damn M$ cloud. I hate where this is headed.

I also hated MS in my IT career. I was a NetWare engineer before it went extinct.

@@MinisterRedPill Dude if you see it now, RUN!

At least plumbing is predictable! Thank you buddy

@MarzMindset - I totally agree with you. I haven't used MS products for at least 15 years now and would never go back to them. Linux all the way and LibreOffice! MS indeed sucks.

Question everything. Everyone. Question why? There's an agenda that us pawns are not privy to. Money, the root of all evil. It breeds greed, jealousy and divide. Why do we worship it? IWhy do we SLAVE away most of our lives to make somebody else rich, whilst we (the SLAVE pawns) only make enough to force us back next week to do it all again. QUESTION EVERYTHING

Sooooo true.. My dad worked for NASA, Lincoln Labratories, MiT, and their teams saved everything externally. Locked it up. Even i the late 70s, data tapes were recorded and removed and stored in locked cabinets. To this day, he still he preaches that every thing you do on a pc can not be erased and can be traced.

Must be on Windows. This is one of the reason I quit using it. You have to keep turning one drive off in the update cycle.

@@Selendeki - nobody caring about what you do on YOUR computer - may be true to you 🤣🤣🤣 it's not true for most of us.

Same here after my MS account lock out for simply changing my email, I have moved as many of the files/folders on One Drive to a removable drive, BUT, one drive is refusing to allow copies of some of the remaining Files/Folders, so I have to find a work around. BUT for me One Drive is totally dead, and as soon as I can replace 365, I will do so, seriously looking at Linux as a replacement to MS.

Yep, same here. Such is the life of ICT support to business. If they can hire someone to get guaranteed results (i.e. someone who's only used to MS Office), they'll do it. As a result licenses must be paid.

This is the whole reason that it will never really be "the year of Linux" so many of us would love to see. People's lack of adaptability (combined with the astounding rate of change in the tech world already) keep us hamstrung to intrusive and clobbed together microsoft products.

Lol when nothing is superior to Microsoft Office. Talk about losers that force others into using inferior products that cost little to nothing with no support or progress over the years.

The problem is the saved format is not 100% comparable between MS and Libre. The issues are not trivial if a document is going to be passed around in the office and with clients.

That's why I'm excited for the AI takeover and automation of trivial jobs. If people don't like change, AI has no problem with that.

I still have my Ami Pro install discs 💜

Still have some law firm clients using Word Perfect!

I hated WordPerfect.

Granted, that puts Office miles ahead of Windows, where they fight tooth and nail not to even get started to approach reliability. 😋

WordPerfect has always been reliable. I was a professional WordPerfect user at a law firm. I am an expert in WordPerfect and Word. The windows version was fine from 5.1 on. I still only use WordPerfect on my home computer. There were always things that Bill Gates thought his users shouldn't be able to do, such as fractional font sizes. When I was working and needed to duplicate government forms so we could fill them in on the computer, only WordPerfect was up to the job. WordPerfect could do a 6.7 point font while Word was limited to just half sizes.

Someone I can't remember who put best like this: "cloud is just someone else's computer" - which you have no idea who has access to, have no control who has access to it or when, and no accountability or responsibility for when things go wrong.

@@CnCDuneJust think of "the cloud" as a store display.

Its used to train AI models and people keep feeding into them.

Yes , we provide them information they make an income from and we also pay them for that privilege

My source had inaccurate information on that. Thanks for the correction

Thank you for posting the correction; my eyes went really big when Rob mentioned the error. I've been a Sun (yeah now Oracle) sysadmin since 1990 (back in the SunOS days!) and loved working on Sun gear and OS; the compnay was an awsome partner in my career. Oracle - not so mich! Really appreciate your content, Rob!

I use tar atta linux it will open just about any archive file. yeah micropuke copies everything. but what they REALLY need to copy is ext4. that'll put hackers atta business but guess what that puts Norton, McAfee and all other malware, ransomware, virus writers atta business as well. can't have that shit, now can we?

