Are they kidding with Office 365? (rant)

Full disclosure: I hate Microsoft and everything they make and am a Apple Lemming, happily buying whatever they tell me to.

That said, I had a need for something called "Outlook" on my Mac so that I could see shared calendars from something called "Exchange", apparently that is how my work e-mail gets to me.

I go to the Microsoft site, and they tell me that there is Outlook 2016 available. OK, I'll have that. Nope! You need Office 2016, a bunch of other programs that you will never use. OK, fine, I'll take them all. Nope! You need to create a Microsoft account for Office 365 so you can access a bunch of online crap that you will never use. Gah! Alright already, can I have my program now?

NOPE! After installation, I am told that I am now the Office 365 administrator for my company. Huh? I need to change that, so I try to log in to the account. Nope, I cannot because I need administrator permission. Huh? I AM the administrator, you just told me that! So I try again, and am told that my account, that I JUST created, does not exist. Seriously Microsoft?!?!?

So I punt it back to the IT geeks and they work on it for a day or two and promise that everything is fine. I can open Outlook on my computer, but I get all kinds of error messages. So I try MS support, but there is nothing available to me because 1) I am a business user 2) My account does not exist 3) I am not an administrator 4) MS sucks. Seriously, each options tells me that I have to talk to someone else and in the end, no one will help me. Who knows how much we paid for the POS, but it comes with ZERO tech support. All of the extra online stuff does not work either, you can't log in most times, when you do everything is stuck in Spanish despite the settings clearly saying that I want them in English, and it often crashes and freezes my system. The other programs, Word and Excel, do the same. They freeze any time you ask them do do anything even remotely processor intensive.

It's just not worth seeing the shared calendars, I am deleting all this Microsoft Crap and getting back to software that just works.

so how are you enjoying google calendar, docs, sheets and gmail?

Outlook is the MS product I hate the most. Both for inherent E36 M3tiness (both on the client, and Exchange on the server side) and lock-in power.

And here I thought this was going to be a rant about the 1yr subscription BS.....

In reply to Ranger50:

Yeah, I'm considering the Office365 $100 yearly extortion a bargain compared to Autodesk Revit, which is several thousand dollars per seat per year, and zero option to not rent it.

Yea, Office 365 does not bring joy in my experience. It's also remarkably weird and variant, with dozens of different flavors to buy/rent/experience.

Do have one version of it that somehow seems to work pretty well. That's the version available to my kid through the public schools. It works reliably at home and school or wherever he is (with internet access), and lets him store his documents where his teachers can get to them.

Just use Outlook Webaccess. It's already installed on the exchange servers.

Duke wrote: In reply to Ranger50: Yeah, I'm considering the Office365 $100 yearly extortion a bargain compared to Autodesk Revit, which is several thousand dollars per seat per year, and zero option to not rent it.

I have Revit 2016 and it's a standalone perpetual license.

The problem I have with Revit is unlike AutoCAD (and most software) I can't save the file back to an earlier version to give out to people that are running older versions of the software.

Chris_V wrote:

Duke wrote: In reply to Ranger50: Yeah, I'm considering the Office365 $100 yearly extortion a bargain compared to Autodesk Revit, which is several thousand dollars per seat per year, and zero option to not rent it.

I have Revit 2016 and it's a standalone perpetual license. The problem I have with Revit is unlike AutoCAD (and most software) I can't save the file back to an earlier version to give out to people that are running older versions of the software.

I have never seen CAD software other than AutoCAD that allows you to save to an older version.

Hrm, that may be a return to form for Autodesk. We have Revit 2014 and they made us take the yearly plan, with no option not to pay it. We haven't had time to jump to 2015 yet, but we own it, because we are required to.

pinchvalve wrote: So I punt it back to the IT geeks

You probably should have just asked them for the link to Outlook Web Access, so that you could access Outlook from your browser.

You can use Mail (OSX client) with Exchange. It takes some doing though. I usually just use the web client, even though it insists on using Silverlight.

From a magazine layout standpoint, Word has become awful. It leaves all kinds of weird formatting and colors embedded in the files that transfer over to InDesign and then into the PDF we use to publish, which means I have to go back and change what looks like blank areas in PDFs.

I have fond memories of WordPerfect's reveal codes function.

In reply to MCarp22:

In reply to Grtechguy:

^^^^ These guys ftw... I'm surprised your company doesn't have someone telling you to do what these two are, Pinch

Office works fine for me... but I use whatever IT has installed on our machines and whatever came bundled with my Dell laptop at home.

Don't get me started on Revit...

My work computers have gone to 365. Before I could just use the general log in and do anything I needed to. Now I have my personal log in and that won't let me do any "department" work. For that I need the department log in, and that changes every month. So I've taken the option of "berk it, a manager can pull it up."

ProDarwin wrote:

Chris_V wrote:

Duke wrote: In reply to Ranger50: Yeah, I'm considering the Office365 $100 yearly extortion a bargain compared to Autodesk Revit, which is several thousand dollars per seat per year, and zero option to not rent it.

