This time I am really disgusted.

I have a filing system I keep track of things on my laptop.

When Microsoft started their OneDrive, sometimes things got saved there and sometimes in my system. After a lot of confusion and some duplicated work I finally learned I had to be very careful everytime I saved things.

Now they have gotten predictive and often wrong on what I want. I have a WORD cheat sheet with all my acounts and passwords. I had a couple of docs open working on things. I opened the cheat sheet to take care of something, went to copy a password and Microsoft from the point I clicked on substituted one of the other docs for the rest of my cheat sheet. I find myself constantly checking and finding unwanted substitutions.

What are the alternatives besides Apple that are compatable with other users and their Word, Excel and PowerPoint?

Thanks

You might want to look at Open Office (https://www.openoffice.org/). For one thing, it's free.

I have an older (now unsupported) version of Microsoft Office that I still use, and I like my version of Word, but 90% of the time I actually prefer Open Office "Calc" over Excel.

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 4:29 am This time I am really disgusted.

I have a filing system I keep track of things on my laptop.

When Microsoft started their OneDrive, sometimes things got saved there and sometimes in my system. After a lot of confusion and some duplicated work I finally learned I had to be very careful everytime I saved things.

Now they have gotten predictive and often wrong on what I want. I have a WORD cheat sheet with all my acounts and passwords. I had a couple of docs open working on things. I opened the cheat sheet to take care of something, went to copy a password and Microsoft from the point I clicked on substituted one of the other docs for the rest of my cheat sheet. I find myself constantly checking and finding unwanted substitutions.

What are the alternatives besides Apple that are compatable with other users and their Word, Excel and PowerPoint?

Thanks

I second racerboy's comment. OpenOffice or LibreOffice (they are basically the same software, both are free, both have mostly same code base).

They support microsoft's office format (though there are certain cases, when compatibility is not full). Just make sure to save in that format, when sending data to other people.

Or, if it only your data and you are not sending it anywhere - there are programs that keep hierarchically organized notes (Like, for example, CherryTree notes (not recommending, just referring to the type of software).

PS. passwords in word file.... I shudder at that thought.

fhunter wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 12:25 pm PS. passwords in word file.... I shudder at that thought.

I am sure. It is my response to 25 years of prompted password changes. At the start you could dream up 5 letter/number passwords that sort of made sense. Then came all the enforced changes with more and more letters, numbers, etc required and more and more accounts that need passwords. I managed to squeeze 'FuckYouYahoo' and 'FornicateUYahoo' out of the system, but then it decided '1!FuckYouYahoo%' was too similar. Passwords have gotten obtuse and hard to remember after all the enforced originality. I crib, therefore I am.

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 1:17 pm I am sure. It is my response to 25 years of prompted password changes. At the start you could dream up 5 letter/number passwords that sort of made sense. Then came all the enforced changes with more and more letters, numbers, etc required and more and more accounts that need passwords. I managed to squeeze 'FuckYouYahoo' and 'FornicateUYahoo' out of the system, but then it decided '1!FuckYouYahoo%' was too similar. Passwords have gotten obtuse and hard to remember after all the enforced originality. I crib, therefore I am.

Ah, you are not inventive enough. I did my share of passwords with curses in them (the joy of Russian is that there are multiple synonyms of curses and average password history is just 10 passwords). But at some point - I gave up and started using password manager with totally random passwords, encrypted with master password.

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 1:17 pm Passwords have gotten obtuse and hard to remember after all the enforced originality.

Amen to that.

PS. https://xkcd.com/936/

PPS. https://neal.fun/password-game/

I guess my MS Office is not the only unsupported suite I am using. Open office has also stopped updating and has been succeeded by Libre Office as mentioned in fhunter's post.

racerboy (imported) wrote: Fri Dec 15, 2023 2:00 pm I guess my MS Office is not the only unsupported suite I am using. Open office has also stopped updating and has been succeeded by Libre Office as mentioned in fhunter's post.

I was recently looking into this, and the word I got from multiple sources is that both Open Office and Libre Office are still 'live' projects, but that while Libre Office (which started as a fork of Open Office) is doing a lot of development, and regular addition of new features, Open Office is treated as a more 'finished' suite, and has a much slower development pace, mostly oriented on 'bug-stomping'... As a consequence Open Office is more 'stable' but lacks some of the bells and whistles of Libre Office... OTOH L.O. is a bit less stable, and is subject to changes in how things work, which can be annoying... For basic documents either would be a good choice....

