With my user/increasingly crazy man in the woods hat? Fuck that noise.

With my corporate stooge hat (that is the one that pays for the previous hats)? This actually is a really good idea. Way too often we have people saving documents to their laptops or losing them when they break a desktop enough that IT has to reimage it. Everything corporate should live in the corporate data store by default.

And... at this point, any individual user using MS Office is an idiot who probably also needs that extra layer of protection. Why spend money when Google Drive (which is already cloud native) works just as well? And for those who care about offline use? Get Libre Office where stuff is perpetually 80% as good.

Did I miss something in that article? I see no mention of how to disable this, pricing for cloud storage, etc.

Important to note that the article says it can save to Onedrive or cloud drive of your choice. Its not clear exactly how that works if you want to save to Box, or Dropbox or something else but it looks like the option is there and it seems like you may even be able to turn that off if you want.

If it's still not your preference, I've seen licenses for office 2019 for sale on the web, which predates a lot of the cloud integration and AI tool nonsense. Between that and libre office there are ways to avoid using this service if you're so inclined.

MS Office is increasingly only sold as part of "Microsoft 365" which already involves paying for cloud storage and copilot and the like.

20 seconds of googling gets me the pricing page for their family (which I think is the same as single seat personal?) plan which is 130 USD a year for

    For one to six people
    Sign in to five devices at once
    Use on PCs, Macs, phones, and tablets
    Up to 6 TB of secure cloud storage (1 TB per person)
    Productivity apps with Microsoft CopilotFootnote1
    Identity,Footnote2 data, and device security
    Ad-free secure email

There may still be some corner case "just MS office" releases that are targeted towards legacy machines in certain regions. But if you try to buy MS Office for whatever reason, that is what you are gonna get.

I wonder what happens to your documents if you stop paying for office.

Not sure on the policy for this (and too lazy to read through the TOS) but the usual standard is:

You have read only access to your data in some form for N months. Sometimes individual, sometimes grabbing the whole dump. If you haven't renewed your license within N months, that data is deleted (but not really).

This is a call for those people who are missing a feature that they absolutely must have in LibreOffice, to 1) check whether it has been added since they last looked (when was that, again?) and 2) to put in a feature request if it isn't there.

Tables in the spreadsheets program, fuckers.

At this stage, I am highly confident that they accepted that they will never add it.

Are there ways of doing table things in LibreOffice, even if that specific feature isn't there? That's been why they haven't added things in the past... but then eventually caved in and added them.

I'm thinking mainly of the fact that for long enough either LibreOffice (or its predecessor OpenOffice? It might have been that long ago) would try to add all one million vertical cells as a data range to a chart if the user selected an entire column, and the devs refused to "fix" that to only use everything down to the last non-blank cell.

But eventually someone got on the dev team who was willing to do that.

No harm in asking again.

This actually is a really good idea.

Yes, for the reasons you mention. And very, very much no. My corporate hat immediately thinks about a crapload of stuff our network drives have which is under various NDAs, restrictions to store outside EU/ETA, restrictions to store even outside our country and so on. At least our accounts have mandatory MFA and other standard safety features, but cloud storage has a different threat model than our local hardware which also makes it's own little headaches.

I don't play on the contract/legal field on corporate at all, but I do know that some of those NDAs have numbers big enough to bring the whole circus down and other clauses which can even throw someone in jail if things really go wrong. I just hope I'm not the scapegoat at that point.

If data has handling requirements it 500% should not be something people are storing on their "personal" devices.

I personally hate the idea of storing corporate data in "cloud" storage, but MS et al have gotten approval from many governments to do exactly that. So if that is your corporate data store? Then that is where it goes. And if someone is making a new document with additional restrictions then they better damned well have training on how to pick which folder in onedrive it goes into.

Seeing these sorts of posts is like seeing people come here to whine about Reddit. I moved on from windows over 20 years ago. Given how much worse it has become since then, I can’t understand why anyone stays with it.

Comfort, familiarity, ignorance. And there's people like me who use tools that don't exist on Linux (I dual boot Debian Trixie now, but it's barely usable)

just a reminder: there's not only libreoffice, there's also onlyoffice: it's like the microsoft suite but with TABS(and it's open source)

an alternative to MS (or some other third-party) cloud doesn't have to be "personal" devices, though. company-specific handling requirements can still be achieved via self-hosted network shares containing all user-saved data, which still aids in the local storage replacement issue that you're having.
but for many companies and spaces, MS cloud or whatever third-party could be just fine, and this will of course push some of those folks that direction nicely

What do you mean? I'm assuming you aren't referring to LibreOffice Calc, as that entire program is tables. LibreOffice Writer also lets you put tables in documents.

If you mean you want to use spreadsheets like a database? Here is an article on it: Calc as a Database

Because not everyone has the skills, the know how and the time to learn a new operating system.

Most people if they were to try to install Linux would probably endup breaking their systems somehow, most don't wanna risk it.

It may seem simple to us, but think of it from the perspective of someone who is afraid to install a program because thinks it's going to make their computer explode, have no idea what a bootable USB is, and have never used a command line their whole lives.

With modern computers with UEFI and secure boot installing Linux is even harder, no average user is going to mess with any of that.

For the average person, the computer is just a very secondary thing in their lives that doesn't get any attention besides the average "my phone is full, I need to copy my photos to the computer". Tech companies know this so they exploit the user's ignorance.

laughs in group policy disabling of onedrive