It looks like your license only allows for the web version, so your university probably isn't spending that much for it. You'd get the same message on Windows too.
I think this overlooks the full picture. It's not about the this one pin prick relating to their license. It's that working with Microsoft in any capacity is filled with paper cuts like this, annoyances, bad design, and overt errors. Every single day.
They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
Though, that's true of every single Microsoft-sized B2B-focused company I've ever encountered, as well as the one I once worked at.
I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything.
And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
It really isn’t. Not necessarily. Sometimes it’s just doing what you need to do to keep your job. If you have ever worked in a maybe organization like this you might have done that kind of thing yourself. You might not even have realized it at the time because you were so caught up in keeping your head down and surviving the bureaucracy.
Silly that the error message doesn't convey that, right?
I recently got added to a company's Teams account as a guest. I do a bit of software contract work and have used Slack with no issue until now, this is what Teams show me:
- Client says they added me already, but I have no email with an invite. Turns out I didn't have an account that had previously joined Teams with a personal account.
- But even after I created a teams account, due to the order of events (added to corp account as guest, then created a teams account), I still don't have access and need to be readded.
- I can't upload images on groups because I don't have OneDrive access, WTF?
- I cannot download transcripts of meetings I join because I don't have permission.
This is bad management, not bad software. It's just like everything non-apple. Android and Microsoft give you choice and potential value but it requires knowledge and setup.
Apple gives you neither choice or value, but everything just "work$". People come to me saying I used windows and it sucked, and that's because they are comparing a 500 dollar Acer laptop with a 1500 Macbook Air with no knowlge on how to properly use Windows.
Both have their market place, unfortunately the users with the least knowledge are the ones always complaining about Windows. And, let me tell you, when something is broken with their Mac, they also don't know what to do. See OP's post as a perfect example. They blame MS not their IT admin.
It's the reason Apple calls their support Genius bar. They are trying to message out "Hey, you really are smart, we are just geniuses". Well, you're not.
I'm not so sure about that. For a while now I've worked at companies where PC users could use desktop Office but Mac users had to use the Web version. I think that Office for Mac might actually be a largely separate codebase - there are also significant feature differences between it and the PC version.
Admins can reallocate licenses of different types among accounts or change them completely. That it worked fine a few months ago means nothing. Your account currently doesn't have a desktop entitlement at all, be it macOS or Windows.
Talk to your M365 admins and beware of lies they might tell you to cover up the truth.
First, doesn't Microsoft give away M365 for free to educational institutions? (Perhaps that's only US institutions, though.) Second, isn't this how they bill their accounts — Business Basic doesn't get desktop apps and you need to pay more to use desktop apps? Third, did the OP try to open their document in LibreOffice? I think there's a legitimate criticism of the move from one-time lifetime purchases to the SaaS economy, but Microsoft isn't the only one who deserves criticism for this.
After I finished University I was told I could keep my email for life. I can't recall now the license (Web Office apps, Onedrive, email) but Microsoft decided to pull the plug so the university had to close out the old accounts. I understand Onedrive, but not allowing email to continue?!
Microsoft are price gouging. Shortly after Microsoft ended the 10x Free Business Premium for Not For Profit/Charities, I went to a convention and Microsoft had a talk about how to maximise profits from NFP/Charities;
"NFP doesn't mean no money"
"Microsoft are doing more for charities and NFP to help build blah blah"
VERY rich after literally dropping these licenses which most small NFPs would run off exclusively for office staff.
This is a good time to point out that Microsoft’s tiers and pricing for Microsoft 365 is completely insane as far as the overwhelming number of different ways to fundamentally buy the exact same software.
I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services.
The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.
I recently was building out on azure and oh boy, the joy of microsoft products.
Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
> You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services.
I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist.
But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
> You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services
That is part of your value proposition as an employee to know the secret tricks of dealing bullshit in the ecosystem.
I am not saying it is right. Just that no ecosystem is free from heinous bullshit - and OSS is largely free of greed-based bullshit. Just not of dysfunction-based bullshit.
My 2 cents anyways. Grass is always greener and all that.
Skill issue, this is why I mainline a macbook pro, a windows shitbox laptop and my kubuntu katana mega riced XPS. Yeah, I also walk about with a live cd.
I've seen this and I think it's actually a bug. I have mac computers at work and occasionally this will crop up and typically signing out and back in resolves the issue.
About ten years ago I went with text-based graph description languages and haven't looked back[1].
One application of AI I have found useful is in the quick composition of graphs via text-based graph description languages: graphviz (the great granddaddy), mermaid.js, plantuml, and of course derivatives like WireViz and CircuiTikZ.
A typical ask would be something like "generate a mermaid network diagram showing the relationships of all markup languages". It's surprisingly good.
A neat trick you can do if writing in Asciidoc: conditional directives are pre-processor directives, which means they're interpreted before the graphing engine goes to work. So you can make art that has sections which can toggle on and off based on document variables (the Asciidoc lingo for these is "attributes" but using that word can be confusing for old XML hands). Very neat when you have a block diagram you want to reuse for lots of different configurations.
[1] Unless I need 3d, in which case I'm afraid I like Blender a lot. Even more than Asciidoc.
Henrique should take it up to his university. When I was a student, mine used to provide me with an account that could use desktop apps on Windows and Mac. Educational institutions get very cheap license bundles compared to enterprises btw.
(Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)
In this context they don't. There is no license where one can use PowerPoint on Windows, but not on macOS. It would not work on Windows either, because the problem is that his account is only entitled to the web version of the Office apps. The exact wording of the message he got is platform-specific and it doesn't even mention Windows at all.
