Tag Archives: Microsoft Office

Microsoft Shoving AI Features Down My Throat is the Last Straw

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Enshittification forces me to sever my 30+ year relationship with Microsoft Office products.

Warning: This post contains strong language. (I’m pissed.) If you can’t deal with a good sprinkling of f-bombs, it’s best to click away now.

I cancelled my Office 365 subscription today.

I didn’t think I’d ever drop Word and Excel. After all, I know these two applications better than any other on my computer.

Office 365 Apps
Apparently, all these apps come with Office 365 now. Who cares? All I want is a word processor and spreadsheet that works just like it did 20 years ago.

These apps made it possible for me to leave my last full-time job, in 1990, to start a career as a freelance writer and computer consultant. One of my first gigs as a freelancer was teaching Word and Excel — and Lotus 123; remember that? — in classes of up to 8 people for a computer training organization and its clients. I wrote three Microsoft Word courses for them.

The first book I wrote for Peachpit Press, way back in the 1995, was the Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6; I also wrote Excel 5 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide and the Macintosh Bible Guide to Excel 5 the same year. I followed that up the next year with my first Windows book, Excel for Windows 95: Visual QuickStart Guide. Over the years, I wrote a total of 22 books for Peachpit about either Word or Excel and even managed to write one about Outlook for Microsoft Press, even though I only used it for about a year or two for my own personal email needs. More recently, I self-published a little book that explains exactly how to sort data in Excel; it still sells more than 10 years after publication.

My first training video was about Microsoft Word for macProVIdeo back in August 2006. (What a great trip to Vancouver for that job!) I then went on to author another four Office-related courses for Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) between 2009 and 2014.

When I needed to keep track of hours flown and maintenance due for my helicopter, I did it in Excel. I also used Excel to keep track of mileage and stops on my Great Loop trip. In fact, I’m likely to use Excel more than anyone you know who doesn’t have a job requiring them to use it.

And Word! Hell, it’s a word processor and I’m a writer. I wrote dozens of my books in Word. I’d even fire up to write a quick note.

But my mutually beneficial relationship with Microsoft Office has changed.

It started when they made Office subscriber-only, forcing users to pay an annual fee with promises of regular upgrades. What they didn’t mention was that Office apps would start to “phone home,” to make sure they were installed on a computer owned by a user with a valid subscription. Failure to access the Internet when it needed to do one of these checks resulted in problems. It became unreliable as a tool when I traveled with my laptop. Who knew when it would force me to log into the home server?

And, more recently, they added AI features that can scan your documents to “help you create, communicate, and collaborate more efficiently.” Pardon me, but bull-fucking-shit. The last thing in the world that I need is an application that’s sending the text of every single thing I write to a faceless server in a data center somewhere. How long before one of my phrases or descriptions appears in some generative AI text based on the prompt of a stranger 6,000 miles away? And who else has access to this info?

Connected Experiences settings
If you turn these options off, forget about accessing the onscreen help and templates that you paid for as part of the Office 365 package.

Of course, turning this off means tracking down the settings to do so, which are buried behind a button labeled with the benign phrase Connected Experiences inside the Privacy preferences. (That should say something to you.) Click that button to find settings in an all-or-none setup. You can’t turn on the second check box to download templates and access online help unless you turn on the Turn on all connected experiences check box. And, of course, that first check box admits that it will send your content to someone or something somewhere.

It was the inability to access Help from within the app with this crap turned off that really started to bug me. But do you want to know what the last straw was?

The message that appears in my blank Word documents, before I’ve had a chance to type a single character, a message suggesting that I use the Copilot AI to draft my document.

Word Woes
This is what Word looks l like now each time I open it. I disabled the AutoUpdater it put into my System settings, as well as another autolaunch app that apparently checks my subscription on their website every time I launch an Office app. How else would it know, only 15 minutes after the fact, that my subscription was cancelled? The only way to get rid of that dialog box is to force quit it.

And we thought Clippy was bad.

