Microsoft launched an Office Census.

Well, their AI will throw a wobbly when it detects we are still on office 2003.

 

This is an Office update. So shouldn't install if third party apps updates are disabled or if you don't have Office installed. I'm using WPS, OnlyOffice and in rare occasions LibreOffice. They are fine enough for home.

 

I don't think that they're going to force notifications or the like.
This sounds more like a marketing issue to me. They want to know how much Upgrade-potential is available in the market. This could indicate that they may even offer better prices to increase the upgrade likelihood of old office users.

 

I'm sure MS realized that despite the ubiquity of their product, they're underperforming with 2021 and 365 sales. I think they'd see more useful data by polling people why they don't want to upgrade.

Such people would be better off using one of the many free alternatives. Same goes for 2007. But... I'm sure there are a lot more 2003 and 2007 users than MS would be okay with.

 

My Open Office installation says "FUM$".

Surprisingly, I did find things that were better with m$office, but not a lot, and mostly quality of life features, not real features

 

Just bring back old office brand and license/installation. nobody cares about 365 feature. Make your office suite better for real and people will upgrade them. Otherwise more people will migrate to libreoffice and more devs will improve it.

 

The only real reason I have Office365 is for the OneDrive storage and I really should look more closely as to whether I need that.

 

As the use of any office suite for myself is just to do the occasional table calc for financials and here or there a word document for playing board games, I have not found a reasonable feature that I really like about any new office version since 2k3, except maybe that they now can save pdf files natively

 

In my company we use all the Microsoft stuff, and it is awful, but i guess IT likes it.

 

Why are you using Open Office instead of Libre Office? OO is basically just a super outdated version of LO. Whatever updates they do get, they pretty much just copy+paste from LO.

 

I just checked, I'm actually using Libre Office indeed

 

Switch to LibreOffice. I switched so many years ago that I don't remember and I haven't looked back since.

 

Its the misses, she wont use anything else.

 

Switch it on her, rename a shortcut Microsoft Office, and tell her it's the updated version LOL.

 

I can't tell you how many times I've bumped in to devices with these older versions of Office installed and the option to update third party apps being disabled meaning they've received zero updates to Office. Thus this is a pointless census unless it runs for everyone as a regular update.

I believe the third party updates on Windows 10 is off by default, but on Windows 11 it is on by default.

 

I've gotten so used to Libreoffice that I prefer it over MS Office.

 

I wonder what is more likely:
1. Microsoft is doing this to know how many people use older versions of Office.
2. Microsoft is doing this to find out if it is worth the money to create compatibility issues for these users in order for them to buy newer versions.

 

I wanted to report you for being an evil genius.