Microsoft Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward
https://www.ghacks.net/2025/08/27/your-word-documents-will-be-saved-to-the-cloud-automatically-on-windows-going-forward/Open linkView original on piefed.social992
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https://www.libreoffice.org/ for anyone who wants microsoft to stop messing with their office apps.
There is also only office which has better compatibility with MSOffice file types
This here.
I wish Only Office got as much fanfare as LibreOffice. The UI is much closer to Microsoft Office and it tends to have better compatibility.
I have both installed though and use them both lol.
OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it's still Lev Bannov's product.
The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.
Mm knowing that makes me never want to go anywhere near OnlyOffice now, oof.
LibreOffice has a ribbon UI too.
That it does :)
LibreOffice is awesome too. No complaints really.
I tried it years ago and it was pretty garbage. Took forever to load. Looked like shit. Has this changed?
TIL! Thank you, kind stranger!
Gerne!
Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.
Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).
Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn't seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.
I'm on my phone, so I didn't search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there's a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.
I've no recent experience with either so I can't comment on how well either works.
Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.
I believe Open Office and Only Office are different products.
Only Office had a major release in June, 2025.
And you are correct that Open Office last update was back in December 2023.
openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.
libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice's status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.
onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for 'reasons'.
Ah I see. Thanks for the information. I use both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and generally am happy with both. I kind of just bounce around back and forth.
Man, wouldn't it be nice if both of our counties didn't have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?
You are correct. I misread ( or my brain farted ) and looked up the wrong one.
Downside is ties to Russia and performance is really bad, as I understand it's an Electron web app, not a native application. It also won't save to network shares properly and will lose your file if you do.
Don't ever save your files directly on a samba share with only office. Lost hours of work twice . It doesn't keep recovery files.
I second this. There's a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it's not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it's been great.
Office would have a learning curve too if you hadn’t been using it since you were a child.
Tbf it was simplier back when people first used it
When people were first using it they were coming from DOS or older machines. Many were using a mouse for the first time. It wasn’t simpler to them.
This is very true. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since 2007 and at my new workplace everyone’s using it. It’s really hard and I don’t find anything. Yesterday I was working with tables but I gave up and had IT install libreoffice instead.
You can now enable a tabbed interface similar to Microsoft Office
I suppose this means Microsoft will not count Word doc file sizes against users' cloud storage quotas, right? Right??
🤣
It'll be like Google: everything goes in, nothing comes out unless you jump through difficult hoops, price continually goes up.
Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)
Where do you think Google learned it?
? Google invented it.
If you're in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.
How is this served? Do they send a usb drive? Or a download link of some sort?
It's a download link, on their respective dashboard you can select between the catagories you want. Like on Google you can select if you want youtube, drive, gmail, or everything at once.
With GDPR they have 7 days to comply, and it should be available to any EU citizen even when outside of EU territory. So I'm assuming you can just change your region. Either way, takeout.google.com is where I'd go.
Yeah, i ised take out before, it took 2 weeks to download my photos, i think 8 60gb downloads. It was painful, I got hopeful that youbhad discovered a workaround.
Ah, that's unfortunate. Tbh I've been downloading 200GB there frequently and haven't had any issues.
GDPR can also be called upon using a registered letter and they are required to deliver as well. I'm not sure but that might be a way to recieve a physical copy.
No, they upload your file, delete the local file, then oopsie, you ran out of cloud storage, please pay $99/month to access your files.
Anakinsmirk.jpg
This is certainly about making sure your files are safe and definitely not about stealing your data for training AI. /s
Don't let Murdersoft steal your data. Don't contribute to their corruption or genocide assistance.
Step 1: https://fedoraproject.org/
Step 2: https://www.libreoffice.org/
Thanks, going to try out LibreOffice. Does it has same (or similar) functions as Word itself?
It's designed to be very similar. If you are already familiar with Word, you should feel right at home.
I'm not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I'm sure it's better now.
My only problem is how Libre Office handles their style system. It's forced use for things like Footers, and very hard to manipulate and turn off unlike Word.
My own way to bypass it was to replace a new document text into an old converted word text that had the correct footer pages from Word.
I really hate page and Style guides because they always want to propagate everything through entire documents, instead of only changing things on a page by page basis. Adding things to previous pages when you change something isn't helpful.