I am a fucking writer. I wrote for a living — and still do get paid to do so (although not as often as I’d like) — for more than 20 years. I do not need a fucking AI assistant to help me draft a document or even to check my GD grammar. I want these features turned off with absolutely no clue left behind to hint that they even exist.

And I want to access onscreen Help when I need it, right from within the document. How about like it was in the old days, when you actually got help files installed with the app instead of a menu command dumping you into a forum where someone might or might not have the answer to your question?

And when I contact help and choose the chat option because I’m not likely to understand the heavily accented script-reading voice of the overseas-based support team, if it says the average wait is 2 minutes, I don’t expect to wait 16 minutes. You’re running a GD computer. It can’t calculate average wait times? Bad enough I wound up spending 54 minutes of my day trying to get a solution. Yes, I timed it!

And I don’t want my computer connecting to the Internet every fucking time I launch one of your apps. If I subscribed last March and the app checked in then, it should not need to check in again until this March. And I certainly don’t want it sending the contents of my documents to your server to play with in ways only vaguely discussed in your 50-page, lawyer composed terms of service.

I want a work processor and a spreadsheet app. I don’t want an assistant or content thief.

When I finished with the chat, I had a solution alright. My solution was to cancel my Office 365 subscription, which was due to renew next week. I then went directly to the web site for Libre Office and downloaded it. After 30+ years as a Word user and “expert” — I think authoring 24 books and 6 video courses about Office products establishes that — I’m switching to a different word processor. I hope it’s as good as everyone says.

And if it decides to start phoning home, I’ll be writing in TextEdit.

The Spam Source Experiment

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Let’s see who’s selling me out.

I get a lot of email and much of it is spam. That’s why I have a special email account I use for anything that’s not important. It’s a disposable account. Every few years, I simply stop using it and create a new disposable account. Then I slowly but surely update my records where I need to. The spam virtually stops.

For a while.

Eventually, it builds up again and I’m back to the point where I need to delete that account and create a new one.

And don’t talk to me about spam filters. Yes, I have one in my email client. Yes, it does work. But no, it doesn’t catch it all and, unfortunately, it misidentifies too much as spam. So I can’t trust it.

The other day, while drivinge, I came up with a novel idea. Instead of creating one disposable email account, why not create one for each organization that asks for an email address? Then use that account for just that organization. And then, when the spam starts coming, I can easily identify its source — it’ll match the name of the account.

I own multiple domain names, each of which can have as many email addresses as I like. So there’s no limit to the number of addresses I can create. And I don’t even have to set them up in my email client software! I can simply check for mail on the web if I’m expecting something. And let it accumulate on a distant server if I’m not.

Verify Address
Sure, this email address is mine. But don’t expect me to monitor it for your junk.

I started this today. I decided to use Microsoft Excel for iPad to maintain my helicopter Hobbs book (a record of hours flown) and Due List (a record of when various maintenance items were last done and next due). In order to access an Excel file stored in Dropbox from my iPad — and be able to edit it — I had to create a Microsoft account. That account needed a valid email address. So I logged onto my server and created one named microsoft @ one of my many domain names. And I used that email address to create the account for Microsoft Excel. I checked the email on the web, got the code I needed to complete the account setup, and am done.

And I never have to see any junk from that account again.

But I can always look if I need to.

Let’s see how far I can take this. I’ll report back, maybe next year.

Microsoft Customer Service = User Frustration

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How I cranked up my blood pressure this morning.

Back in October 2010, while working on my Outlook book, I installed Microsoft Office 2011 on my old 15-in MacBook Pro. The installation process prompted me for a product key, which I found on the product packaging. The software then used my Internet connection to “activate” the software. The process worked without any problems and the software worked fine.

Microsoft Office

Fast forward to yesterday. I replaced the 100 GB hard disk in the computer with a 500 GB disk. Well, I didn’t replace it. A computer tech did. (It’s worth $100 for someone else to deal with all those tiny screws.) As part of the installation, he copied every file off the old hard disk to the new hard disk. When I started up the computer, it started just as if the old hard disk were still in there — but with a lot more free space.

