Can someone please PLEASE explain to me what the hell microsoft office 365 accomplishes?
Can i still buy excel like i used to or do i have to buy a bloody subscription now to office 365?
I use Google sheets. Always have done since starting my companies but since I’ve gone VAT registered (another headache, thank you UK ) i need to use excel and some software that works alongside it to send my returns to government. But this has to be excel and not compatible with google sheets.
All i want to do, is either migrate to excel from GS entirely (but without the other bollocks that comes with 365)
Or just copy paste my balance sheet to excel once a month from GS to send to the poxy government.
I confess. I have no idea what I’m doing with spreadsheets but GS works for me fine. Its on my phone, pc and laptops and it works everytime.
But i need excel for this one bloody job, do i need to buy 365 and pay a worthless subscription or is there another more obvious way to just buy the bloody thing and own it.
I’m a little stressed today, apologies if that is rubbing off on this post.
According to the lady i spoke to this morning she was extremely insistant that it had to be excel due to the way the plugin works when the sheet is open. She said it must be excel 2010 or newer running on win 7 or newer
Its a separate standalone program, but i have no idea about this stuff.
LibreOffice can save as different Excel file extensions, .xls .xlsx
No idea what the newest format is though, or if the Lady would notice the difference.
The other bollocks is the only reason why o365 is cool. It‘s gone way beyond the usual office apps. But none of it is important to you right now.
If you just need Excel I think the Browser version of it on office.com works without a subscription maybe? Try it, works like Google Spreadsheets and saves files to Onedrive, so that sweet .xslx file ends up directly on your harddrive
The fact alone that there are officials (probably handsomly paid with public money) dimwitted (or worse, paid off by MS) enough to force people into a proprietary data format whose only constant is that it just won’t stop changing, for the sole purpose of data exchange is enraging to say the least.
I’d tell this off as a hoax if we didn’t have the same kind of absolute cognitive lawn darts sprinkled all over places where they can achieve maximum damage.
Yes, there is an absolute lack of understanding about the difference between an interface and its implementation. They need to define the interface, what people use to talk to that interface isn’t their business.
As far as I am concerned there are perfect exchange formats available.
csv, txt, pdf, svg, json, and a few others. Hell, even XML or PER. Everyone can read and write them, lots of parsers available in all programming languages, you can search or diff them on any system.
As for Office: work forces MS Office on me for some things, but for most I use LibreOffice. Works just fine.
That‘s for home use, and not exactly what I meant.
Our Administration does not know how to transport data for a simple process within the same townhall building. They still print to paper and scan it again just for relaying information to another office. Disgusting.
Anyway, I hope ViktorK was able to settle his small business with the tax office?
A little late to the party and I hope you get this sorted mate.
Sounds like they need you to download and use the plugin as well, I would be interested to know exactly what it does? I would try it with LibreOffice before forking out for Excel/Office. But if it is anything like our .gov departments they spent a fortune paying someone like SAP for bespoke software that will only play nice with other specific software.
Because if all they need is a .xls or .xlsx file sent to them I would just use freeware such as LibreOffice and let then sort it out.
It sounds like she’s talking about a macro within the sheet, or some Visual Basic that’s embedded. Do you have a copy of the excel template she wants you to use? If so I’m happy to have a look and see if it works on other flavours of Excel.
I use GS, LibreOffice and O365 Excel seamlessly on three different PC’s without issue.
My understanding is that you cannot use Excel Macros (in essence VBA scripts) in Excel Online, GS or LibreOffice directly. For GS you need to convert them to Google Apps Script and for LibreOffice there is a different API.
There does not seem to be an alternative to buying O365. the one time purchase (cost is about equal to the 1-year subscription) is only available for personal use, not business use (at least in my country).