@Dexcon - Thanks for getting back. Yeah, they want me to spend more money on space. Are you using MS Office 365? Isn’t that subscription? I’ve not seen what’s in the Drive, maybe about time I prune it?

@Grazie

Are you using MS Office 365? Isn’t that subscription?

Yes and yes.

I've been using MS Word since around 1986 (I'd hate to know what the purchase cost back then would be in 2021 $$$$). I ended going the sub avenue with Office some years ago when it became apparent that the perpetual boxed versions weren't going to be available any more in multiple computer licenses, and I needed licenses for my desktop, my laptop, the smart phone, my wife's laptop and my el cheapo laptop for overseas travel (now a concept of historical interest only).

As a sidenote, I'm still using MS Money that came with an MS disk package bundled with a new computer back in 1997.

My Gosh! You actually pay for M$ Office when you can get LibreOffice (a better product) free?

LibreOffice

I tried it years ago - and didn't like it.

LibreOffice is fine, but I cannot say it is better than MS Office.

Documents created in Libre Writer quite often displayed incorrectly in MS Word. It is a problem if you are creating documents for others (resume to apply for a job for example).

Spreadsheets functionality if very limited in Libre. It is fine for simple tables, but when someone send you xls file with complicated formulas/graphs -- it just does not work in Libre.

And many people use Outlook.

I'm using MS Office at work and Libre at home as my requirements at home very basic. My wife cannot use Libre at home (but she used to use it) as she need much mode from Excel.

The reason I subscribe to Office (home) is that you can share it with 5 different people, full usage for everyone and everyone gets their own 1 TB of cloud storage. You can install it on several devices, which is convenient. I use Outlook so I need office, but I've grown to appreciate all that you get for the 100 bucks a year. Onedrive lets you upload huge files (well, up to 100gb, which wasn't big enough for my last project, but still, not bad). And... I find the interface and usage to be better than the rest, or at least the usual suspects, as far as sharing etc. Pictures I take on my phone get uploaded automatically and now that Google has started limiting their gmail and google photos to 15 GB... makes the Onedrive deal even more valuable. So, as much as I detest subscriptions in general, I've been won over by all that Office offers. My 2 cents.

I think the office 365 deal is quite cheap. The 1tb storage that one drive offers has been sufficient for me. I even use it for media that I use in my projects. Sometimes I have to wait a little while it downloads, but I can live with that. I have a 2tb external drive as well, but I do not trust it. It must be close to 5 years now so sooner or later it will break down. With one drive I always have a backup.

I bought MS Office for $30 bucks USD. Licensed and legal. Check Pinguin and G2A, both honest resellers.

I bought MS Office for $30 bucks USD. Licensed and legal. Check Pinguin and G2A, both honest resellers.

@Musicvid - Really?! Wow..... Any drawbacks? You get ALL the OFFICE Modules? WORD, EXCEL, DB and OUTLOOK? How come they can do it for that price?

Yes, I got the full pop for $30, the seller personally helped me register with MS.

Here is where I shopped. Go with a seller who has a high rating, 98 - 100%.

https://www.g2a.com/search?query=microsoft%20office

Editor for notes. LibreOffice for office like things. Papyrus for the "real" writing. Affinity Publisher for some finishing masterworks.

Papyrus for the "real" writing.

😁👍

I use Google Drive. I have 130gb of space of which I'm using 100gb and it costs just £1.59 per month inc. VAT (UK tax). Extra space is available at 200gb for £2.49pm, 2tb £7.99pm etc. Annual plans are cheaper but I've never got around to sorting it out.

I use GD for cloud backup obviously but also to upload sets of photos for clients to be able to download from a private link. Likewise you can upload large video files for clients to download - and they can watch as well without downloading. I used to have full-on Vimeo but it became unusable due to restrictions with incidental commercial music. I now use Youtube in its "unlisted" option as although it does not offer password protection it does also not search and list those videos so only people with the actual link can watch. In practice most incidental commercial music is authorised, all be it with occasional adverts. Sometimes countries are not allowed, a recent use of a Kennedy violin in the background being one for Cuba Iran North Korea and Syria. By coincidence recently some clients are Iranian nationals in Iran so I had to re-edit to a different track.

I have used Open Office for many years plus have Outlook Exchange in a web hosting company so have no use for MS Office and don't use One Drive at all.