The problem began when I launched Outlook. Microsoft presented me with a dialog that prompted me to enter a key code. It was as if I’d never registered it.

Now if I were in my office, this wouldn’t be a problem. That’s where the original disc and packaging is. But I wasn’t. I was in our Phoenix condo 100 miles away.

Easy, I figure. When I registered the software, I provided all kinds of identifying information. Microsoft could look this up and give me my key code.

So I go into online chat with someone from the Microsoft Store. He says he can’t help me, but gives me a toll-free number and series of menu choices to press.

I call the number and press the menu choices. I wait on hold about 5 minutes. I get connected to someone presumably at Microsoft. I tell him my story. He tells me that Customer Service could help me. He transfers me. I wait on hold for another 5 minutes. This time, I’m connected to an overseas support person. I tell her the same story. And this is where the real frustration begins.

She asks if I have the disc. I tell her I don’t. I tell her that if I had the disc, I wouldn’t have to call.

She asks for my order number. I tell her I don’t have my order number.

She asks me where I bought the software. I tell her it came directly from Microsoft.

She tells me she’s going to connect me to the Microsoft Store. I stop her and tell her that that’s who transferred me to her.

She asks again for the disc. I tell her I still don’t have it.

She asks again for the order number. I tell her I still don’t have it.

She tells me to call back when I have the disc in front of me. I tell her that if I had the disc in front of me, I wouldn’t have to call her.

She tells me she needs product information from the disc. I tell her what product I have.

I ask her why she can’t look up the information I provided when I registered the software. She tells me that they don’t keep that information. (Yeah. Right.)

She asks again for the disc. I begin to suspect that she doesn’t understand my situation. I ask to speak to someone who can understand me better.

She puts me on hold. I wait about 5 minutes. Then I’m disconnected.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wasted 30 minutes of my life dealing with Microsoft Customer Service. The last time, I had a copy of Windows XP in front of me and needed to know whether I’d already installed it on a computer. I knew I had an extra copy but wasn’t sure which one it was. I had all the key codes and other information they should need to answer this simple question, but after bouncing between two departments for 45 minutes and not getting anywhere, I hung up in frustration.

I compare this with Apple’s customer service, which is is pretty damn good.

Even Adobe was able to help me when I had a registration issue with Photoshop after my computer’s logic board was replaced. (By the way, Photoshop still works fine on the computer, despite the hard disk change.)

Looking back at all the years I’ve been using computers, it’s always Microsoft customer service or technical support that fails to provide the help I need to resolve an issue. First, it’s nearly impossible to find what might be the right phone number to call. Then, after navigating a phone tree, waiting on hold, and telling my story to someone, I invariably get transferred to someone else and need to go through the same process. Sometimes this is repeated until I realize I’m being transferred back and forth between the same two departments. Along the way, I have to deal with people who don’t speak English very well or are reading off scripts they’re not allowed to stray from. No one is ever helpful.

Why is this?

Many people don’t use Microsoft software because they hate the company so much. I can understand this.

I have to admit that I have no love for the company at all. But I use Microsoft software — at least some of it. Word is still the industry standard word processor. My editors would not be very happy if I told them no, I can’t view your manuscript edits, changes, or comments because I don’t use Word.

And Excel — well, I’ve been an Excel jockey (and a Lotus jockey before that) since 1990. It’s the only spreadsheet software I’m comfortable with. Everything else seems just plain wacky. (Think Numbers.)

What I don’t understand is how a company that’s so cash-rich and has such an enormous installed user base can’t give proper support for its two biggest products: Windows and Office. Could it have something to do with its management? Or have they simply adopted a “we’re too big to have to care” attitude because — well, they are?

What supports that last theory is that Microsoft never sends a follow-up e-mail asking me to complete a satisfaction survey. (Apple always does.) They obviously don’t want to know how satisfied I am. Why? Because they don’t give a damn.

So my laptop will remain Office-crippled until I get home to re-activate the software. Not much productivity when your primary productivity tool doesn’t work.