I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.
It doesn't make it flawless (at all), but installing the microsoft fonts helps. Most distros have a package or helper tool for that.
Pretty much. It was OpenOffice years ago, but then Oracle got involved and so all the devs left and put a new name on it.
No. That's the point. LibreOffice does not send your data to Microsoft.
LibreOffice is what Microsoft Office WAS without the bugs. If Word and Excel worked for you before the cloud, Libre is golden.
I'm 99% of the way on LibreOffice. Gave it a solid go, but the main thing I use in excel is too cumbersome in Libre. I think it's a great option for many people though.
As a clueless individual, how are they assisting genocide?
For today, you can call me Jeeves. To learn more, a quick search for "microsoft genocide" or "microsoft gaza" will give you the answers.
Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.
Working hand in hand with the Israeli government in mass surveillance and (likely) AI-generated targeting data.
Another user just linked some resources. Incredible the bullshit going on these days. So much going on it's hard for me to keep up with it all but I'm glad to be enlightened.
Let's say this huge breach of security and privacy is okay.
How are Microsoft ensuring these sensitive documents are not being transferred via or stored on servers located in hostile countries with lax data laws (such as foreign nations like the USA?).
Microsoft has already said it doesn't matter where your data is stored, it isn't safe from the United States.
But you can change this behaviour in settings, it's just the default for now.
So, if you don't trust Microsoft to handle your documents, but still somehow use MS Word and OneDrive, for the moment you can still stop it from saving your Word documents to their servers.
Ms office 2016 install still going strong with zero cloud function. That day I lose it is the day LibreOffice copies itself from the laptop to the desktop. Aint paying for O365
You can change it for now.
Yes, that's what I meant with my "for now" and "for the moment".
wdym, that's the point
https://www.libreoffice.org/
tell your friends.
OnlyOffice gang https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx
I like the idea of it, but it is Russian.
I think it they are based in Latvia now which is in Europe. They did originally start in Russia and still supply the Russian government. Though it is free and open source. So where it is based does not really matter.
OnlyOffice is one of the few open source applications which actually puts effort into its UI. LibreOffice looks straight from 1990. I really would not recommend LibreOffice to anyone who is not technical, whereas OnlyOffice provides a great UI experience.
With the entire West supporting a livestreamed genocide the whole moral highground schtick does not really land for me anymore either.
tip: do not write about the revolution, short stories, hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, or your teenage angst and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
tip: Only write about the revolution, short stories about your hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, your teenage angst, and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
For everything else, use LibreOffice.
directions unclear, now I’m directing a netflix special on sexy horse guerrillas.
Ugh, the ai spellcheck is broken and I’m writing a Netflix special in six hearse gorillas.
Season one was excellent, it ended on a cliff hanger though. Netflix did not renew for a second season.
would watch
Isn't that... Just a bulky centaur?
bingo
So just bpmb threats and realistic beastiality. Got it.
Tina Belcher?
Ha! Exactly where I was going with that.
I’ve just binged the entire series twice in a row. I’m on S10 in round 2. Dunno why I like it so much.
Tina is definitely one of my favourites
Marshmallow and Rudy for me. :)
Ensure to make sure every doc has 17 giant sized images saying FU MS
I love to kill cops
inGTA"Fuck you, Microsoft." -Everyone, at all times
Even if you're not ready to come to Linux, you're definitely ready to switch to LibreOffice. I dare you to try it.
I'm using OnlyOffice bins on linux and find it to be a fantastic suite for my (minimal) uses. Not sure how it works on Windows though.
I'm unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn't realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.
OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.
Ah. I tried that a few times and didn't care for it myself. Weird that my brain thought it saw OpenOffice.
Only office is designed for people who work with MS files. Libre Office is for people who work with open files.
It's still being kept barely alive for whatever reason. But it hasn't gotten any reasonable updates (I think not even including security updates as of recently, see https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/ ).
See also https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
Got it. Thanks.
Eh, that game where you had two gorillas standing on buildings lobbing exploding bananas at each other was pretty cool.
Writer and Impress should cover Word and Powerpoint perfectly. Even if your colleagues use Windows, you can still open them just fine.
Excel though is troublesome, especially those with coded VBA or some plugins from companies. But for basic Excel? Calc can do the job ok too.