@@robbraxmantech Your source wasn't just inaccurate, it was totally wrong. In this video you give Oracle credit for developing OpenOffice, in actual fact in 2010 Oracle literally destroyed OpenOffice and was the reason for the LibreOffice fork. As soon as Oracle bought SUN, in 2010, they then set about winding up the SUN software, disposing of the devs (those that didn't just quit that is) and basically stopping all development on OOo. Oracle only bought SUN to kill MySQL (Also now forked as MariaDB) because it was a direct Open Source competitor to Oracle Database. IBM convinced Oracle to gift the OOo code to the Apache Foundation so that they could grab the code for their own Symphony Office suite, under the much more permissive Apache License, without then having to contribute back to the community. The LibreOffice Folks forked OOo to maintain the code under the GPL. SUN Microsystems, despite hiccups along the way and community suspicion of the big corporate, was generally a good citizen of the Open Source Software community. Oracle on the other hand were arguably even worse than Microsoft and giving them any credit for the development of OpenOffice frankly grinds my gears and shows that your research was minimal if almost nonexistent and doesn't do your credibility any favours.

Like they always did/do.... Working with Office/VB/VBA for over 25 years now and every year they come up with something 'better' - that takes new training, new licenses and then suddenly isn't compatible/supported any longer... They keep fixing what ain't broken, yet you still keep apps that crash...

I want NOTHING to do with Microsoft AI - that is the reason I switched all of my computers to Linux instead of "upgrading" to Windows 11. I don't trust Microsoft, and they are only getting less and less trustworthy.

Can't say it better.

@@user-hv9sg5pl8b what do you run now ? I'm considering the switch to debian.

Youre new to the industry. MS has always pushed a solution without a problem you clown.

2003???

Companies that provide email services should also begin offering NextCloud or OwnCloud services as well.

These cloud services offer much better multi user collabration than using old network shares or worse sending them by email

Surely there's a way to pirate old Excel versions. If you collaborate with others however, your SOL.

@@wio2189 This is good but old versions eventually quite working on new OS versions so there is an eventual limit to the OS as well.

You can create any function you want in LO and Google office replicates much of Excel.

@@rrmackay If functions are all you need thats great but they are also a tiny part of the functionality. The fact is, there is so much in excel that people don't bother to learn and other spreadsheets don't have that excel functionality is just not matched by anything.

I have used instructions directly out of an MS365 manual in OnlyOffice and everything works 1:1 or extremely close to 1:1 as far as I can tell, including spreadsheets. I recommend OnlyOffice as much as I can to everyone I can now, as it is the only office suite that is fully 1:1 with Microsoft Office, and can read/export to MS Office formats with no format conversion issues, at least in my experience.

Yes, sort of.... If you do any complex formatting or include graphs or images - good luck! LibreOffice just isn't completely compatible with MS office. I do engineering work and have to make reports with extensive graphics and I also publish in journals. If your needs are simple, or you don't have to exchange documents with others who us MS office - then LibreOffice will be OK.

I use Linux as my base OS. I then use a Virtualbox guest to run a copy of MS Windows 10 with Office on my LInux machine to communicate documents with those who use MS office. I recommend this setup because 1. You can backup the Virtualbox Windows system. 2. Linux offers filesystems (ZFS) that is far superior to anything on Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Server in my opinion.

Those are just words. What changes have you made in the way you use computing devices because of the instructions that Rob has given you?

Or infantile ... ooo fluffy white clouds !😄

Always true

Now, people also pay to be the product.

Which linux? I just bought a new laptop, still in the box. Its windows but I want to switch to Linux day 1.

​​@@goathead3329Ubuntu, Mint, or what I use is Zorin. I tried Garuda Linux recently but switched back to Zorin rather quickly. It broke a lot of things in my case and for me Zorin OS just works. For someone just coming from Windows, I think Zorin OS or Linux Mint are about the easiest options for you.

@@goathead3329 Mint is what I use.

@@goathead3329 I always recommend Mint or Ubuntu, in that order, to new Linux users - they are geared to make your initial experience as easy as possible.

I use Linux Mint 20. I started 15 years ago with SUSE Linux. It became a lot easier once Ubuntu was developed.

