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1. Embed this notice
   Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 04:39:24 JST Charlie Stross

   Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription.

   Two reasons.

   1. I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book length).

   2. CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they're all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.

   So good riddance to Office365!

   • RamenCatholic 🐢 🌈 and Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 04:39:23 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     A third reason for ditching Office365 is that I have had a hate on for Microsoft's monopolistic business practices since the early 1990s AND a fourth is that Office is enshittifying rapidly—autosave only works to OneDrive shares now, not local storage, for example—and why am I paying for shit I don't want to use anyway?

     Now the alternative is confirmed good enough, I'm out.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Timo (timo21@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 11:16:57 JST Timo

     in reply to

     @cstross I wonder is law firms are gearing up for lawsuits around copilot or similar tools.

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 15:45:40 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • The Sleight Doctor 🃏

     @ApostateEnglishman I have been using StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice since roughly 1995 and earlier iterations were SPECTACULARLY rough around the edges in some respects. But for the past couple of years LibreOffice has been increasingly solid.

   • Embed this notice
     The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)'s status on Wednesday, 21-May-2025 15:45:42 JST The Sleight Doctor 🃏

     in reply to

     @cstross I can't recommend LibreOffice enough! It's intuitive, reliable, feature-rich and stable. Plus you can import or export in pretty much any document format in existence.

     I have had compatibility issues in the past - a job application form which didn't work in LibreOffice because all the input fields were broken, for some inscrutable reason - but it's a rare enough occurrence to not be worth worrying about.

     Peter Krefting repeated this.