Yeah I got through school and could work just fine now with Calc. I'm sure it breaks when you get fancy but not that many people get that fancy.
No, I don't think they will. LibreOffice
Laughs in LaTeX?
I've been writing all my college papers in LaTeX and it's been great. They look so professional, and it's easier to work on a collection of text files than one monolithic document.
I swear typesetting your papers is worth half a grade point at least. Then once you find Zotero and realize it will automagically handle your citations and you have auto biblios and cites working in LyX....life changing, absolutely.
I've never learned latex but it seems like a huge learning curve. Never even proficiently learned vim yet
It really depends on what you will use it for. Using it for plain text doesn't require much, some advanced layouts require a bit more digging, if you're including fancy graphics, equations, bibliography, footnotes, etc, you're going to look at managing the relevant libraries to gandle that (they are very well made and very convenient). All in all, it can be as complex as you want, but it can also be quite easy to use.
Also LaTeX is way simpler than plain TeX.
Not really like Vim at all. But yes its a bit of a learning curve. Imo its worth it but I'm an engineering grad student so it is especially suited to my uses.
Not too bad with LyX. Get templates and modify them. It is a learning curve but entirely doable.
These days you can just use AI to make the outline for you and go from there. Should be easier than ever
Google doc for me. It is free and it is good enough. /S
That's interesting, since Google Docs has always automatically saved files to the cloud.
I'm waiting for them to edit the comment and add an /s tag.
Tbf, if they are in K-12 as a student or teacher, they'd probably have to use google docs anyways.
To anyone thinking "LibreOffice still has issues", here's the LibreOffice donation page to help them fix it up and be rid of MS Office forever.
Not to be used to train AI. We promise...
LLM's out here running wild. How Rude.Maybe I should switch to Linux again.
They'd break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people's OneDrive, it'd be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they'd lose by default.
they're probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
As soon as you find proof, you have literally free money up for the taking at any court.
That's... not how any of this works..........
an obscure clause in TOS won't be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done, it could also be an "and" where you expected "or", or an ommision of a specific thing... my point being - it's always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
it very much is how it works though? show me a lawsuit someone lost before they got caught commiting a crime. and how would you even go about proving that your unpublished documents were used to train AI? even an entire life's work of one person is just a speck in the training data, it's impossible to definitively prove your work was stolen and used to train an AI. besides there will always be plausible deniability that the AI just made shit up that happened to look kinda like what you once wrote
That means nothing. Illegal terms can't be enforced in contracts or terms of service.
No. Written law always takes precedence. If they spied on your data stored in OneDrive, they'd lose by default the moment the case hit the courthouse.
As for your second paragraph: yeah, I agree. If they did that, the damage would've already been done. But it would kill the business once found out. The benefit is not worth the risk.
For example: you're saying that they would use it to train AI, right?
They don't train AI. They get a trained model from OpenAI.
Thank you to the skilled developers who bailed on OpenOffice when the shit stain company Oracle bought Sun, and formed LibreOffice.
I can only hope there will always be digital freedom fighters on the side of good.
I've donated to LibreOffice, and you should too, if you use their suite.
I love LibreOffice, but I wish there was an Android app. I've even considered learning more app development to try and help, but it's such a daunting task.
This here. Not fully featured but a decent reader and editor which we hope will improve with time. Good effort on the devs!
LibreOffice & Open Office Document Reader | ODF https://f-droid.org/packages/at.tomtasche.reader/
It can edit files now? Apparently it can. It took a while but it's finally there. Finally. Good job.
There's a web port AFAIK, web dev has a lower entry level
Check out the Collabra Office android app. It probably covers your needs.
You can turn it off. Opt-out is still bullshit.
you can turn it off (for now)
You can make yourself believe that you turned it off for now*
Yes Ms is secretly stealing from users across the world and yet not a single security researcher has found it. AND ALEXA IS LISTENING TO ME 24X365 DAYS A YEAR!
They do find it regularly. Its not even a secret, they are openly advertising it as a feature.
It is... thats its purpose...
I think you are in the wrong place on lemmy if you are so willingly blind to the realities of tech companies.
