Saving MS Office Users

[Nelson Garcia]

Thanks Jeff, us victims of "academic versions" of M$ Office have already
experienced the torment of having to call M$ every time we upgrade our hard
drives or PCs.  My Office 2000 would only run 50 times until I registered
online which sends the registration code and a machine ID and tries to match
them to anything previously registered.
I went back to Office '97 even though I paid almost retail price for the
academic version of Office Professional.
I wrote M$ a year ago and they were not very sympathetic, basically telling
me "get used to it".

Another annoying "feature" is that of asking me to insert the CD when I try
certain "premium" options in order to "install" them.  M$ denied to me that
this is a check to see if I still have the CD but how many times do I have
to reinstall the same option in Word?  Every time I try something like mail
merge I get the "that feature is not installed, please insert the MS Office
2000 CD" message.  However, when I leave the CD in the drive permanently,
the messages stop and nothing ever gets "reinstalled", hmmm...

So if academic versions are any indication of things to come, once you get
used to subscription you can look forward to the "show us your papers"
challenge just to move around your own computer.  Not very American, eh?
Happy 4th of July.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Mings" <jeffm at lava.net>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at maile.hi.net>
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 10:25 AM
Subject: [luau] Saving MS Office Users


>     One of this lists's goals is to help others find superior
> alternatives to proprietary software through Linux and other open-source
> or free-as-in-speech software.  If you'd like to save a company or
> organization a lot of future costs and headaches caused by MS Office,
> consider snipping the following text and forwarding it to them.
> -Jeff Mings
>
>
>
>     Business and department heads need to know about Microsoft's move to
> software subscription:  you will not like it.  If you're locked into MS
> Office, the day will come when you'll get a new PC, or someone will send
> you a Word file that you can't read, and you'll HAVE TO upgrade to MS
> Office XP or its successor.  When you do, you are likely to encounter
> problems as described in these articles:
>
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2779746,00.html?chkpt=
zdhpnews02
>  and http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2766529,00.html
.
> If you're responsible for software expenditures, you should consider
> freeing yourself from the MS upgrade train.  The Department of Defense
> has freed itself and saved millions of licensing dollars  by moving to
> the free StarOffice as reported at:
> http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2779806,00.html  .
>