Are you Still using Microsoft Office? Time to Move On. An Alternative.

Everything now from Microsoft 365 to Google Docs is in the cloud, which means someone can read your documents! Something that is pretty hard to justify on this privacy channel. There are many options available but we will discuss the only one choice that I fully recommend.

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I'm the Internet Privacy Guy. I'm a public interest technologist. I'm here to educate. You are losing your Internet privacy and Internet security every day if you don't fight for it. Your data is collected with endless permanent data mining. Learn about a TOR router, a VPN , antivirus, spyware, firewalls, IP address, wifi triangulation, data privacy regulation, backups and tech tools, and evading mass surveillance from NSA, CIA, FBI. Learn how to be anonymous on the Internet so you are not profiled. Learn to speak freely with pseudo anonymity. Learn more about the dangers of the inernet and the dangers of social media, dangers of email.

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[markclemence]

there is no cloud, , it's just someone else's computer

[virgiliod.]

I heard somewhere: "There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer on the internet"

[MarzMindset]

I worked in IT for the past four years. An honestly the direction that Microsoft is moving is making me switch careers into plumbing. I love Linux, I now use Libreoffice and Linux os when possible on my personal time. Thank God for Steam Deck and thank God for people like you Rob. MS Sucks.

[trumpingtonfanhurst]

I'm old enough to know to never trust any "cloud". I use external drives, 3 of them.
OneDrive somehow took over all my personal files on my desktop anyway, and it took me a week of fighting to regain control of MY OWN STUFF!

[bobhopkins]

We tried rolling out libre office at work for people to save money on office licenses. We use roundcube for our email client with a IMAP server and libre office as the office suite. People hate it. Endless complaints about little issues that IMO are pretty trivial. People don't like change and are generally not very computer literate. You can mess people up by renaming a shortcut on their desktop. This is why we ultimately paid the office licenses. People always prioritize convenience over security, especially when the security issue seems abstract to them.

[qbraun]

I love that idea, what does Cloud really mean, a deployed solution to save all your important documents on some else's machine who has a priority for profit and selling information.

[TheVirtualTim]

Nice video! But I did want to point out one error. I'm a former Sun employee and while Sun did acquire StarOffice in 1999, Oracle did not acquire Sun until Feb 2010 -- more than a decade later. Sun contributed a LOT of software to open-source.

One fun feature of OpenOffice/LibreOffice is the file format ... it is actually a .zip archive. You can open them with your favorite Zip utility (you might need to rename the extension if the zip utility is fussy). Inside you'll find several files -- some contain meta-data while others contain your actual data. This was done to allow end-users a way to programmatically access their document data outside of the office suite. Microsoft later copied the feature.

[Oatmeal-Savage]

MS Word only took off because it was WYSIWYG, whereas Word Perfect was not. Word Perfect, however, had FAR more features and was FAR more robust than Word. It was the default word processor that all legal firms used. But, people liked the idea of WYSIWYG in their word processor, as buggy as it was at the time. It took literally many years and many iterations before Word even started to approach reliability.

[theirisheditor]

LibreOffice Draw doubles as an excellent PDF editor, great for making quick changes where I don't have the original document or was exported from Adobe Illustrator, has Mac fonts, etc. It can edit most PDF files as if they were originally created in Draw, including its vector graphics.

[andrewredman]

I self host Nextcloud and leverage the integrated office platform. Love it. I know what it is under the hood.

[cemiess]

I'm a developer in the Microsoft ecosystem and recently was shown by Microsoft their AI integration into Microsoft 365. There are some interesting features that might be quite useful but you definitely get the feeling that they are currently pushing a solution without a problem

[elminster]

So the one thing that none of these alternates provides is a backup strategy that replicates the cloud solutions of O365 and GDocs. Some people will say self-hosted next cloud, but that's not easy to set up. Google and MS make it easy and that's what we need on the Open-source side.

[NickFrom]

I agree. The only problem is there is no app that can even remotely come close to Excels capabilities. So, if you are like most people and just create basic spreadsheets you are good. But if you truly use excels features, you have no choice.

[jstuart]

I have been using libreoffice for about 8 years. I don't create many documents, but the word processor does everything I need. Calc is great and does everything I need. I usw draw to do basic .pdf stuff all the time .

[Legomanfred]

I stopped using Windoze years ago. I now use Linux as an OS. In turn I even downloaded Libre Office onto my work computer. Works fine. Nobody wants to read my documents, but I get it. Great video, thanks. 👍❤️

[ArtOfHealth]

People used to tell me my head was in the clouds. Maybe that was prophetic. Like you did, I use all three as well. I used Libre back in the 90s and Open Office. Nice and simple. Thanks for the encouragement Rob.

[hunt]

We've used a 2003 version of MS Office since we purchased it new - we don't have any reason to upload to the cloud, use it rarely (retired and not much call for composing documents any more) and I'm quite capable of doing my own grammar checks and editing.

[karmad.twelve]

Thank you so much! I got Libre Office right away! Enjoying the ease of use of the program already!

[cam_]

In MS 365 you can turn off cloud (except for outlook/hotmail emails) eg: "Connected Experiences". Open an Office App, go to Account, Account Privacy, Manage Settings, scroll down to "All connected experiences"and tick to turn off. Now no save to Onedrive is available, you can also uninstall OneDrive on a Windows PC but still use OneDrive as an encrypted 1TB storage space for 3rd party apps so MS can't read anything, some of these third party apps also have version history, delta sync and data de-duplication. Sounds secure and private to me while using MS 365, maybe I'm missing something.

[alankoester]

I just want to point out that you can actually change the LibreOffice settings to automatically save documents as Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.