I’m so thankful that we can now read scientific papers. Snobbery was only one of the reasons they didn’t want ‘others’ to see 👁

@@nickieglazer7065 Reading a scientific paper requires more than just a particular software package or word processor, sorry but you'll have to acquire some subject expertise. What are some of the other reasons?

@@videomaniac108 I read published scientific research papers before and after peer review. Call me ‘old fashioned’ by all means and apologies if I misunderstood. In order to read the scientist’s words; I need my eyes and the software package & word processor that is my brain. We are even closer to Neuralink than I had anticipated.

I want to take LaTeX anyday over other documents for scientific part. But, I totally get your frustration about the syntax and the difficulty to actually write the stuff. You needed to get classes to learn how to get even simple paper form out of it at start. But, once you learn it, it became far nicer. If one would have a dedicated keyboard with Function keys for the common parts, that you can just get it started (if not using a template) then it is not so bad for creating the few page white papers and technical documentation. Same is with the ODF/OOXML, just create the templates that you want every student etc to use, and actually enforce that for acceptance. It is not difficult once you have good templates to hand over and people can just WYSIWYG to fill the data as they would fill a form. Same is still with LibreOffice Writer and MS Office Word. The GUI is not just great by default. Way too complicated and way too much stuff that isn't required, and functions order is against the purpose. As in normal writing, people should first just enter the data (their text) and then add the additional data (images, pictures, logos etc) and only then start to take care of the formatting and all. It just so heavily made that people start to focus first to these small things, like font and where the image is and so on. That is why I write mostly on just text editor, on terminal. And when I create the nice PDF's, I just copy data from files to the publishing application and I do the formatting there. There I can focus purely for the visual look, not at all to content anymore. I just so wish that we could get away from HTML emails and as well webforums, as I welcome any day back the times of text-only emails (with attachments), newsgroups and IRC. Heck, even the basic wall and write for Unix terminal use are amazing tools to discuss quickly something to someone else on the network.

I originally used Lotus word pro way back when. Then to MS because I needed it for work. Then made the switch to Open Office. A few years ago I finally changed over to LibreOffice. That I can use it across a number of different platforms is a major plus for me.

You can do pretty much anything you want to do on LO or Softmaker Office (Freeoffice with a price tag).

Yup. I still use Office 2007. Works just fine.

The ribbon has become too cluttered in M$ apps. One can tweak the ribbon -- but the tweaks are not easily transferred between machines and I believe I have lost customizations in more than one M$ "upgrade." *_Personal Computing_* -- who wants that? I haven't found that M$ does. Resistance is futile -- you will be assimilated.

Agreed. I gave up on MS Office the moment that terrible ribbon interface appeared - I think it came out in Office 2007, wasn't it?

Heck no, not having ribbons is my no. 1 feature of LO. Office lost me in their inevitable attempt to fix what ain't broken in 2007. Eff ribbons. 👎

Use office 2003 or 2007 in Windows 7

@@artsmith1347 OMG so, so confusing. Clutter and mess. I can read, in fact I can also write, which is WHY I need a word processor ... Just give me f'n written menus

I miss Visio Technical more than anything else. There isn't another program that rivals it. (...that I'm aware of)

They locked me out of my computer. They stated that they gave me a Bitlocker recovery key. When I logged into Microsoft they said I never had one. Now I cannot use my computer.

Out of curiosity, how early are we talking about?

Had that issue with office 2016 that was purchased in 2016 and downloaded from their website. Fast forward to 2023, and no longer can I download the software, and they claim to have no record of my purchase even though I forwarded them the email with the order number... then they hide their phone number, and any phone numbers you find just tell you to go to their website... I wouldn't buy anything from them just because the lack of support if you have a problem.

@@stephencooper3583 ms will no longer activate office professional 2007 or 2010. both of which i tried online method (after the horrible experience of speaking each number until it recognized all numbers - it basically told me too bad were not going to activate this), the phone in method (in which case it also told me they will not activate it), the speaking with a support person in india method (where he said the same thing) and attempging to use a passed around on the internet cscript KMS technology (in this case i feel it only didnt work because that product key had been abused by too many others like myself trying to get product they paid for to function). i did not bother to try activating my earlier 2003 or 2000 products as i need to use the newer 2007 file formats.

Try google docs, meow.

