7 ms·

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) -

Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined. Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?" I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.

Spooky23 2y ago
You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.
- mrandish 2y ago
  Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info. If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.
  - bflesch 2y ago
    OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.
    - ptx 2y ago
      LibreOffice also does this.
      - bflesch 2y ago
        Correct. Thanks for the hint. I keep mixing up openoffice and libreoffice even though I only use libreoffice on my system.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks. Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.
  - bflesch 2y ago
    LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc). Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
    - noisy_boy 2y ago
      It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes. This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.
      - bflesch 2y ago
        Nope, it's actually Menu -> User Interface: https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1 https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1 Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ
        noisy_boy 2y ago
        Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of organization of icons and ease of finding things.
- gtech1 2y ago
  Check out Only Office
- al_borland 2y ago
  For the occasional user, various online office suites are also an option. On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years. I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point. If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.
  - maccard 2y ago
    My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.
- tpm 2y ago
  MS Office is much harder to use for the casual user not already used to it - the interface is very disorienting.
- chneu 2y ago
  To be fair, office is also hot garbage. It's just that most people are used to that kind of hot garbage. As someone who hasn't used office much in the last 15 years, it's nearly unusable for me. I have to Google how to do basic things because everything is confusing, ugly, and hidden(or hard to find amongst the huge number of icons).
- chewonbananas 2y ago
  It's not as bad as it was 5 years ago. It's closer to the flat office design.
- ptx 2y ago
  It probably depends mostly on what you're used to. I find that LibreOffice looks fine - no worse than most apps, and much better than Microsoft's UI.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  > LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use. I don't know, I quite like it, reminds me of the old Office look. Plus, there's at least a bit of customization that you can do, which is pleasant: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0 https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0 Very much seems like a matter of preference.
bhouston 2y ago
I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.
- 486sx33 2y ago
  Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!
  - Ferret7446 2y ago
    The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace. If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
    - bflesch 2y ago
      Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.
      - arccy 2y ago
        my recent amazon order emails actually came with a full itemized list with prices
    - pavlov 2y ago
      Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts? That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.
packetlost 2y ago
I've been pretty happy with OnlyOffice. I'm pretty sure it's based on Libre or OpenOffice but looks much more similar to 2012~ era MS Office.
- nguyenkien 2y ago
  No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.
- n3storm 2y ago
  OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does. jfyi
polotics 2y ago
you use OneNote? I had text search randomly stop working in that thing, no explanation just nothing found. For me this was the Microsoft last straw.
bArray 2y ago
I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.
- esperent 2y ago
  I do this too, however there is considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS Office.
  - ohgr 2y ago
    There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too. We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.
  - bArray 2y ago
    True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end. The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_linux_microsoft365_possible_bug/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_... [2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-can-i-stop-the-web-version-of-word-from/09fd35f6-b609-44a1-8dbd-c1b2f75da9ff https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...
  - niutech 1y ago
    Try ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it is open source and has superior compatibility with MS Office.
- taurath 2y ago
  I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.
n3storm 2y ago
I was a hardcore desktop LibreOffice user both Calc and Write, but I have been using Write exclusively online through CollaboraOffice in a Nextcloud Instance and did not have any issue in two years. I know it was buggy before because I have been checked every two or three releases.
bambax 2y ago
Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.
- tomatocracy 2y ago
  Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).
  - bambax 2y ago
    Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif. XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match). Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
    - tomatocracy 2y ago
      The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining. And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
- threatripper 2y ago
  How can it be free if you need to buy a license?
swores 2y ago
This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment. Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on that comment, especially for this: > «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"» Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now just consistently annoying to use.
- ubermonkey 2y ago
  In a conversation with a pal yesterday, I realized I had LONG since stopped doing any actual writing in Word. It's just too huge and slow and clunky. I write in a plaintext environment (options vary, but probably Obsidian or emacs). If or when I fire up Word, it's to structure the document and format it for distribution. Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.
  - Tempest1981 2y ago
    Does it still have the smooth-animated cursor as you type? That thing messes with my brain, so that I lose my train of thought.
    - doctorwho42 2y ago
      Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer. It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop
- dfedbeef 2y ago
  The windows experience is trash for regular users, it looks like a casino now unless you are aggressive about turning _everything_ off. However: raising concerns is a bad career move apparently. These ideas... aren't proposed by devs; if that makes sense.
mkayokay 2y ago
I guess you already know, but you do not necessarily need a server for Syncthing if the devices are on at the same time. If they are not, a simple low-power rpi-like device would be more than enough to implement a star topology, with the pi being receive-only.
peppers-ghost 2y ago
I switched to onlyoffice + joplin for notes and am very happy with both.
rs186 2y ago
I used to always have an Office installation on my computer, whether it's pirated (many years ago)/using my personal license/using my school license/etc. Then I got a new computer without bothering to do the installation. It was a long time before I discovered that I need any of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And I was able to get by with Google Docs. If that's not good enough, I go to the free version of Office 365. In the rare occasions where I need the actual, native Office software for compatibility/functionality reasons, I do it on another machine I have access to. This has worked out surprisingly well.
Propelloni 2y ago
If you go the Syncthing-Route anyway, take a look at Softmaker Office [1], it's an almost-drop-in replacement for MS Office and would set you back 50 EUR/year for 5 devices. We evaluated it for our migration away from MS software and would have gone with it, but it lacks an office server for Nextcloud integration. [1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office
physicles 2y ago
I’d recommend switching to Obsidian and never looking back. And unless you have additional software that requires windows, Linux is also a lower-stress compute experience these days. I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.
niutech 1y ago
Check out ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it's open source and provides great compatibility with MS Office files.

