cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48806122
A license verification certificate expires and when it expires, Microsoft Office for Mac assumes it’s unlicensed even if it has been fully paid for.
So, any idiot who paid for Office 2019 for Mac “perpetual” will lose access to it next month.
The same will happen with Office 2021 and Office 2024 in the future.
Pirates are unaffected, only who paid for the product gets punished
Good job 👍🏻
Disabled or pirated are not the only options:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/
Since the OP specifies Mac users, as a Mac user, I find iWork perfectly serviceable. I think it’s a bit controversial with its “Ribbon” on the right rather than the top, though it kind of makes sense. I don’t love iWork (Writer, Numbers, and Keynote), but they are good and they come with Macs (or at the very least are free in the App Store).
I have tried LibreOffice recently, and I didn’t care for it. But I am glad that such a robust free office suite is available on Windows. I believe some Linux distros ship with it, too. If I didn’t have iWork, I’d probably just use LibreOffice. It’s not terrible, I just have a better choice.
The few times I tried using LibreOffice, it’s anything but robust. Very bad UX, and even worse, it frequently crashes and fails to recover, resulting in data loss. And I’ve only been using Linux for more than 10 years now.
The Apple office apps are still free, but they do have an add-on subscription too now.
Is iWork compatible with Office files though? That’s going to be the sticking point for people who had been using it and lost access…
Yes, it opens the files and can work with them. However to save them back to the original filetype, you need to export
It’s been quite a while since I used iWork, but iWork is different than office. In some ways it’s a better product - the layout and formatting in Pages is worlds ahead of Word. It’s not a clone of the Office suite, which works to its advantage.
^ This. Easy to get, easy to install, works like a charm and the license is “perpetual” you won’t need bother with it ever again.
The last Mac I put this on was determined not to let me change doc files to open with it no matter what I did. It would change it for individual files only, but not the file type. Maybe because it was m1 or something.