Nobody does serious computing on a touchscreen phone or tablet - that's why babies like touchscreens on their Disney tablets in the back of their parents' car on long journeys.

​@@terrydaktyllus1320 ah, now I know the one reason why babies like touchscreens. Thank you person who has all the answers to everything!

@@Dave-um7mw No, I don't have the answers to everything - for example, I have no interest in horse riding, so you won't find me hanging around equestrian channels on RU-vid. So stop making silly assumptions and put your "amateur Internet psychologist" books away - because you've never met me, if you passed me in the street you wouldn't know it, and therefore you're hardly qualified to discuss me as a topic. Now do try to keep up and stay on topic, there's a good chap. We were talking about computers... in your own time...

@@terrydaktyllus1320 TLDR. Anyway, your "no one does serious computing on a touchscreen phone or tablet" comment led me to believe you were trolling, so I responded in kind. The way-to-long-of-a-response you just wrote on the other hand, leads me to believe that you're serious about thinking people only use word processors or spreadsheets for "serious computing" and nothing else. Is this true?

The heaviest desktop version of Linux, Ubuntu has an average memory usage profile of somewhere between 2-4GB - assuming you've got a browser with a few tabs open and LibreOffice doing some "heavy lifting" with some big documents. Windows 10 and 11 have a requirement for a minimum of 8GB RAM before you take anything else into account. Windows Defender, Microsoft's built in anti-malware package, used to have a very poor reputation until the dawn of around Windows 8 when it suddenly improved in quality dramatically - mainly down to the fact that a lot of it resides in memory constantly scanning the contents of your PC (sorry, the PC that you paid for that Microsoft leases back to you once Windows is on it) and reporting back to Microsoft in real time of anything suspicious that it finds and comparing it to what is on the PCs of other users. Hence the memory usage profile of Windows is much higher. So, in simple terms, if you seriously believe that storing your documents on your own PC is more secure than in the Cloud when you run Windows, you are very much mistaken - Microsoft still knows everything about you and what is on your PC at all times.

That's the confusing part about this video. I don't think Google or Microsoft wants to know what foods I eat or what document contains certain keywords that is already being typed on Google or Bing.

@@UrfriderPoro You're entitled to think what you like. Once I have given you information that I know is to the best of my ability and knowledge, then my job as a "good Internet citizen" is done and I can sleep soundly at night - whether you choose to take that advice on board or ignore it, that's up to you.

@@terrydaktyllus1320 I'm still going to use alternatives like Libre Office. But it's like monkey typed, any private information like my personal documents I wouldn't want on the cloud or backed up where hackers can steal it. Giving big tech data on mainstream information isn't going hurt anyone.

My thought is that AI is doing nothing more than screening and taking input from your phone in real-time and uploading it to either private or government centers. Why does the AI portion of the chip need to take up more space than both the graphical and CPU portion allotted to the consumer. Aside from that, nobody asked for AI chip integration. It was just pushed to consumers.

IF your grocery list was checked by AI, that's asking for trouble.... 2 years ago you bought the wrong food, you are overweight, you will go 6 months to a food camp. don't share your private stuff ( google does not respect your privacy)

I am using apple notes for grocery shopping Could you please tell me which app you suggest?

@@ThePeterasd Apparently not. I've posted twice and both times the reply has vanished.

I don't need any AI

I still have access to my documents when not connected even though they are in the cloud. Its a setting where you can set a folder to be always available locally and the cloud keeps a copy.

They want your data. Data is the new gold. I live in the EU. Data Protection only protects the corporations Not the individual. The Bank, Hospital, Police st, Social security, Lawyers, Court etc. are allowed to record you when you walk in but you are not permitted to record them. Perfect grounds for corruption. LAW is not legislation. I know my rights & I exercise my rights by not complying with Unlawful legislation. Your Freedom is your responsibility.

The EU did allow to law to happen that makes possible for companies like Google and Microsoft to transfer data to USA, even when it was suppose to be so that the data can't be used or moved at all outside EU that is from EU citizens. The whole thing is just such a nest of loopholes that makes it hateful to even think about.

I believe it was Visio...

I was thinking the Microsoft equivalent of draw could be Publisher.

