Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS...
Google Docs, LibreOffice and Euro-Office can all open and edit Office documents, and two of those can also do online collaboration. Unless you want integrated Copilot, there’s no reason to move to O365.
FWIW I just spent a couple of months testing a bunch of Office suites as a replacement for MS Office, and I settled on SoftMaker. The “Home” subscription (version without AI and reference features) is CAD $40/year (there’s also a free version with a few features removed) and it can do everything that MS Office can do, some things (like commenting in Word docs) it does better.
There is. Compatibility. Ms has had a monopoly on office for decades, and some things still don’t format correctly or functions don’t work as they do in ms office.
For most people, laziness prevails when it just works in ms office.
But also for most people, the amount of ms office they’re leveraging is 100% functional in libreoffice and the like.
Even O365 regularly botches line, paragraph, and table formatting compared to the desktop versions. If you really need your formatting to be page-perfect, you should probably be using Scribus, Microsoft Designer, or Adobe InDesign anyways.
OOXML is a public standard—one that MS has problems matching between versions, but Google and OpenOffice based products have only had issues with embedded objects from other MS products.
Google Docs, LibreOffice and Euro-Office can all open and edit Office documents, and two of those can also do online collaboration. Unless you want integrated Copilot, there’s no reason to move to O365.
FWIW I just spent a couple of months testing a bunch of Office suites as a replacement for MS Office, and I settled on SoftMaker. The “Home” subscription (version without AI and reference features) is CAD $40/year (there’s also a free version with a few features removed) and it can do everything that MS Office can do, some things (like commenting in Word docs) it does better.
Thanks for the suggestion!
I’m expecting Euro-Office will be on par within a year, and allow me to self-host (and it’s all OSS).
Yeah, I’m going to watch Euro-Office, too, and in a year when it’s time to renew my SoftMaker subscription I’ll decide which to go with.
There is. Compatibility. Ms has had a monopoly on office for decades, and some things still don’t format correctly or functions don’t work as they do in ms office.
For most people, laziness prevails when it just works in ms office.
But also for most people, the amount of ms office they’re leveraging is 100% functional in libreoffice and the like.
Change is also hard for most people.
Even O365 regularly botches line, paragraph, and table formatting compared to the desktop versions. If you really need your formatting to be page-perfect, you should probably be using Scribus, Microsoft Designer, or Adobe InDesign anyways.
OOXML is a public standard—one that MS has problems matching between versions, but Google and OpenOffice based products have only had issues with embedded objects from other MS products.
Why would anybody want integrated copilot? That’s disgusting!