Spooky23 2y ago

You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

mrandish 2y ago
Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info. If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.
- bflesch 2y ago
  OpenOffice/Libreoffice lets you choose between multiple UX styles, which rearranges the buttons like old office, the ribbon stuff, and many more. I was amazed when I first noticed this (kind of hidden) feature. You should check it out.
  - ptx 2y ago
    LibreOffice also does this.
    - bflesch 2y ago
      Correct. Thanks for the hint. I keep mixing up openoffice and libreoffice even though I only use libreoffice on my system.
noisy_boy 2y ago
LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks. Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.
- bflesch 2y ago
  LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc). Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
  - noisy_boy 2y ago
    It is actually View -> Toolbars -> Customize -> Notebookbar but within that there is only "Tabbed" option which doesn't really show a way to change themes. This is a perfect example of actions that make adoption harder. This should have been at most 2 clicks and prominently displayed assuming LibreOffice wants to be a great alternative to MS Office and make the transition easier. I have been using Linux daily for over 20 years now and it is not intuitive to me - it doesn't make me very optimistic about the experience for a new user.
    - bflesch 2y ago
      Nope, it's actually Menu -> User Interface: https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1 https://postimg.cc/sMhhFvC1 Then this dialog appears: https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ https://postimg.cc/YhVWyQVJ
      - noisy_boy 2y ago
        Found it - thanks! I wish this was more easily accessible to new users - it actually makes a difference in terms of organization of icons and ease of finding things.
gtech1 2y ago
Check out Only Office
al_borland 2y ago
For the occasional user, various online office suites are also an option. On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years. I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point. If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.
- maccard 2y ago
  My work pays for a full O365 subscription for me. The web apps are more than I'll ever need as someone who basically uses Excel and Word as an interchange format.
tpm 2y ago
MS Office is much harder to use for the casual user not already used to it - the interface is very disorienting.
chneu 2y ago
To be fair, office is also hot garbage. It's just that most people are used to that kind of hot garbage. As someone who hasn't used office much in the last 15 years, it's nearly unusable for me. I have to Google how to do basic things because everything is confusing, ugly, and hidden(or hard to find amongst the huge number of icons).
chewonbananas 2y ago
It's not as bad as it was 5 years ago. It's closer to the flat office design.
ptx 2y ago
It probably depends mostly on what you're used to. I find that LibreOffice looks fine - no worse than most apps, and much better than Microsoft's UI.
KronisLV 2y ago
> LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use. I don't know, I quite like it, reminds me of the old Office look. Plus, there's at least a bit of customization that you can do, which is pleasant: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0 https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0 Very much seems like a matter of preference.

bhouston 2y ago

I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.

486sx33 2y ago
Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace. If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
  - bflesch 2y ago
    Yeah google does not steal your data and that's why companies like amazon dont even send you full details of your online shopping order so google can't crawl what you bought and what price you bought it for.
    - arccy 2y ago
      my recent amazon order emails actually came with a full itemized list with prices
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Is it reasonable to assume that individuals and small companies get the same friendly terms as companies with big legal teams and expensive contracts? That may be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. Probably it can change with one email from Google that has “oh btw we’re changing some contract terms, you have 14 days to opt out, no big deal” buried deep down.

packetlost 2y ago

I've been pretty happy with OnlyOffice. I'm pretty sure it's based on Libre or OpenOffice but looks much more similar to 2012~ era MS Office.

nguyenkien 2y ago
No. It's js, render in qtwebengine.
n3storm 2y ago
OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. CollaboraOffice does. jfyi

polotics 2y ago

you use OneNote? I had text search randomly stop working in that thing, no explanation just nothing found. For me this was the Microsoft last straw.

