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Microsoft punishes idiots who purchased a "perpetual" license of Office 2019 for Mac by disabling it next month, pirates unaffected (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48806122

A license verification certificate expires and when it expires, Microsoft Office for Mac assumes it's unlicensed even if it has been fully paid for.

So, any idiot who paid for Office 2019 for Mac "perpetual" will lose access to it next month.

The same will happen with Office 2021 and Office 2024 in the future.

Pirates are unaffected, only who paid for the product gets punished

Good job πŸ‘πŸ»

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[–] 16 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Since the OP specifies Mac users, as a Mac user, I find iWork perfectly serviceable. I think it's a bit controversial with its "Ribbon" on the right rather than the top, though it kind of makes sense. I don't love iWork (Writer, Numbers, and Keynote), but they are good and they come with Macs (or at the very least are free in the App Store).

I have tried LibreOffice recently, and I didn't care for it. But I am glad that such a robust free office suite is available on Windows. I believe some Linux distros ship with it, too. If I didn't have iWork, I'd probably just use LibreOffice. It's not terrible, I just have a better choice.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    a robust free office suite

    The few times I tried using LibreOffice, it's anything but robust. Very bad UX, and even worse, it frequently crashes and fails to recover, resulting in data loss. And I've only been using Linux for more than 10 years now.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    The Apple office apps are still free, but they do have an add-on subscription too now.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Yes... I was able to disable the subscription-oriented tools from Numbers (Excel) but not Pages (Word). Maybe I didn't try hard enough. They're marked so you can just not click on them, but there's a way to hide them. I did it on one, I can probably do it on the others.

    They're completely free with a subscription for GenAI stuff that wasn't there before. They didn't take anything away from the free product.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    It’s been quite a while since I used iWork, but iWork is different than office. In some ways it’s a better product - the layout and formatting in Pages is worlds ahead of Word. It’s not a clone of the Office suite, which works to its advantage.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Is iWork compatible with Office files though? That's going to be the sticking point for people who had been using it and lost access...

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    As far as I can tell, yes β€” and so is LibreOffice, since people are talking about that one, too. And I suspect they both have the same limitation β€” encrypted Office files. So yes, I can read .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files. I can't read Publisher (.pubx) files, but neither can Mac Office users β€” Microsoft never released Publisher for Mac. I can then write them to the iWork formats. I can also take an iWork document and export to Office. I suspect Office can import iWork files. Office interoperability is mostly a solved problem, though I think there are a few outlier cases.

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