As much as I would like, I do not see a future where 100% of software is open source, and I see some benefits on proprietary software (well, before the age of slop and the low entry barrier for reversing things).
However, I do think that the information itself (videos, documents) should be in open formats with open specifications, that allow new / other programs to open them.
I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 for Mac some years ago. In the last few months, a key certificate expired, and completely bricked the software.
MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license.
This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
I did this as well a few years ago, fortunately for a relatively small sum of money. I don't need MS products all that much, usually just Word. So I'm very happy with LibreOffice.
> I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019
My, memories are short. In 2008 Microsoft "Play for Sure" became play no more. Exactly the same stunt, 11 years before you bought that perpetual licence. Why anybody trusted the company after Play For Sure was a mystery to me.
And that was just the beginning. Then came Sony being ripped a new one, Azure being taken down by expired certs - twice in 6 months, critical certs signed with MD5 until it's so weak they were exploited, more recently China running rampant in hosted exchange scraping state secrets, GitHub with record down time, and Windows has become a dog slow ad platform. And yet today Microsoft makes the most revenue than any other software firm.
I dunno how they do it. After decades of treating their customers like shit, business has never been so good. They must have one mother of a sales team.
I heard the novel term "Golf Driven Development" the other day. Essentially it's where software/services aren't sold because people wanted or asked for them, they're sold because one CEO played golf with another CEO (with the express purpose of making this happen).
Salesforce, Microsoft, Atlassian, and co. are obviously sold on their merits.
Also, the inability to have older software installed with newer software because of the installer type. e.g. Visio 2019 and Office 365 suite cannot coexist.
This is cloud-era software philosophy. The device isn't yours. The software isn't yours. You are not a sovereign in your private space.
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Baby steps, but backwards. The option to disable secure boot will be gone any moment now, by automatic updates "for security", of course. It will probably begin with business laptops, then all laptops, then all x86.
Unfortunately, universities have entrenched with Word documents that cannot format correctly on any FOSS solution, or even on the web version of M365 Word. I have tried, so many times, to request form compatibility at least with the web app. Not going to happen.
I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
At the risk of getting in trouble for frequent self promotion, I sicked Claude for a few hours, and Office 365 works with Wine on Linux: https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake
It seems to work fine for me, with a legit Office 365 account.
I can't promise it will fix your problems but it's the "real", full-fat Windows version of Office, so it might be a starting point if you want to avoid virtualization.
Less angry than this, but I’ve started needing to use windows for a project, and it’s hilarious how terrible everything is. From constant notifications about everything - everything everywhere all the time - to horrifically overly complicated UI where the one setting you need is in 10 menus and 45 tree nodes to onenote and copilot constantly reseting themselves and asking me to log in to something I dont care about. I truely wonder how anyone can use this all day and get anything done.
The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application.
This is the end result of capitalism and the demand for endless growth. Line must go up. If you want to avoid the extraction machine, use source software at parity or create new open source solutions with LLMs.
Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.
I've been using university-licensed Office for a decade across several fresh MacOS Installs. Only in the last year have I started frequently receiving "sign-in to verify license" nags not unlike the OP's. These also cripple editing functionality until you sign in, forcing you to do the 2FA dance every time. The same rot afflicts mobile apps lately. It's such bad taste to perform license checks this aggressively.
Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.
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[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] threadThey're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything.
And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
- Client says they added me already, but I have no email with an invite. Turns out I didn't have an account that had previously joined Teams with a personal account.
- But even after I created a teams account, due to the order of events (added to corp account as guest, then created a teams account), I still don't have access and need to be readded.
- I can't upload images on groups because I don't have OneDrive access, WTF?
- I cannot download transcripts of meetings I join because I don't have permission.
How bad can a software be? Really?
Apple gives you neither choice or value, but everything just "work$". People come to me saying I used windows and it sucked, and that's because they are comparing a 500 dollar Acer laptop with a 1500 Macbook Air with no knowlge on how to properly use Windows.
Both have their market place, unfortunately the users with the least knowledge are the ones always complaining about Windows. And, let me tell you, when something is broken with their Mac, they also don't know what to do. See OP's post as a perfect example. They blame MS not their IT admin.
It's the reason Apple calls their support Genius bar. They are trying to message out "Hey, you really are smart, we are just geniuses". Well, you're not.
Also, just quickly poking through their various enterprise plans (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...), I found several that offered Web & Windows but not Mac, and none that only allowed editing on Web like you describe.
And they are paying microsoft a lot. The whole financial, HR, marketing departments and even some research groups use "Teams" to communicate.
It's unbeliveable.
Admins can reallocate licenses of different types among accounts or change them completely. That it worked fine a few months ago means nothing. Your account currently doesn't have a desktop entitlement at all, be it macOS or Windows.
Talk to your M365 admins and beware of lies they might tell you to cover up the truth.
Microsoft are price gouging. Shortly after Microsoft ended the 10x Free Business Premium for Not For Profit/Charities, I went to a convention and Microsoft had a talk about how to maximise profits from NFP/Charities;
"NFP doesn't mean no money" "Microsoft are doing more for charities and NFP to help build blah blah"
VERY rich after literally dropping these licenses which most small NFPs would run off exclusively for office staff.
I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.
Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist.
But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
That is part of your value proposition as an employee to know the secret tricks of dealing bullshit in the ecosystem.
I am not saying it is right. Just that no ecosystem is free from heinous bullshit - and OSS is largely free of greed-based bullshit. Just not of dysfunction-based bullshit.
My 2 cents anyways. