I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.
Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook).
O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.
There's still Office LTSC version, which will likely exist for the foreseeable future. I believe they require internet for activation, and are offline afterwards.
Yeah the canonical "offline" method is to use the LTSC images and activator from https://massgrave.dev/ . That's the only way to run a licensed copy of office on an airgapped network.
"X was the last version with any features" is among the laziest of internet tropes.
It's fine to say that you don't like the subscription model, or the pricing, or telemetry, or "AI" thrown in everywhere, but saying that everything is "regressive feature simplification" is so obviously wrong and so easy to prove false that you're basically lying to our faces and pretending people won't notice.
You can program Excel functions in JavaScript, greatly improving the power of things you can do (especially in the web UI). Excel haa gained SVG support, all sorts of improved functions (CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, SWITCH), funnel graphs, a dark theme, better Pivot Tables, viable coauthoring (even with Sharepoint or OneDrive, coauth on Excel 2016 was rough) and so much more. That's just one app.
It's fine to say "I don't find this a good value" or "change X is a dealbreaker for me" but please don't degrade the conversation by telling obvious lies.
It funnels you down the cloud route pretty heavily which is at least in what we do is incredibly dangerous and leads to regulatory problems. What we end up with is a nightmare tangle of GPOs where we don't know what feature is going to be turned on next in a trivial update which will end up with our mandatory signed in O365, because that's how you have to pay for it, pushing content to OneDrive or something. Even the file save dialogs switched a while back to push cloud first and we had a nightmare even though OneDrive was disabled (!) because no one could use it suddenly.
THAT is a complete dealbreaker.
As mentioned, the calendar and contact management is so bad that we ended up using iCloud anyway for that.
There's also a better win for us which is moving to R with tidyverse. Less footguns, can work with people via a VCS fine, can wrap a whole data pipeline in automation in a makefile, doesn't go down for 2-3 days a year.
What's the point of coy language like this? This is a general pattern I've noticed of people using weasel words because they think it will protect them from liability. Stop this pretence that saying "thepiratebay" is going to get you in trouble. It won't. This is a forum for adults, so let's talk like adults without bringing euphemisms and self-censorship in here.
Unless you were doing it to seem humorous, in which case go ahead. I didn't find it humorous but humour is subjective.
Its a interesting pattern in which people self censor due to other sites they use which will filter posts based on things like the Piratebay. Its some thing I've seen alot more in Gen Z users almost becoming slang.
O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.