OK, that does it: that’s the 3rd time this year Microsoft Office has bailed on me. Each time, my entire Microsoft Office for Home & Business simply disappeared. The first two times were sort of deliberate removals – I was trying to update or install a new component and instead MS H&B simply deleted itself. This third time, I did nothing – no new installations, no uninstallations, no upgrades, no updates, zip. I just restarted and suddenly all my MS docs were blank. Sure enough, the MS H&B was gone.
I quit.
The last two times that happened, it took me several days to re-install it, a laborious process that never went as smoothly as the help pages said it would. Each time required a tech-support person to walk me through a manual uninstall, then a further two calls to help me install it as that didn’t go according to plan, either.
This sucks. I want a stand-alone application that if something goes wrong, I can simply re-install it from the CD. You know, like in the old days!
I’ve installed LibreOffice (OpenOffice won’t open my .docx files but LibreOffice will) and have rescued and printed out a document I need for tomorrow.
I’m investigating alternatives, including abandoning Windoze apps altogether and switching to writing with my iPad. I haven’t up till now because a) my iPad is old and small and b) the keyboards I’ve tried all sucked, but a Mac user I spoke to today said he wrote all the time with his iPad Pro and new Magic Keyboard and was very pleased with it, so I guess I’ll be checking that out.
Another possibility is to use Google Docs.
Both he and another Mac user recommended Ulysses for writing. It’s on my to-do list. By coincidence, the document I needed for tomorrow is a worksheet about Ulysses, the Greek hero, only they called him Odysseus. A group I teach has been reading and discussing some stories from the Odyssey and tomorrow’s is the one about the Sirens.
#1 by Duncan White on December 21, 2020 - 7:40 am
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Have LibreOffice too. And a 2016 simple Office suite (in English) before all the subscriptions started. Avoid Word, Powerpoint. It’s just that Excel excels at integrations with other apps – although I read from accounting software people that it does create errors.
My reveal was this spring/summer, as students were initially given the benign command to ‘submit’ homework via email. It became malignant. They flooded my inbox with J-Word documents, which forced me to open my Eng-Word separately each time. And the files were slow, large. It was the students’ newest toy, their default action, and they had paid dearly for it, were determined to use it.
Have since outlawed Word, Excel, Powerpoint. Also Pages, etc. PDFs are okay, on occasion, and can be opened, read quickly in a browser, filed away. Best is to type directly into a Text field that can be instantly read, without expansion. This habit must be trained, enforced. Best way was for a fellow student to outline in local dialect, as if speaking like a mother to a toddler.
Ulysses is managed by a German company. And it is a paid service. I hope to pay, since there will be maintenance and improvement. This translation service is also German: Linguee https://www.linguee.com/ and its new DeepL translator and DeepLPro, with reasonable rates. https://www.deepl.com/pro?cta=header-pro