Forgot the /s?
until your computer force reboots itself in the middle of the day to do updates it didn't tell you about, and you log back in and later that night find it uploaded all your shit to the cloud and just for good measure deleted some of it too as a fuck you
it's the Microsoft way
The true opt out is to stop using Microsoft products
You can't opt out, most healthcate providers use windows.
Mental health awareness? No thanks, I rather just write in a journal and talk to myself in the mirror as therapy.
You guys are getting healthcare?
The dentist asked me to sign a waiver so they could use AI...I'm looking for another dentist
I don't trust Microsoft not to flip that switch back when I'm not looking.
Microsoft all about opting out rather than opting in.
Perks of not signing into Windows/Office with a Microsoft account.... Oh wait
L I B R E O F F I C E
LibreOffice. No need for MS Office, ever
You're thinking as an individual. Excel in the business is what keeps Office afloat. There simply is no substitute. Even if you want to go with another spreadsheet, who's going to trust that to faithfully import Excel data?
I'm not sure I even trust Excel to import an Excel file without mangling it.
you guys are able to save an excel file without it nuking everything?
LOL, Excel doesn't mangle shit. It's best-in-class spreadsheet software for a dozen reasons. #1 being that it never changes. It's solid, no other software like it. Business won't risk fucking around with anything else.
SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies, and one that mainly used Google for Business. Accounting still had to have Excel.
So, not actually an Excel power user then.
Well, no? It would be ridiculous to expect me to be a power user over all the software I've administrated. I judge what people need according to business demands and orders from on high. My judgement is that, yes, some business units require Excel.
That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.
Bruh. We're talking about a certain piece of software. You're getting a bit off track.
Tell that to my companies president.
At this point that’s almost like ransomware.
How will this work for (for example) cibersecurity companies that have reports full of client's vulnerabilities and can't have them hosted in third parties?
I would guess we're on the fuck around part and your question will be answered on the find out part
By their admins setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\General PreferCloudSaveLocations to 0 using GPO probably
A cybersecurity firm knows better.
Holy fucking shit, what absolute trash
Which means an AI scans it...
No for most it's customers and an option for them all. MS is very clear in its policies. Any AI services you use, isn't sent back for training. The policy is very clearly explained and one of the clearer ones.
Business or enterprise users data isn't trained and individuals data can opt out
I remember when facebook had a policy to require users to opt-in to having third parties scrape users data, but then it turned out a "bug" caused FB to sell everyones data anyway and they made billions more money than they would have.
I have no doubt a similar "bug" will make its way to the MS servers if one hasnt already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
This feature doesn't even work.
So many times I'll save a word doc, attach it to outlook, and it'll silently attach an older version of the word doc.
Word says its up to date, one drive says its up to date, but outlook still gets an old version.
It takes hours to resolve. Everything Microsoft wastes so much of my time.
Libre office does the job for me! Auto save on cloud sucks. At least you can turn it off! For now.
Depends on the cloud. I like my files being automatically backed up to my private Nextcloud server.
I understand, everyone has different options on this! I prefer to choose what stays local and what on cloud.
Why?
This
That’s not how cloud save works!
The files are saved to local storage that then gets sync’d up to the Cloud. The files are available both on- and offline.
"Access" as in: have anything to do with them? Then why tf are you using Word on Windows?
"Access" as in: be able to read them? That would be super illegal for them to do and the easiest class action lawsuit win in history. EU fines would eat them alive.
You need to explain why you think the second statement refutes the first.
I think I accidentally posted that on the wrong comment. My bad.
As if windows does not send telemetry
Comes from a person who hasn't written telemetry. It's either useless or contains private information
Private information doesn't necessarily mean "entire contents of all word documents I have ever created"
Cloud storage has nothing to do with anything/anyone reading the contents of your files.
It's absolutely mind boggling to me how many completely ignorant people are on the Technology community here.
Just imagining the fines from the "won by default" lawsuits that MS would suffer at the hands of their EU users makes this whole notion hilarious!
There are many tiers of private information.
You can definetly collect a lot of useful telemetry data without collecting any of the, lets say, "most sensitive" private information.
Just to exemplify:
you can collect telemetry on the most acessed features of a software and associate it with their location: whilst collecting their location you can definetly choose between having the person's specific location (GPS coordinates with a few meters of accuracy) or their broad location (i.e.: their city, state, or country).
