It's All About Technology

Thursday 20 March 2014

Why I'm quitting Microsoft Office forever


So yesterday I decided to write a guide to getting started with Microsoft OneNote, which is now available free for Mac and all versions of Windows. First step, of course: download and install the OneNote client. Nothing complicated about that, right?
Wrong. The installer quit midway with a cryptic error message. Weird. Tried again: same result. Sigh. Well, no time to mess with this now, I'll come back to it later. Let me just check my email real quick and...whoa! Where's Outlook?
The icon was gone from the Windows taskbar. I clicked into the Start menu and...whoa! Where's Office? The entire suite had vanished. I clicked into Settings and found it still listed among my installed programs, so I tried the Repair option. Same error the installer threw. Reboot, Repair, again: same error. Uninstall Microsoft Office: same error. So, basically, the simple act of trying to install a Microsoft product fully and irrevocably crippled another Microsoft product.
In the end, I tracked down a Microsoft Fix-It that allowed me to uninstall Office. And you know what? I'm not reinstalling it. Not now, not ever. Because I've had it up to here with this kind of nonsense (which is way politer word than I'd be using if this wasn't a family blog).
(Credit: Microsoft)
A brief history of hating Office Earlier this week I was already feeling a bit insulted by Microsoft's introduction of Office 365 Personal, which gives you a single license (for one PC and one mobile device) for $70 -- for one year. Yep, it's a subscription option, same as the newly rechristened Office 365 Home, which costs $100 and comes with five licenses. Uh, math isn't really my strong suit, but there's something amiss with those numbers.
Full disclosure: My Office 365 installation came courtesy of Microsoft, a one-year demo license for journalists. It expires next month, so I was already planning my Office exit, so to speak. But for nearly a year I've been using Kingsoft Office Free 2013, which I consider the best Microsoft Office alternative. It's pretty, capable, and more than sufficient for my everyday-user needs (which amount to word processing, occasional spreadsheets, and once-in-a-blue-moon presentation viewing).
The alternative: pay Microsoft $70 or $100 annually for tools that are far beyond my needs -- and that apparently crash and burn when you try to add a new one.
The only reason I've continued using Office 2013 at all is Outlook, which is actually pretty nice in this version. Plus, I have a PST file containing years' worth of email. But just the other day it was producing oddball password-error messages for one of my Gmail accounts, even though I had no trouble signing into that account on the Web.

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