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Microsoft revealed today that Office 2019 will ship in the second half of 2018, and will run exclusively on Windows 10.
Microsoft's General Manager for Windows, Bernardo Caldas, and General Manager for Office, Jared Spataro announced changes to Office and Windows servicing and support today.
[...] Office 2019 applications will only be supported on a limited number of Windows client and server operating system versions. In particular, Office 2019 will only be supported on the following systems:
- Any supported Windows 10 SAC (Semi-Annual Channel) release.
- Windows 10 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel 2018.
- The next Long Term Servicing Channel release of Windows Server.
Unless I'm misreading Microsoft's announcement, Office 2019 won't be available for Windows 8.1 or Windows 7, or older Server versions.
[...] The company plans to support Office 2019 for five years of mainstream support and about two years of extended support.
[...] Office 2019 support will end around the same time that Office 2016 ends. It is unclear why Microsoft made the decision; one explanation is that the company plans to move all-in in regards to Office 365 and Office in the cloud and that 2025 may be the year Microsoft might make that switch.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 03 2018, @03:53AM (9 children)
Agree, I hope they restrict it with various pain in the ass requirements that force people to scratch their heads why it won't install on machine X after they paid hundreds of dollars for it, and then they can make it expire on certain machines after a while... they can also force corporate customers into negotiation rooms over millions of dollars for global service agreements that will force them to throw out old hardware, upgrade early, and otherwise piss off the world even more than they already do.
Meanwhile, Open/Libre Office has been good enough for my word processing and spreadsheet needs for at least the last 10 years, on multiple OS platforms - and I remember a point back in 2004 when I was actually using it out of need, because Word whatever on my corporate issued Windows 98SE was choking on digital photographs - more than 3 in a document and it would roll over and die, while OO accepted the dozen+ that I wanted to include with the report.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Saturday February 03 2018, @04:20AM (8 children)
Word documents are one thing, macro-heavy Excel workbooks another. One widely used sales platform (namesake of a river that runs through a rainforest in South America) offers sellers a prevalidation workbook that uses macros to check listing files against the schema that the web service expects. The seller can also validate a listing file by uploading it to the web service and seeing which rows it accepts, but that means of validation does not give detailed, immediate feedback, and it counts against the seller's upload quota the same way a successful upload would. Excel macros are not compatible with LibreOffice [libreoffice.org]: while both use Basic dialects, the APIs for interacting with the document appear to differ at least as much as windows.h differs from unistd.h and Xlib.h.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @05:21AM
I used LibreOffice 5.x on an Excel spreadsheet for a leaked AAA MMO that used it across multiple files for generating rate progression per hour and then regenerated into the binary server files. While the actual conversion app required Office, the spreadsheets themselves worked perfectly under LibreOffice, providing the same results as Office itself.
Outside of LO being MORE accurate than MSO for a variety of spreadsheet math today, it is capable of loading a lot more files, including ones with complex apis and scripting than most people realize.
If you haven't tried it recently, try it again, you may be surprised by the results.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:23AM (1 child)
In Munich[1], they created a FOSS tool years ago. WollMux [google.com]
They used it to convert 100 percent of their users' M$ Orifice macros to work with LibreOffice.
[1] Before a new batch of politicians decided they wanted to piss away 100 million to go backwards from a system that was 96 percent converted to FOSS back in 2013 and had already saved the city 10 million at that date.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 03 2018, @02:45PM
When politicians are pissing away that kind of money, a fair amount of it tends to splash back into their own pockets. The people who elected them should react accordingly.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:27AM (3 children)
Oh, and I was reading at gHacks that LibreOffice 6 is out.
In the comments there, a guy who had previously had a problem with a CVS file created in M$ Orifice found that it works fine with the new release.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @01:09PM (2 children)
Did you mean CSV file?
https://fileinfo.com/extension/cvs [fileinfo.com] What is a CVS file?
Proprietary image format used by early versions of Canvas, a drawing program designed for creating technical illustrations; may contain both vector images and raster images.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:33PM
Yeah. (Brain fart.)
Comma-Separated Values (not the pharmacy chain originally Consumer Value Store).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 04 2018, @06:44AM
Funny. When I hear "CVS" I think of an outdated version control system. [wikipedia.org]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 03 2018, @02:43PM
Are you saying that Bezos is a tool? Because if that's what you're saying, it's alright to come out and say it.
The compatibility thing has been a thing since Word first came out. Before Word was even passable as a word processor, we used AmiPro, it kicked Word's ass back in the day, but then: the internet. And everybody and their brother used Word, and Word documents looked like shit in any other processor, so you've got to have word to read the crap that people send you in e-mail, and there it is: lock in. AmiPro died, and it was a long time before OO started to make acceptable renders of Word documents (LO still has some quirks).
If any major vendor wanted to put their accessibility tools in free-open-source accessible formats, they could today - there's nothing in the technology holding it back.
🌻🌻 [google.com]