Collecting someones specific location is definetly way more sensitive than their broad location...
And the full content of all textual documents a person generates has a very high chance of containing of their most sensitive private information...
What an ignorant thing to say...
Don't use Windows either.
because your phone/laptop doesn't have a global wi-fi connection, and you might want to open a document pause for dramatic effect outside of your home or work!
Depending on your setup, you will always have an offline copy, too.
I have never seen a setup where that's not the case.
I've yet to see a cloud storage solution that doesn't have offline-storage.
Like... WTF is going on? This is the Technology community, and yet you people come here and comment like you've only dealt with computers in the 90s...
The file is saved locally, then - as soon as there's a network connection - gets uploaded to the Cloud and remains in both locations. You can access it from both "ends" - if you edit it in the Cloud or on a different device, the changes get sync'd down, etc.
i've seen my friends who never changed a setting in their life struggle with not being able to access their files when their internet died. how default settings work i do not know exactly myself, i don't use cloud saving
There are only two possibilities here: either they were trying to access these files offline on a different device, or they had their storage completely full.
In the latter case OneDrive will kick out the oldest files to Online Only, so that you still have space to save newer stuff locally.
Oh, I guess there's a third option - they were using some obscure third party cloud storage. Something that's not Filen, OneDrive or DropBox.
This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?
I still use Wordpad to write all my gay dinosaur erotica, am I safe?
Last time I checked there was Copilot integration in NotePad. So I wouldn't assume WordPad is safe from anything
Mr Tingle, its an honor, and you should be at the moment, but please consider a more proper way of writing literature such as LaTeX or Vim
"or" ?
Chuck Tingle, is that you?
I wish...
For now... Next update they'll add Copilot to it for reasons.
It depends how gay is it? And do dinosaurs mate in packs?
Scrivener ftw
this is their patch for the whole disk data loss debacle
and also "let us train copilot on your college essays".
Joke's on them, because those were all written by Chat GPT 😂
Received an email this morning. Copilot is now powered by GPT5.
still valuable to microsoft!
Idiots will still not know where anything is saved. Catering to the technologically illiterate has made society way more illiterate.
...or just use some other app for your private documents and Word only for work-related stuff or such. I use Word/Office at work and have absolutely no issue with all the documentation being saved in the cloud. But for private stuff I would have to think twice if I want this.
What if I'm using a pirated copy of windows and office?
You get deported to Uganda.
Uganda be kiddin' me.
Kenya believe it?
I'm not Ghana believe it.
lmao
rwanda. too.
I’d rather use old ass word perfect at this point
Just use libreoffice
I'd rather chisel text onto stone tablets than that bs.
https://xkcd.com/378/
I actually installed WordPerfect 6 for DOS and MS Word for DOS recently. They're very relaxing for writing and fast too. Then I use LibreOffice to convert the documents to more modern formats if needed.
That’s dope. I recently read that George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar. Maybe that’s why that dude can’t finish a book series.
You have to click through to a third save dialogue just to choose “Browse my files…”.
This made my blood boil, and then I remembered I switched to Linux a month ago... all good.
Switched to linux. No regrets so far.
Of the installs I've done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit "retry" and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn't work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.
I'm not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve
The breaking point for me was when I was showered with Copilot+ pop-ups on every single hover. Let me fucking copy/cut/paste/format in peace. I never asked for any of this, and neither did any user of any level of expertise.
Switched to OnlyOffice as it felt to perfectly answer my needs. There are still some quirks with non-UTF-8 documents, but you know what, I'd rather iron those issues out than be shoved a product I didn't request nor need at every single interaction I have.
I highly encourage anyone that hasn't done already to explore alternatives to the M*crosoft Suite, if they haven't done it by now. Every update is just the worst form of enshittification known to humankind. Can't wait to have an intrusive slop AI agent tell me how to do my Maths in the Calculator app next.
Let apps be just apps again 🗣️🗣️📢
Why I use libreoffice.
Seriously, Microsoft!?!?
Is this on Macs too?!?
Not mine, then again I use nothing Microsoft on my Mac.
this operating system still costs like $100
/ per year
I'm interested in how they're gonna enforce this with my copy of word 2007.
the new libreoffice won't run on your vista.
