Microsoft Office 2021 launches on 5th October

[HEXUS]

Releasing alongside Windows 11, the new Dark Mode is the most obvious change.

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[AnonAnon]

Yes, more dark theme support!

[567]

I'm still running Microsoft Office 2010 for private use and it still does everything I need it to.

[sinhaomar]

Well done. New office does not mean better, more productive and quick soft.

[bae85]

Meanwhile, my local council still uses Office 2007... How can you improve something that just works?

[Faiakes]

So they refused to add the dark mode their customers requested for over a decade now, only to turn into a buy in feature?

[philehidiot]

Meanwhile, my local council still uses Office 2007... How can you improve something that just works?

You don't. You make it worse. As a lot of people are using Orifice 365, you just tweak it so this is no longer fully compatible with the older versions. You claim you have made security enhancements and you can't sacrifice these things to support obsolete software that's 14 years old. You say that it still works (mostly and because of an extraordinary effort to retain functionality) and it's only a few features affected so you clearly haven't made a deliberate effort to bork the software. You then point out that the people using the older software are selfish as it isn't properly supported anymore and they could be allowing viruses and trojans and other miscellaneous pwnage into their (and your) systems. You finish with "we did our best but we have to prioritise safety of the majority who are using our latest software".

Because that's straight out of the "How to be a corporate fu...........mean person" handbook.

[trevcjohnson]

I'm pretty sure for the majority of users Office 2000 still provides all the functionality they use.

[Spreadie]

Office 2010 works just fine for me.

We are lumped with the online version of 365 at work - it is hateful. I swear Libra office would be better.

[Tabbykatze]

Wow, maybe I'm a luddite but i have thoroughly enjoyed the improvemrnts from 2000 to 365 versions. Sure we still have the issue of unwanted automatic updates but while yes for generalistic stuff you could get away with wordpad. There are a ton of appreciable features and quality of life improvements

[John_Amstrad]

If you want to share your documents with everybody else yes buy a 365 subscription. The corporate use of 365 must be punished same as giving away company secrets.

[Kumagoro]

Anytime know what the deal is with this new version and ISOs & MAKs, KMS etc? We are still on 2016 and never moved to 2019 because apparently Microsoft changed things or something and that's about all we heard from IT back then and nothing since.

[AlSomething]

I use office 365 for work and Scouts. It has it quirks, more to do with one drive and sync in SharePoint. Otherwise I like it. Now & then I have to use office 2010 in a school, it's painful. I use some features which aren't easy to use in 2010 but easy in 365, then the big one is multi window use. It's just painful switching between 2 windows on a window 7 machine. Then there is automatic links update. Give me 365 any day over 2010.

[Saracen999]

Personally, given that MSs approached resulted in me switching current machines to Libre several years ago, and it does everything I need (well, everything any standard word processor will do at any rate (see *)) the differences between versions of Office, whether 365 or not, are academic. My legacy machines still run legacy versions of Office because it's all tehy need. To me, new versions are 'ho, hum, yawn'.




* = budding authors could do worse than look at Scrivener. It blows Office and Libre out of the park for that. Specialist tool for specialist needs, IMHO.

[DemonHighwayman]

Not used MS office for a decade or so, libre office does just fine and is without the security concerns of using a microsoft product.

[cheesemp]

Got 365 at work and to be honest if you are using sharepoint/teams it all work together fairly well. The ability to collaborate on docs and share them round etc is a real enterprise feature. The automatic backup of docs to encrypted onedrive is also useful given recent ransomware.

Sure for home/basic office use there are free alternatives that are absolutely fine but don't discount the advantages for large enterprise of the extra's office brings in.