9 comments

  • k310 2 hours ago
    May I recommend Libre Office? [0] For casual/home use, it should meet needs. Free, no subscription. Spreadsheet can collaborate. [1]

    Collabra Office seems to be the port of LibreOffice to ios. (free) Look it up on the app store.

    > Collabora Office is a text editor, spreadsheet and presentation program based on LibreOffice, the world's most popular Open Source office suite - and now it's on iOS, enhancing your possibilities to work on mobile devices.

    Collaborative versions, a.k.a. Collabra online are available, but hosting is never free.

    But TBH, I am your "more casual than casual" office suite user and the bundled Apple apps do my minimal office tasks, and are compatible with MS formats.

    [0] https://www.libreoffice.org/

    [1] https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...

    [2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/

  • qubex 3 hours ago
    I’m furious that there’s apparently no way to even downgrade if you’re an iOS/iPadOS Office 365 subscriber as I am. Co-pilot isn’t only useless, it’s an actively hostile encumbrance I’d pay good money to rid myself of.
    • anshumankmr 3 hours ago
      >it’s an actively hostile encumbrance I’d pay good money to rid myself of.

      sorry... I know it has its problems but makes it hostile? (My knowledge of Microsoft CoPilot begins and ends with its chat thing)

  • antonyh 3 hours ago
    I 'cancelled' down to a non-AI family sub, but ended up full cancelling before the kick-in date for the annual renewal. I'm done with the nonsense and dark patterns. The shenanigans has worn thin.

    I'm tired of the price hikes for AI - if it was good enough without AI, it's should be optional and a separate sub. It's an enhancement not a core feature.

  • Molitor5901 2 hours ago
    I loathe copilot and have reverted to using an old version of Outlook desktop, which I then had to regedit to remove copilot buttons etc. It's a horrible product being shoved down our throats.
  • skywhopper 3 hours ago
    I remember when this came up and you had to go the “cancel” route to get back to the normal pricing. Tip to product folks: if you have to hide the cheap option to get people to choose plan with more features, you’ve failed at your jobs. Choosing this path is lazy, cynical, unethical, and in a just world, criminal.
  • ZeroConcerns 2 hours ago
    Yeah, well, that seems entirely unsurprising. Despite nominally being "on the Microsoft platform", I don't see many results from their "AI strategy", and what I do see is entirely underwhelming:

    -The Copilot key on all my recent laptops literally does nothing, other than pop up a preferences dialog that allows me to choose between 'None', 'Search' (which just redirects to a Bing-Webview-from-hell) and 'Custom' (which just informs me that I have no suitable providers installed). So, yeah, 'None' it is!

    -The Copilot button dropdown on my MacOS 'New Outlook' (the only platform on which that is slightly usable) displays an empty menu. Asking web-based Copilot about that, its response is "yeah, well, that is quite a tease, isn't it"... Uhhhm, sure?

    -Copilot code completions in Visual Studio only ensure a quick trip to disable them. I mean, maybe 5% of the time they're topical, but the remaining 95% is just cases of it trying to insert 20+ lines whenever I make a simple typo. I mean, really?

    But, yeah, I guess we're stuck with this kind of nonsense for the foreseeable future, until it starts to hurt. But, that might be a while...

  • BewareTheYiga 3 hours ago
    http://archive.today/BRCuY

    Was this just a dark pattern or did they flat out hide the classic option?

    • dpoloncsak 3 hours ago
      "Microsoft admitted on Thursday that it was only when users tried to cancel their subscriptions that they were told they could revert to a lower-cost option."

      Isn't this textbook dark pattern?

    • jacquesm 3 hours ago
      Both?
  • qwertyuiop_ 3 hours ago
    But AI is not a bubble.