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28 points

or just use LibreOffice

If you work in an office or for an office or are connected to an office … let them pay for it and use the software on their systems.

It’s also a great excuse to disconnect from the office anyway … if someone calls you after hours to do work … tell them you need to access your computer at the office and won’t do the work until you get back to your desk.

Otherwise, if there is no requirement from anyone and you’re just doing some word processing yourself at home or doing some basic spreadsheets … just use Open Source Software … there’s plenty of them around.

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22 points

the catch is when you really need specifically O365 for some reason, e.g. we had to get the O365 download version for my kid’s schooling because that was the specific version the “this is how you do office shit” classes were taught against, the online O365 didn’t cut it

of course even the teacher was telling the kids “look you should just use libreoffice” lol

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3 points

That’s the thing … most people who are doing work themselves at home and for their own purposes, never need something like O365 … when it comes to schooling it should be the same, unless the school is doing very specific particular thing just to justify using O365, then it shouldn’t be required

Word processing is very simple … I have an old Underwood typewriter from 1921 … I can write and format a letter using it if I wanted to … it shouldn’t be any more complicated than that.

Microsoft pushing their software is just a cheap salesman selling snake oil that you don’t need and doesn’t do anything special.

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5 points

you are now getting fatuous in your evangelism and should desist

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9 points
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Is the school providing the license? because if they’re not, then it is a rough call to require and force parents to pay for a non essential tool. This is why FOSS is such a powerful education ally. It doesn’t cost any of the end users any money. This kind of things is why people still think MS products as the default. MS spent a lot of money in marketing to force education to treat them as such.

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9 points
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you are both correct and fatuous, which is an ideal combination

assume that in the past 25 years everyone here has heard the gospel of RMS

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6 points

My mom will never grok LibreOffice.

I tried to switch her for a long time but I gave up when she called me one day to complain that her coworker can’t open a file she saved. Apparently the coworker in question was too, emm, talented to open an .odf

There are things that are outside of human reach. I can’t even put into words the strife that MSFT caused in my house when they switched Internet Explorer to Edge and thus “broke” her computer.

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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here’s the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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