@walter-i. After I saw your smileys I realized that at the one hand mentioning "Papyrus" may be confusing, because this software (Papyrus Autor) probably isn't known outside Germany (and I think it's valuable style analyses only works for German language). And on the other hand is my "real" writing often based on starting to hand-write onto "Papyrus" in the sense of paper before it's transfered/typed into the software Papyrus.

@Marco. I did not know the software "Papyrus" and thought of Papyrus, which had already been used by the ancient Egyptians.

Also a bit with a view to data security - since it is still possible to decipher the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians today, but I doubt very much whether anyone will still be able to read our intellectual outpourings that we "immortalise" with any of today's common software in 4000 years.......

In any case, it has once again brought a small smile (albeit unintentional) to my face, and that is the best of all.
Thanks for that.

I doubt very much whether anyone will still be able to read our intellectual outpourings that we "immortalise" with any of today's common software in 4000 years.......

... or even from 30 years ago. Who commonly has still got a workable 5.25 inch floppy disk drive ... or even a 3.5 inch drive from years later ... to read media that was commonplace back then?

Re papryus, I envisaged this as being a new Vegas Pro 'titles and text' option called the 'Dead Sea End Credit Scrolls'. And yes, I sometimes have a weird sense of humour.

I've always owned by own businesses (some small, other large) and when WordPerfect "died", I went office (love access and excel together). Word is extremely powerful and outlook is like my second brain. For multiple computers and users it is very inexpensive. Even retired I use it every day.

and when WordPerfect "died",

I still mourn it today, I loved working with it - and it was so far ahead of MS Word......

I stopped using OneDrive after Google kept twisting my arm with more and more space with Google drive and everything was faster through the Google servers. The free GoogleDrive is 15GB, then Google further twisted my arm when we renewed my wife's MetroPCS cellular phone plan. With new plan offer we got an additional new line which included a free Samsung phone, all for the same price we were paying. We gave free phone/line to our 9y/o son. Additionally with the offer we got Amazon prime for free and each line was provided 200GB of free Google Drive space. So yeah, my wife and son now have 200GB of free google drive space included with their phone plans, which neither of them use and I'm sitting here on my 15GB of free account Google Drive since my phone is through another service. 😆

One of these days, I'm going to have to borrow my kid's Google account credentials and start using that 200GB of space.

So my advise, instead of subscribing and paying for any more online storage space. Look at your current phone plan and check into some competitive offers. Google was pushing hard with offers on this front with free Google Drive space included as part of cellular plans and like me, it may not cost you an extra cent.

If you're in a position where you can choose between Google Drive and OneDrive, I'd choose OneDrive over Google Drive because Office 365 is just too good.

Even if you only edit stuff in a browser, Microsoft Office Online is better than Google Drive unless you collaborate primarily with Google Drive users - and Google has nothing as good as Microsoft OneNote, which I personally consider to be a huge differentiator between Office and iWorks or Google Docs. Microsoft has better mobile apps, as well.

That being said, cloud storage is not good for working off of. It's good for backup, but you'll be uploading for days, and there is a chance of file corruption when using cloud sync folders in this way. It just isn't a great way to work. Better to just buy some large HDDs and use that for backup (redundant backups where possible, and one copy stored in a different location).

Microsoft Office apps have always been fairly cheap, outside of specifics like Microsoft Visio. Word was $99-129 forever. For the first 1 decade of its life it was a massive underdog to WordPerfect, which cost significantly more. Price competition is actually how Microsoft supplanted entrenched industry standards like WordPerfect, 1-2-3, and dBase.

Office Suite was only expensive when you bought the whole suite :-P Lots of PCs shipped with Works Suite back in the day (Microsoft Works + Full Copy of Microsoft Word), so Windows PCs were largely on par with Macs in terms of delivering usable software out of the box.

I also wouldn't buy from a vendor selling Office Suites for $30. These are often Volume Licenses, and Microsoft does do their rounds and invalidate these licenses when they are abused in this way. 98.6% chance anyone buying that will, eventually start up an Office app to realize the license has been revoked by Microsoft. This has been a common scam since Microsoft moved over to Windows/Office Genuine Advantage, and they almost always get around to this as the keys are sold and resold to so many people and the abuse becomes obvious.

These Volume License keys are typically used by businesses who license a large number of PCs using one serial (often in unattended installations or embedded in disk images for easy deployment). Good luck with that!

People should not be sharing the websites of these vendors. These are not legitimate licenses. Do not buy from there. The entirety of Reddit knows to avoid them, Lol.

