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by ohgr 471 days ago
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.
3 comments
derkster 471 days ago
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.

https://marketplace.appdirect.com/en-US/apps/345798/office-l...

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ohgr 471 days ago
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.
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Arainach 471 days ago
"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.

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ohgr 471 days ago
Well no it's not lazy at all. I'll tell you why.

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.

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reddalo 471 days ago
Office 2016? To me, the "last" version is Office 2003. Everything that came after is horrible (the ribbon? I still can't stand it).
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