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Microsoft OneNote - some experiential Tips & Tricks
IainB:
Just as a "heads-up", for those who may only be interested in the possibility of using OneNote as a daily journal, @rgdot has posted a mini-review of an alternative PIM - Mini review: The Journal. I gave this a brief trial a while back and it seemed rather good at what it was designed for, but it did not meet my peculiar requirements.
By the way, there is quite a good journal template in the AHK-coded wiki proggy Wikichucks <https://code.google.com/archive/p/wikichucks/>
IainB:
A rather thought-provoking and potentially very useful post for those OneNote or other MS Office users considering how to jump ship from MS Office to something else - with MS Office 365 + Windows 10 it rather seems that the caveats abound: Software rental brought to you by Microsoft !
(Section copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Software rental brought to you by Microsoft !
Posted on May 15, 2018 by pauljmiller
I have recently been having problems with my laptop computer.
The nature of these problems is not relevant to this discussion but it did necessitate what Microsoft call a ‘Reset’ of the PC. I opted to keep all my personal files. I thought I could re-install the applications I had bought and paid for from Microsoft after all it was the same PC they had originally been installed on and I had bought a valid license key for that computer right !
Wrong ! Microsoft have stopped re-activation of license keys for previous versions of Office software. This was a copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2010 which I had been forced to buy after Microsoft destroyed my previous laptop with the disastrous Windows 10 upgrade. I bought this software in September 2016 so I have had just over 18 months use out of it and now Microsoft refuse to re-activate the license key.
For many years Office has been a very profitable product for Microsoft.
Software has different characteristics to normal products, the development costs are high but the production costs are low. This means that for a small company who aren’t selling very many copies the development costs are a large percentage of the profit for each copy sold but for a large company who are selling a large number of copies the development costs become tiny compared to the profit for every copy sold, particularly at the excessive prices that Microsoft charge.
This is what destroys many small software companies. However Microsoft are not a small company and they have sold many copies of Office and looking at the differences between Office 2010 and Office 2013 they have done little or no development in those three years. But now they have become even more greedy than they were previously.
They have moved their business model over to ‘SaaS’ or ‘Software as a Sentence‘. So they have stopped the service to activate the license key by telephone which means that a license key which needs activation can be activated just once online. If it has already been activated then it can no longer be re-activated. They are trying to kill off older versions of Office. They are trying to force everyone onto the rental version, Microsoft Office 365 because it generates a steady revenue stream for Microsoft.
Be warned, if you have a copy of Microsoft Office previous to Office 365 installed on your machine do not un-install it unless you really mean to get rid of it completely because you won’t ever be able to re-activate it on any computer ever again, not even the one on which it was originally installed!
So what alternatives are there for people who don’t like being milked by Microsoft.
Microsoft Office Professional 2010 consists of Word, Excel, OneNote, Power Point, Publisher, Access and Outlook.
(Read the rest at the link above.)
--- End quote ---
tomos:
^ that is very disturbing. I wonder was activation not agreed in the software purchase license/agreement.
I'm shocked that they would even go so far.
IainB:
@tomos: Well, if what is described in the article is correct - i.e., that is what MS are actually doing or intending - then it would seem to be a form of "price gouging", which is illegal in some countries. It will be interesting to see how the governments in those countries view the actions of MS in regard to MS Office licencing in light of prevailing consumer protection regulations.
The more inept governments or those with weaker consumer protection legislation would probably just roll over and accept it, whereas others (perhaps including the UK, for example), could be unlikely to tolerate such monopolistic practices. We shall see.
What we have seen so far is that the US may have rather publicly set the bar very low here - e.g., the price-gouging initiated by Martin Shkreli (the overnight 5,000 percent increase in price of the drug Daraprim by Turing Pharmaceuticals) and then other drug companies apparently following suit, would seem to have gone unchallenged/uncorrected by commerce regulators.
wraith808:
I just did an activation of an older copy of office recently, so not sure what the disconnect is. Does it say that he attempted to call Microsoft support to straighten it out? Or is this merely another from of FUD?
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