bArray 2y ago

I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.

esperent 2y ago
I do this too, however there is considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS Office.
- ohgr 2y ago
  There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too. We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.
- bArray 2y ago
  True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end. The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_linux_microsoft365_possible_bug/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_... [2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-can-i-stop-the-web-version-of-word-from/09fd35f6-b609-44a1-8dbd-c1b2f75da9ff https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...
- niutech 1y ago
  Try ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it is open source and has superior compatibility with MS Office.
taurath 2y ago
I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.

n3storm 2y ago

I was a hardcore desktop LibreOffice user both Calc and Write, but I have been using Write exclusively online through CollaboraOffice in a Nextcloud Instance and did not have any issue in two years. I know it was buggy before because I have been checked every two or three releases.

bambax 2y ago

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

tomatocracy 2y ago
Although I agree about the ribbon and UI, I think Excel 2003 in particular feels quite limited today - it can deal with a max of 255 columns in a sheet and is missing some of the most useful functions (SUMIFS and XLOOKUP spring to mind especially but also the newer array functions like SORT).
- bambax 2y ago
  Sumif (without the s) worked in Excel 4 (1992), you just had to enter it with CTRL+Enter and use curly braces IIRC. I used it to build dashboards. Not sure what problem sumifs solves beyond sumif. XLookup sure is useful but again you can probably replace it with a combination of vlookup and hlookup (or index match). Regarding the size... If you're dealing with huge spreadsheets it's really better to use a proper db. Or even manipulate data with sqlite. sqlite can query xlsx files directly (with an extension), it's extremely fast and stable.
  - tomatocracy 2y ago
    The problem with the column limit is not so much about huge datasets as limiting flexibility in how you can lay things out - 65k rows and 16.7m cells are plenty and I’d be wanting to use a database well before I got there. But 255 columns does feel quite constraining. And whilst you can work around lack of XLOOKUP or SUMIFS using the older functions, again it constrains how you lay things out (eg VLOOKUP needs you to presort your table by the lookup column if you don’t want an exact match) and this can often result in sheets which are much more unwieldy and slow to calculate.
threatripper 2y ago
How can it be free if you need to buy a license?

swores 2y ago

This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment. Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on that comment, especially for this: > «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"» Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now just consistently annoying to use.

ubermonkey 2y ago
In a conversation with a pal yesterday, I realized I had LONG since stopped doing any actual writing in Word. It's just too huge and slow and clunky. I write in a plaintext environment (options vary, but probably Obsidian or emacs). If or when I fire up Word, it's to structure the document and format it for distribution. Word is no longer useful to me for composition. This seems like a bad thing.
- Tempest1981 2y ago
  Does it still have the smooth-animated cursor as you type? That thing messes with my brain, so that I lose my train of thought.
  - doctorwho42 2y ago
    Every time I reinstall office, I am actively googling how to disable that within 5 minutes of using word. I don't get why all these companies keep trying to add flashy crap to what is essentially a hammer. It reminds me of that college humor sketch about the CEO of Oreo shouting at his team for trying to innovate on the Oreo... It's a solved problem, we made the perfect cookie 100 years ago. Just stop
dfedbeef 2y ago
The windows experience is trash for regular users, it looks like a casino now unless you are aggressive about turning _everything_ off. However: raising concerns is a bad career move apparently. These ideas... aren't proposed by devs; if that makes sense.

mkayokay 2y ago

I guess you already know, but you do not necessarily need a server for Syncthing if the devices are on at the same time. If they are not, a simple low-power rpi-like device would be more than enough to implement a star topology, with the pi being receive-only.

peppers-ghost 2y ago

I switched to onlyoffice + joplin for notes and am very happy with both.

rs186 2y ago

I used to always have an Office installation on my computer, whether it's pirated (many years ago)/using my personal license/using my school license/etc. Then I got a new computer without bothering to do the installation. It was a long time before I discovered that I need any of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And I was able to get by with Google Docs. If that's not good enough, I go to the free version of Office 365. In the rare occasions where I need the actual, native Office software for compatibility/functionality reasons, I do it on another machine I have access to. This has worked out surprisingly well.

Propelloni 2y ago

If you go the Syncthing-Route anyway, take a look at Softmaker Office [1], it's an almost-drop-in replacement for MS Office and would set you back 50 EUR/year for 5 devices. We evaluated it for our migration away from MS software and would have gone with it, but it lacks an office server for Nextcloud integration. [1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

physicles 2y ago

I’d recommend switching to Obsidian and never looking back. And unless you have additional software that requires windows, Linux is also a lower-stress compute experience these days. I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.

niutech 1y ago

Check out ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it's open source and provides great compatibility with MS Office files.