[mshroyer]

I've started switching back to LibreOffice because the situation with MS Office nagging me to save my files to the cloud, or to use "connected" AI experiences, keeps getting worse.

(The connected experiences, including Copilot, can be disabled with a dialog hidden deep in Office's Trust Center, but even that's confusingly worded. It's unclear from the wording and the structure of the dialog what the combination of checking "all connected experiences" but unchecking "experiences that analyze your content" should actually do, for example.)

MS Office is certainly the more polished product, especially Excel. There are some spreadsheets I can't feasibly convert to LibreOffice Calc without equivalents to Excel's lambdas and tables.

But LibreOffice does the job in most cases. I'm really excited to see this new work—especially CRDT-based sync between desktop app instances over a network file server, which would turn LibreOffice into a significantly better experience than MS Office for my purposes.

[docmars]

I'm curious why people bother tolerating modern versions of MS Office when they could instead use an offline version like 2019 and call it a day?

Are the more recent versions really that necessary or useful for features? I miss using 2007 when the ribbon was introduced and the UI finally felt organized.

[mlyle]

Using something with support (e.g. vulnerabilities being fixed) is important. 2019 is about to stop getting fixes.

[mshroyer]

This is my main reason. Additionally, yes, some of the Excel features that would attract me to it over LibreOffice Calc—such as the aforementioned lambdas—aren't available in older, non-365 versions of Office.

[kapad]

> I'm curious why people bother tolerating modern versions of MS Office when they could instead use an offline version like 2019 and call it a day?

I use the online version because it worked out cheaper than the offline version + Dropbox.