Interesting, i haven't had any issues on that front
I do wonder how my copy of Word 2010 at my work is going to do this.
this has been goin on for like a year now. i have an offline profile with no onedrive on my machine, and tried the latest office. theres a slider saying autosave, but i was unable to use it. felt kinda weird that there is no autosave feature anymore. turns out autosave has been a cloud save option, and poor excel was not able to savemy private data to the onedrive datafarm. also the new excel is super slow compared to like the 2016 version, which indicates that theres more bloat under the hood.
The slider you're mentioning is specifically for cloud sync, correct. But as far as I know Word still does the thingy where it will periodically snapshot and allow you to recover previous versions.
I'm not 100% sure because I don't use it at home anymore but I still do at work.
Jesus christ. So glad I ditched MS. It's like getting out of a cult - once you see it looking in from the outside, you finally realize how terrible it is.
I actually appreciate this. The only place I use Word is at work, and nothing I create in Word at work is 'mine'. I do not care at all about the security of things I do at work (that's for our IT Security team to care about), and all this means is that if I accidentally screw up, or if my computer just up and dies on me... all of my work files should be 'safe'.
My employer has been going very hard towards ensuring that our work computers can ONLY be used for work purposes. Once I accepted this and embraced it I found that I'm now 100% free of Microsoft for anything personal, and it is amazing.
there is a reaching hand that goes further than just using it for work.
lets say you open libreoffice writer and write a party invite. you send this party invite to a friend - they are invited to your party.
your friend opens it in MSWord, its uploaded to the cloud and scraped for all of your personal data to train their AI and to be sold to the lowest bidder.
you had and want nothing to do with microsoft, but they are still harvesting your data.
Export to a .pdf, automatically opens by default in user browser via local storage as a reader, bypasses MS
This is still problematic shit though, on the same level as enabling Recall by default and encrypting W11 storage devices by default.
i have been trying to understand what information i send to people and how i send it in an attempt to try and get as lottle data into msrecall as possible.
im not quite there yet (and probably wont be before the oct cutoff) because my mother still uses windows & emails me sometimes, and a few of my friends on discord use windows. its really difficult because i have no control over my data being scraped by products i do not use and have never accepted a eula for. its...... aggravating :(
The unfortunate fact is if a user who views what you post is using a windows machine, the likelihood of the information on their screen being captured by Microsoft is overwhelmingly high.
I guess you may have to approach the issue how you would the public-facing internet at large: if you cannot verify who and how people are viewing your material, do not post any material that can be accessed by windows. If you must, post it through a trusted circle of users who also understand the issue.
I agree, however you're never going to be able to fully control things that you've sent out for other people. Even this post can, and likely will, end up as training data for AI. 'The only winning move is not to play' applies to a lot of things in life, and if you truly want to protect your data then the best move is to not create any data. The second best move is to not share any data that you've created.
I mean, I'm in the same boat. This doesn't effect me except for work stuff. But here's the thing, all of my documents are already backed up to the cloud via OneDrive settings. So this is redundant at best.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons I hate the MS experience is because they push things on you. Its not your PC, its theirs. Hey, you want to use OneDrive? No? Are you sure? No? Are you really sure? No? Why don't I just turn it on for you so you can see how great it is. You must have turned it off by accident, let me turn it back on. OK, OK I get it you really don't want to use onedrive. Oh, I forgot that fact once our annual update came out and undid that setting. You straight out uninstalled onedirve and altered your registry? Ok, how about we just upload Word documents for you.
Part of why I still hate it at work; work knows almost everything about me. People with poor understanding of PII have my personal information, and use MS products. Microsoft knows all of that, and everything that I type, the notes I make, the phrases I use, inferences on my interests, and can combine that with other profiles. It helps put together a much more complete picture and profile of me and why I interface with. And I can't opt out, can't use Linux, and can't just go somewhere else to avoid it.
Meanwhile here I am with
ghostwriterI used nano for over 10y, I'm a nvimer now.
I just can't ever go back to office UI stuff. For my designs I still have Krita and Inkscape.
I would love to switch to LibreOffice (or similar) but I haven’t been able to find a way to get tables to work in the same way they do in Excel, and that’s a deal breaker for me. None of the suggested approaches come close to being able to select a range, press ctrl+t and immediately be able to filter/sort/lookup using column names from anywhere in the document. I use that feature dozens of times a day, and so does everyone in my circles that deals with financial data.