---

Re: WordPerfect - Yes, it was far ahead of Word, in the beginning. It was like half a decade or more onto the market before Microsoft Word. And there were few Standards in the CP/M and DOS days. This made products ever more sticky, especially in the publishing and word processing markets, where printer drivers and fonts were often product-specific. WordPerfect also had some really outstanding support back then (which simply cannot scale to very large user bases - so that went out the window once the PC market boomed).

Despite WordPerfect having some very nice niche features catering to the legal market, today (Reveal Codes, Pleading Tools, Redaction, etc.), it really was marked for death the second Windows 3 became a thing and TrueType Fonts and Microsoft's Printer Driver Model came into play. WordPerfect's competitive advantage in the DOS days was printing, and how printer manufacturers would develop Printer Drivers for WordPerfect specifically. It also had its own Fonts, and other Word Processors didn't have much to compete with it in those areas.

Windows 3 completely changed the game, by deleting WordPerfect's most important competitive advantages - it was a brilliant move on Microsoft's part, and showed just how much owning both the platform and the software running on it can be a competitive advantage.

Everything became WYSIWYG, and TrueType + Printer Drivers were generalized so that all applications could access all of that stuff. Couple that with the much lower price of Microsoft Word, and the fact that Microsoft had an Office Bundle that included all of their productivity apps, and the fact that they had their products ready for Windows ASAP... all of their competitors found it hard to compete against this. It doesn't help that they were already competing against each other.

By that time, Quattro Pro had already started eroding Lotus 1-2-3's market position, with better graphics and key bind/macro compatibility (the subject of a precedential lawsuit, back in the day).

Access had already severely undercut the price of Paradox and dBase, and they were already competing against each other. Both of these took forever to port to Windows, and the price was just too high when they finally made it there (and the products were buggy).

I actually think there was a whole book written about the WordPerfect Corporation - how they grew to dominate that market and were eventually outcompeted.

A lot of developer products also lost out in the move to Windows. Editors like Epsilon and BRIEF pretty much ceased to exist in the mainstream, for example. Borland C/C++ lost out heavily, as did a number of other compiler toolchains. Borland Pascal (later became Delphi) was outcompeted by Visual Basic.

There was a ton of shuffling back then! All of the Market Leaders seemed to collapse, and Microsoft swooped in to fill those markets with first party products. It was really not hugely different from what Apple did with OS/X and their software.

Microsoft has been backing away from that strategy, though, due to Anti-Trust concerns (esp. since that lawsuit).

With all the WordPerfect talk I'm reminded of the fireside chats from Pete Peterson of Wordperfect. He used to do a nightly update about the progress of Wordperfect for Windows. Anybody else here remember those? Must have been a CompuServe group, can't really remember, but I was a huge WP fan and that group was full of like minded fans of the great Wordperfect. It was the first "expensive" piece of software I ever bought. 249 bucks at Egghead, and that was a deal, as I remember. I eventually moved to Word, reluctantly. WordPerfect for Windows never really matched the elegance of the DOS version. I don't have a problem with Word now, it's good but I've never gotten the same warm fuzzy feeling using it as I did with WP. My first crush, I guess. I kind of feel the same way about Vegas, there are lots of worthy competitors but I feel at home with Vegas and I dread using most other editors as they feel clunky and inelegant to me.

With all the WordPerfect talk I'm reminded of the fireside chats from Pete Peterson of Wordperfect. He used to do a nightly update about the progress of Wordperfect for Windows. Anybody else here remember those? Must have been a CompuServe group, can't really remember,

@ddm
I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about that.
I was just as much a fan of Wordpro, what I liked most was the properties window, where the change in the text was immediately displayed at runtime - with Microsoft Word you always had to close the properties window first - to then see the change......window open, window closed - that's how it went all day.
At that time I worked for a large bearing company that wanted to stand up to Microsoft and for this reason used the Lotus product line. I remember Lotus 1,2,3, the equivalent of Excel, Freelance for presentations and Approach, for databases.
We eventually had to switch, because of course we were working with many other companies, all using Microsoft - and the eternal converting, and what came out of it, was extremely frustrating.
Eventually we bowed to the pressure and switched to Microsoft as well.
But what a hassle that was and how much unnecessary money it cost!!!
Since so much crap came out when converting, it was usually easier to recreate the files - for a company with over 40,000 employees......