MicrosoftI have taken a time-out to wrap up my project without further interruptions or wasting any more time with this mess than I already have, no thanks to Microsoft. It seems like such a long time ago that I posted the first comment to this blog (currently we’re at 269 replies, NONE positive EDIT: ok, while drafting and then shelving this, it’s a cool 316 replies and it seems Reza_Ameri has now sponsored the first positive)… yet nothing has changed, let alone improved. Instead, Microsoft has indeed started listening – not to finally address the issue, just to delete posts to organise an external petition. Really, MeenahKhosraw_IS ? Well, then, thank you for your help and forwarding our feedback to the appropriate team. I am sure, this is complete news to them, it’s not like we haven’t been desperately crying for help on any available channel Microsoft has left us with to still hand in feedback, for months now. Screw this. Oh, I forgot to mention, I ran out of patience as well as the willingness to refrain from using the language this situation deserves. This is a lost cause. Let’s face it, Micros**t does not give a single microscopic s**t about editors, writers, or anyone else with a single-licence who actually uses their broken products as long as public administrations keep paying up with tax-payer's money for insane licence agreements like there is no tomorrow. Everyone else is negligible and easily discarded, left stranded after investing into MS’s many failures like Windows 10 mobile (to use another example from vivid memory), which was forced unto Windows 8 phone as an update breaking everything that made the earlier version actually great (Nokia's camera, Here maps), then was abandoned altogether for Android apps. I still imagine them laughing merrily and sipping champagne as they steam-roller onwards as I stare at the sliver of electronic junk that previously was a pretty cool phone. But hey, I am certain those geniuses are celebrating themselves drunk on their imagined success right now because Windows 11 sports brand-new rounded corners in the aesthetics (and in reality: welcome back to the mid-2000s and Windows Vista, you most successful of Win-versions, we hardly missed ye - if that's not a great omen, I don't know what is).
Enough of this. Some less destructive thoughts for those considering to abandon ship as well:
Keep in mind the end date of your 365 subscriptions. Mine (which I paid for privately despite having access to an educational license because I work on more than one physical machine - another argument for NOT forking over even more money and just buying the perpetual licence version of Office, bound to a single instalation) ran out anyway now. I received a presumably automatic two-weeks-long grace period nagging me to renew my subscription, before it shut down functionality. This is nice to know, but I would not rely on any generosity. On the contrary, my advice is to clear up what you can ahead of the expiration. After the grace period, you cannot even edit simple text with the desktop application, only view documents (you can, however, still edit documents online in the web app in your browser, albeit the experience is severely lacking. I assume they are happy enough as long as they can fully harvest your data in oneDrive).
Some more experience after experimenting with alternatives (and Pamela-1, perhaps this might be a fix for your current problem with the old document), if your game is ‚only‘ editing and commenting already existing .docx documents: LibreOffice will kind of work and offer the traditional layout/functionality for comments and supports tracked changes, too. I find the UI not ideal and lacking in many respects (some of which I am sure are simply due to my lack of familiarity), but it sure beats ‚modern‘ comments. I noticed, though, the attribute „resolved/unresolved comment“ is not transported. While LibreOffice offers its own way to mark comments, it won’t distinguish resolved in Word, and Word seems to ignore comment attributes set in LibreOffice and simply treat them all as unresolved. Other than that, I did not encounter any further compatibility issues yet. If you want to just give it a try and experiment, LibreOffice can be unpacked as a portable version, too, without installation and interfering with your system and Office... I had performance issues with my old machine because of this, I presume, but this is good enough to have a cursory look and check out the UI as well as essential functionality.