This creates a circus act to protect documents. Thank goodness for great alternatives. I use a mix of LibreOffice and Cryptpad. Suits me perfectly.
Per the article this can be deactivated
Turning it on by default (opt-out instead of opt-in) is still a huge concern and needs spreading the word about.
Oh very much so. Casual users are going to be donating their documents for AI processing and not even know it
Silence! The great Microsoft has decreed that from this day forward your documents belong to them! No dissension!
Proceed to the payment portal to pay your offerings immediately. Only those worthy enough to pay for the Extra^TM^ and Premium^TM^ tiers will be allowed to use the File menu.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Windows!
laughs quietly in Linux
What if I dont use M$ account? So it is just a local user, then where does Word back up to?
This is why Microsoft is making it damn near impossible to set up a new computer without logging into a Microsoft account. Luckily the OOBE trick still works (for now).
Office 365 requires an account to validate the license. Potentially it might work differently for the long term licensed versions (which features released to O365 now wouldn't reach until the next LTSC release), but I've not performed the initial install and licensing of those for clients yet
Or for home users who aren't already invested in a Microsoft ecosystem your best bet is to just use Libre Office
Edit: I accidentally made Office exclusive to leap years!
I don't get it, does Microsoft WANT everyone to stop using their products? First they fuck up their OSes, then they start planting shady shit in their OSes, and now it's down to every single goddamned piece of software they poop out! What in the fuck are they even doing!
Office is the product that helped keep Microsoft ticking over. The world is too dependant on Office and people won’t abandon it just because of this.
My fat fingers keep trying to type Microsoft Orifice.
I'm pretty sure most regular users will not even notice the charge, and find it useful down the line. Cause one day they will mess something up, complain to MS that they "lost their work", will be pointed to the cloud where everything was synced, and rejoice. Most users don't really care about the implications that their documents are in the cloud.
They're rent-seeking, more than they already are. The data must flow for training, actively burned bridges be damned.
Cool It finally gets Google docs core functionality after only 20 years. How innovative.
Actually it had auto save for more than a decade. It's just that now they removed the ability to autosave locally, it must be to onedrive.
It didn't remove anything, they're just changing the default save location. You can revert it if you want, it's all in the article...
You haven't been able to autosave locally for many years already. Changing the default save location is just for when you press save.
WTF are you talking about, mate?
I'm using Office daily at work. I save data locally non-stop.
I swear to God, this community should be renamed from "Technology" to "Technologically Illiterate"...
You can save locally by pressing the save icon, yes. But if you want it to autosave every 10 minutes it only allows you to use onedrive as a destination. Or else you are on one of the older versions of Word which still allowed local auto saving.
Well, "save" and "autosave" are two very different features.
Autosave, yes, that's a OneDrive specific feature.
Which also has nothing to do with what the article is about - they're talking about Cloud locations of the user's choosing, which means it will try to default to things like DropBox or Filen just as much as OneDrive.
Now go back and read the thread where I have been talking about autosave the whole time, which is also discussed in the article.
This is extremely minor. I don’t understand the fuss.
Right? People have such immensely weird notions about Office, Microsoft and telemetry, as if they stopped using computers in the 90s and then just read some rage-bait headlines for the last 35 years.
Google Docs has been a thing for 20 years? Wow I feel old
Started using Google Docs around 4th/5th grade. I'm a Sophomore in college now...
Still like Google online collaboration more than Microsoft online collaboration, so it's still dogshit after 20 years...
Some executive noticed that they can't sell you larger cloud storage if you haven't used it up.
Then someone on the office copilot team said they wished they had access to more comprehensive data about what people write with office apps and the rest is history.
I'll just use LibreOffice, but... a lot of people just don't care. Which does also impact us.
Munoz kept out the little details where nobody wants this and this is only a good thing for Microsoft
ODT is better than whatever abomination Microsoft calls a document format.
LibreOffice does everything I need except that their version of Power Point (forgot the name lol) is a mess to work with in terms of making the slide deck visual appealing. Automatic guide lines, snapping and smartart, to name a few.
