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Microsoft converts Office 2019 for Mac perpetual licenses to read-only. versions (consumerrights.wiki)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/apple@lemmy.zip
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[–] 29 points 5 months ago (9 children)

I thought it meant it just wasn't getting updates anymore, but this is wild

The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined "reduced functionality mode," in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved

Not much of a "word processor" if all it can do is view files. Clearly trying to force users towards their shitty subscription service.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    Google Docs, LibreOffice and Euro-Office can all open and edit Office documents, and two of those can also do online collaboration. Unless you want integrated Copilot, there’s no reason to move to O365.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    There is. Compatibility. Ms has had a monopoly on office for decades, and some things still don't format correctly or functions don't work as they do in ms office.

    For most people, laziness prevails when it just works in ms office.

    But also for most people, the amount of ms office they're leveraging is 100% functional in libreoffice and the like.

    Change is also hard for most people.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    OOXML is a public standard—one that MS has problems matching between versions, but Google and OpenOffice based products have only had issues with embedded objects from other MS products.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Even O365 regularly botches line, paragraph, and table formatting compared to the desktop versions. If you really need your formatting to be page-perfect, you should probably be using Scribus, Microsoft Designer, or Adobe InDesign anyways.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    FWIW I just spent a couple of months testing a bunch of Office suites as a replacement for MS Office, and I settled on SoftMaker. The “Home” subscription (version without AI and reference features) is CAD $40/year (there’s also a free version with a few features removed) and it can do everything that MS Office can do, some things (like commenting in Word docs) it does better.

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