More news on the microsoft front.

Read ALL about it here.
Can Office 365 convince you that renting software is a good deal? | ZDNet

If the prices are insanely low (as they are describing in the article) it could be tempting, BUT.

When your subscription lapses or you cancel, you can say good by to every file you created with said apps. How are you going to open them when the software no longer functions?

That's a pretty big "Ooops". Definitely worth looking at with a wary eye...

OpenOffice can read Microsoft document formats (both .doc and .docx, xls and xlsx, etc..) so you can always use those, or you can use the free readers Microsoft provides to view them.

Having it work on 5 machines, no activation necessary and a super low price could make this advantageous for a number of people. Time will tell on the price.

Mystere said:

OpenOffice can read Microsoft document formats (both .doc and .docx, xls and xlsx, etc..) so you can always use those, or you can use the free readers Microsoft provides to view them.

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THose are both dicey propositions as the OO compatibility is always quite lagging and a reader doesn;t mean you can extract the data for use somewhere else. So while something, it's still... very chancy.

Thanks for the article lead, Mike. Will I have the option of renting to buy?

Doubt there will be a RENT to OWN version! LoL

Mystere said:

OpenOffice can read Microsoft document formats (both .doc and .docx, xls and xlsx, etc..) so you can always use those, or you can use the free readers Microsoft provides to view them.

Click to expand...

Ohhh..... oh dear.... On paper, yes. It does. In actual use, it's nothing more than a frustrating headache.

The school district in my area I've found out, is pushing openoffice and google docs as a replacement for Office software, which they cite cost as a main issue. That's a legit issue, but one can use virtualization of Office and distribute it among the array of machines. So, being investigative, a friend I know that is a teacher in the high school let me watch her class use openoffice and google docs. The result? A terribly busy teacher trying to figure out how work openoffice as the students had MAJOR difficulty in using it. I also happen to know a couple of siblings that are in that school that are related to another friend I used to go to school with there told me that using google docs, openoffice, and Office 2003/07 causes a MASSIVE document compatibility issue. They said that through every different software, it actually takes reformatting the document and fixing errors as the software isn't very compatible with one another. It's a trainwreck and thinking about it now, I might just use Word 2013 to write a letter to the school board that this is fundamentally detrimental to public education. If pubic education is supposed to "prepare" its students for real world work, or at least scoring a well paying white collar job, using openoffice is ABSOLUTELY detrimental to those students as they will lose a vitally needed skill in the office workspace: the knowledge and skills on using Microsoft Office programs. Love it or hate it, it IS the gold standard of office software. And if you don't know how to use the gold standard, that sucks.

Subscription based software, depending on the price, could be good. It will depend on certain things....

Coke Robot, I find it no more difficult than when we went from WordPerfect Office Suite to Microsoft Office. We had to learn MSO as well. All applications will have their differences as to how they work, but basically will still work the same. Open Office isn't a bad group of office programs. And from using it in the past, doesn't have a hard learning curve.

Coke Robot said:

. If pubic education is supposed to "prepare" its students for real world work, or at least scoring a well paying white collar job, using openoffice is ABSOLUTELY detrimental to those students as they will lose a vitally needed skill in the office workspace: the knowledge and skills on using Microsoft Office programs. Love it or hate it, it IS the gold standard of office software. And if you don't know how to use the gold standard, that sucks.

Click to expand...

But public education is finding it difficult to pay teachers and get the most fundamental supplies into the classroom. The cost of MS Office is expensive and I can understand the desire to get away from it for cost savings.

In addition, the collaborative nature of things like Google docs is going to become more and more the norm as time goes on. Papers and documents that are shared and can be edited and changed by all of the students with revision histories in case somebody decides to deface or screw up the original.

Today, MS Office is the prevalent office suite in the corporate world. But honestly, it's pretty simple to conquer all of the basic tasks, which are the only things that many office workers use anyway. The transition from Google Docs to Excel is not a mountain, I think most college graduates would be able to make the transition with relative ease upon landing a job that used MS Office.

pparks1 said:

Coke Robot said:

. If pubic education is supposed to "prepare" its students for real world work, or at least scoring a well paying white collar job, using openoffice is ABSOLUTELY detrimental to those students as they will lose a vitally needed skill in the office workspace: the knowledge and skills on using Microsoft Office programs. Love it or hate it, it IS the gold standard of office software. And if you don't know how to use the gold standard, that sucks.

Click to expand...

But public education is finding it difficult to pay teachers and get the most fundamental supplies into the classroom. The cost of MS Office is expensive and I can understand the desire to get away from it for cost savings.

In addition, the collaborative nature of things like Google docs is going to become more and more the norm as time goes on. Papers and documents that are shared and can be edited and changed by all of the students with revision histories in case somebody decides to deface or screw up the original.

Today, MS Office is the prevalent office suite in the corporate world. But honestly, it's pretty simple to conquer all of the basic tasks, which are the only things that many office workers use anyway. The transition from Google Docs to Excel is not a mountain, I think most college graduates would be able to make the transition with relative ease upon landing a job that used MS Office.

Click to expand...

True, Office suites are expensive and google docs is good for collaborative work. But, I will have to say this, but the new Office Web Apps are in beta and WOW. :shock: One would have to be a boob to say google docs is better than the Word Web App. It fundamentally is WAY better! In metro IE 10, the UI literally feels like you're using the installed program itself. There's even a little X in the corner to close out of the app! The new Web Apps are the replacement for Office Starter, which had more features than google docs and was pretty much free to use with adverts. It's wow. The old ones were lacking pretty bad, but the new ones are just blow everything out of the water and my socks.