I have Revit 2016 and it's a standalone perpetual license. The problem I have with Revit is unlike AutoCAD (and most software) I can't save the file back to an earlier version to give out to people that are running older versions of the software.

I have never seen CAD software *other* than AutoCAD that allows you to save to an older version.

Bentley Microstation does, as well as most graphics programs and programs like Word. So it seems like Revit is different than most software in that regard. And since it's so expensive, upgrading every year to keep up is wasteful.

Ian F wrote: Office works fine for me... but I use whatever IT has installed on our machines and whatever came bundled with my Dell laptop at home. Don't get me started on Revit...

I love Revit as a program. All our campus and most of our larger facilities nationwide are done in Revit and it's a great tool. It's not as good at rendering as 3D Studio or Lightwave, both of which I use quite a bit, but for managing construction and space planning, it's great.

Wow. Thanks for this write-up. I have a one-year personal Office 365 from buying a $70 tablet last christmas. Office is on my Mac, and I haven't upgraded it because of compatibility issues with El Capitan. Can you still get Office 2011 for Mac? It works fine for me, though admittedly, I've not used the Outlook component.

For what it's worth, I'm not planning on renewing. I don't really need Office on my personal equipment, and there are better places than OneDrive to stash things in the cloud.

Maybe it's changed, but when I had to use outlook for work it was a remote access, all in the web browser deal.

Chris_V wrote:

Ian F wrote: Office works fine for me... but I use whatever IT has installed on our machines and whatever came bundled with my Dell laptop at home. Don't get me started on Revit...

I love Revit as a program. All our campus and most of our larger facilities nationwide are done in Revit and it's a great tool. It's not as good at rendering as 3D Studio or Lightwave, both of which I use quite a bit, but for managing construction and space planning, it's great.

For doing MEP design it is cumbersome. Mainly because 99% of the projects I do are renovations of existing spaces. To use Revit correctly we have to model a lot of the existing equipment and associated systems. We essentially need to as-built the building before we even start. We never have the budget to do that amount of work, much less the access to the systems, most of which lacks any sort of owner documentation ("What did you buy?" "I don't know... that AHU is older than I am...").

It's tough. Our architects love and do almost all of their work with it. Sometimes it proves useful for HVAC design when the 3D coordination is helpful. But for electrical and plumbing, we lose money whenever we're forced to use it.

slowride wrote: You can use Mail (OSX client) with Exchange. It takes some doing though. I usually just use the web client, even though it insists on using Silverlight. From a magazine layout standpoint, Word has become awful. It leaves all kinds of weird formatting and colors embedded in the files that transfer over to InDesign and then into the PDF we use to publish, which means I have to go back and change what looks like blank areas in PDFs. I have fond memories of WordPerfect's reveal codes function.

Can't you do a "paste special" that just drops in the text and strips the formatting? IIRC that's an InDesign option. Word does that to every program.

I've never liked the MS mail options. The web access version is amazingly slow, but it's what I use on my Mac to avoid having to install all the Outlook software on it.

Thunderbird?

In reply to Keith Tanner:

Well, we want some of the formatting (italics, special symbols, etc). Plus we're applying styles on import to InDesign and I think we would have to do that manually if the text was pasted in. If what we were laying out wasn't so complicated these wouldn't be issues (peer-reviewed medical journal). I'm pretty sure the various colors I was talking about are left by Track Changes, which we use during peer review.

slowride wrote: I'm pretty sure the various colors I was talking about are left by Track Changes, which we use during peer review.

Have you tried Accepting All Changes and turning Track Changes off?

A lot of Word's mysteries go away once you realize that all the formatting information is contained in the return characters. Also, get used to editing with the invisible characters (spaces, tabs, paragraph markers, etc) turned on. Last but not least, DO NOT use direct formatting to get the look you want. Styles are easy to customize and apply, and there is a metric buttload of functionality built into them.

Thanks for the suggestion for Online access, and I have that, but it won't give me access to shared Calendars. At least, not that I can see.

After much trial an error, I figured out that when you install Office 2106, it is permanently linked to the Microsoft Account you create or sign in with when you install it. Sure, you can sign in with other accounts if you want, but it won't do any good because it is fixed to one account and will not have a valid license. And if that account doesn't actually exist, then you are boned. My install just decided that it was linked to some other unknown account, so that was that.

The solution was to delete the entire thing, then log into my account online, re-download the program and re-install. And Microsoft offered zero support, zilch, nada, none, bupkiss. If you are a business user, you can only go to your own administrator for support, training, etc. Mine are part time, so that is not a convenient option for me.

One thing that has changed is that I can delete all the other Office programs and just keep Outlook for when I need it to look at shared calendars. I can't use it for my only calendar because it does not support iCal. I can use Mac Mail for Exchange mail easily, so it only has one use as of now, until Apple figures out how to show shared exchange calendars.

Last week, I upgraded to the newest Apple Operating System. It was 100% free, installed easily with no issues, and everything on my computer worked just fine after the upgrade. How people deal with Microsoft's bullcrap is beyond me.