Thinking about onlyoffice but I'm not sure if I can trust them since I read about then trying to hide their ties to Russia.
Good thing I stopped using MS WORD a long time ago.
I stopped at MS Word 2.0, when the Microsoft people agreed with me that it was pretty much broken for large files, and pointed me to an FTP site where there was a new version... which also was broken. Long story short, that's when I first installed Linux and ran LaTeX and Applixware.
im using a cracked version, i also dont have cloud for ms, no problem there.
See ya Ms Products! I hope you all like that cloud of yours!
This will make happy many companies...
"No, I don't think it will"
I have a Word document saved into my ‘personal account vault’ which is for personal thoughts (like a diary). Does this mean, they’ll automatically upload this too into their cloud?
If that’s the case, not sure what to do. Tempted to go back to old school diary but risk the chance of my family finding it.
Markdown is great for that. There also are some WYSIWYG and a lot of side-view editors. If you still want Word-alike, there's lots of office suites aside from Office 365. Or is it about saving notes to cloud? Even more solutions just for that, aside from plain file-sync clouds.
Thanks, I’ll look into Markdown!
No, that’s not it. I just want a Word-alike thing that allows me to put a password on it and use it as a ‘modern diary’ (like how you can make chapters and such in Word).
Not sure if I explained it well, English isn’t my native language. So wasn’t sure how to explain it
Time to learn another language then mix them
Siu Mit USA De Fa Si Si Zu Yi
The Only Good Fa Xi Si Zu Yi Ze Hai Sei Zo Ge
(Destroy fascism in the USA
The only good fascist is a dead one)
Now just need to transpose that and replace some characters. Of course, making it offline would greatly reduce government/corporate surveillance threats. As long as your family aren't cryptographers, they won't be able to decrypt it.
(Its Tri-Lingual. Cantonese Jyutping, Mandarin Pinyin, and English of course. Romanization of characters makes it harder to guess words especially when it gets transposed with a bunch of others.)
No big corporation or state institution handling vast amounts of customer data will not allow this. Also really bad for regular consumer too. Microsoft servers will become treasure trove for hackers.
Bullshit like like often only applies to the consumer, not the business version.
That's because we are not "customers"
People can't seem to figure out that they are the mark at the poker table
This will be good for the post I saw yesterday where someone was working on some story for weeks and lost it all because they didn't have a backup lol
sounds like a 'service problem' someone once spoke about...
acquire your ms office 'elsewhere' and never link it to a ms account. same with windows. no msa, no 'cloud' to save to.
and there is a service problem here.
I recently started using VisiData and it's amazing.
Me me guess - is this so they can train the LLM using the data we're 'giving' them? F U!!
Isn't this already the default?
I have to change it on every single fuckin document already. Have done so for years now at work.
// I don't use Word outside of work...
It's on per default when signed in to OneDrive. Actually a really nice feature tbh. However, you will be promoted to hell and back if you aren't signed in to OneDrive. I like the feature for work but I don't like the idea of it being the default setting.
yet another reason to ditch microsoft
No they won't
Most customers don't want their users saving locally anyway for data protection and not having to do extra compliance and workstation management.
Of course folks here are acting like setting a default they don't like is insane chaos.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea. Too many people are still not backing up their data, and the article says "...automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination".
As long as they really give users full freedom to choose any cloud service, I consider that a win.
"If you don't have another cloud destination, don't worry... we'll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN'T turn it off! Also, we won't let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!"
Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don't think they can get away with it yet. I'm NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
No, this is a bad idea. It's a terrible idea.
What you said is like saying "well, I need surgery, having the monkey from the forest come at me with a knife is better than nothing."
Microsoft has proven themselves over and over to be the last company you should trust with your data. Even recently they've been responsible for losing a life's worth of data because of OneDrive
They're already uploading people's data off of their computers to OneDrive without consent, then deleting the local copies.
Plus their tech work culture is lacking. When they screwed something up with Office 365 and Outlook wasn't available for over 18 hours (for basically the whole world), their response was a tweet that it's fixed.
Whereas CloudFlare messed up something for only an hour, they released a comprehensive breakdown on their blog of what happened, what the root cause was, and what they're going to do to prevent it from happening again.
Which company seems reliable to you?
A definite plus if one option is to backup to self-hosted platforms.