WheelyFixed

Sounds to me like three questions: What is an alternative to OneDrive for saving files? What is a safe way to save all those password changes? What Office software can I use that won't mess everything up?

First, I like Owncloud and/or Syncthing. They save a copy of your files to another place -- a different computer, tablet, or phone, a Linux box you stow someplace, a friend's PC or Mac machine. If you are careful OneDrive won't predict that you really wanted it to save those files instead. I also use cloud storage services, e.g. Box or Mega, that claim to encrypt files before they leave your machine with an encryption key only you know, so you can be somewhat sure no one else will open them. The same thoughts about OneDrive interference apply. One can restrict OneDrive back to being less proactive, with the understanding that the intrusive way it behaves now is partially to prevent ransomware from deleting your files, which takes some doing.

For password changes, I use a dedicated password manager. I keep copies of old passwords (which is especially helpful when my password change doesn't "take" and I have to come up with the old password to start over). It doesn't have to be a paid password manager, but they do have some useful features. It doesn't even have to be a password manager, there are little encrypted note apps that could work too, e.g. Flashnote. You can paste the text of your old Word password doc into the note or pw manager, so you have it to refer to.

I use Libre Office. My sense is that they have stable versions, cutting-edge versions, and versions that they update and make available to fix security problems. I'm mostly using one of the more stable versions, but I do update it right away for security issues and eventually for new versions. You definitely need to configure OneDrive, Syncthing (or whatever you use) to keep a few older versions, in case you detect a problem that needs you to start over with last week's version, or Microsoft loses today's work, or whatever. Sometimes there's a "track changes" option that lets you do it to the document without going to your stored backup version, sort of like ctrl-Z (undo) on steroids.

One additional note: "word" documents frequently save personal information embedded in your files, e.g. author's name and maybe phone or business info. This can be good in a business setting, but might not be so good if your document gets out onto the Internet. There is usually a "Reset Properties" or similar button to remove all those things from a document. Microsoft's Explorer has an option to do that, though I suspect it is supported only for official Word docs. Or just turn your doc into a PDF file or even a plain text file, though PDFs sometimes include their own kinds of personal information that needs to be culled.

Offered in hopes you might find them useful, because they mostly work okay for me.

I am also a big fan of Syncthing. I use it to keep my two different desktop machines (in different places) and a laptop synchronized so that they all have the same versions of the same files all the time... However it is VITAL to note that Syncthing is NOT 'backup' software, and should absolutely NOT be used for that purpose, as if something bad starts wiping out files on one machine (doesn't matter if it's a bad actor or a PEBKAC) Syncthing will keep the other machines in sync by wiping out the files on them as well (this can be changed in configuration to some degree, but that causes other issues)... Use some other regular backup software regularly! (However since all the machines are synched, you only need to back up one of them....) It is a bit of a pain to set up, but is painless once you have it working...

I think programs adding metadata can be a major problem for anything posted, especially for folks like us that may be likely to post things they'd rather not have readily traced back to them easily by people they don't know... I use a program called Metadata Cleaner, https://metadatacleaner.romainvigier.fr/ that removes most formats of metadata from files. It's licensed GPL v3+ so pretty reliably good stuff, as the source can be examined.... I'm using it on GNU/Linux, not sure if it's available on other systems. (BTW, Libre Office puts metadata info in the files created with it) One of the things it does is display the metadata before and after cleaning so you can see that it's gone, as well as seeing what sorts of (scary) stuff your software is adding to your files...

WheelyFixed

One other thing I noticed about Libre vs. Open Office is the word counting of documents.

I went back and began rewriting The Boys of Blue Creek (all 3 books) and thought I'd really messed up one of the chapters. I noticed that the word count had dropped dramatically. There's something different about how the two programs do word counting. I was shocked to see that over 500 words had disappeared!

I then saved the file with a different name, opened it again, and began comparing. The moment I got between a period and the next letter, I backed it up and put the space back in. The word count dropped by 500 words! And all I did was take out a space and put it back.

Might seem unimportant, but if the word count were indeed very important, then using an older version could lead to, say, a grade reduction for a student for not meeting the word count of the assignment. Other than that, I don't really see any differences.

Modern Libre Office will open old MS .doc files from the Word 2000 days, so I'm happy about that.