That situation is not actually bad, because Outlook you can host and run on your own cloud storage. The video is about people who let Microsoft and Google read their documents by uploading them to their own cloud services.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a great open source email app. It has been updated quite a bit over the past year.

Outlook is, and always has been, a single threaded and bloated piece of cr*p.

Go to onedrive settings and make all documents available offline. In addition, go to the setting to select folders to keep on the computer and select all. Those two options will download all your files into your computers local onedrive folder. If at that point you cancel the onedrive subscription, that local folder will stay and you can just rename it.

you can set it as default behaviour.

This is strange. I use OneDrive extensively on multiple laptops and a desktop sometimes in the same location and never had this issue.

Is WPS office secure? Are read that it's created by chinese company. since we're on the topic of privacy and security do you think it's safe to use . And what cloud service is actually secure nowadays and not reading your material?

@@ronbarton7799 Probably not... even after you close it, it stays running in the background (I use MATE System Monitor to force close it). BUT it is the ONLY true MS Office CLone. nothing comes close. However if you do not need MS Office Compatibility to be perfect (Most people dont as you are creating stuff from scratch) I advise SoftMaker FreeOffice 2018 or the paid version or SoftMaker Office 2024 (2018 does not allow sound or video in Powerpoint Presentations but WPS does).

​@@ronbarton7799This.

What do you use for grammar checking?

@@blackjam2683 Softmaker Office and WPS Office both have them built in I think.

Thanks. Never used Visio either so no wonder I didn't know it.

I have used Visio, Project and Publisher Publisher is the one I miss most often

Never thought I'd see that program name again. Seems that I was in the Navy in the early 80's and I had to learn to a use standalone microcomputer in a stand alone desk that ran Lotus 123 and Wordstar 2000.

Mine too!

The you can still use Jwalk chart Tools. JWalk provided the basic chart features Excel NEVER provided, and LOTUS123 provided from the very beginning.

I stopped upgrading after Office 2007. Have had no problems installing as recently as this year onto a new machine. Keep those original CDs!

I was in military intelligence in the early 80s. Then we could collect about 10x the intelligence than we could physically analyze. Today you can probably collect a lot more intelligence than can be analyzed. The first thing to be analyzed is somebody has to care what you have to say. Very few things that are said in a business or home environment anybody at the government or Microsoft care about.

@@MarkDalbey-cv9sb You needed actual people to analyze data then though. Now, AI can do it 24 hours a day, generate thorough risk assessment reports and mail them to "the appropriate authorities" in seconds. Soon, Robocop will just come blast you away for pirating movies. Kidding, It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you... sort of kidding about that part. But the AI part, not at all kidding. I'm not aware of AI being used for that, but I'd be very surprised if it isn't being tested!

The reason that you have not heard of artificial intelligence being tested, is there is no such thing. It is a marketing term. What they call artificial intelligence is really machine learning, only machine learning is too hard to explain to the average person. Machine learning is more or less feeding the computer lots of similar situations, sometimes millions. When the computer encounters a similar situation it knows to do this. Artificial intelligence is a computer thinking. Computers can't, and may never be able to think. No, machine learning can't be used to analyze data, only a human can do that. You can very efficiently sift through data with a computer, but in the end a human has to determine what it means. @@Mike_H76

I would be shocked if they are not already doing it. It is best to assume they are.

@@VioFax Holy sh1t, I didn't believe you but I just looked it up. That is like Krypton technology from Superman

​@@VioFax😵

How does one get a copy of Office 2007?

Using for work is no problem but I am not using it on my PC. Companies are tripping in the USA.

If you play your cards right, they will never know you are using WPS Office or SoftMaker Office if you dont need to share those documents.

@@eijentwun5509 He has a point, I dont like it but just claim you know it and use it in a vm if the company pays for a copy you can use. I think it should be illegal for companies to force you to actually buy a Product just to work for them but this is what working in the USA has come too.

The real problem, which he acts like isn't a thing, is that MS Office & 365 is far far better than AlLL other alternatives

@@007alztruli I would not know, I simply do not us it. My issue is not wether its better or worse but the fact that Micrsoft wants subscriptiom money to use it.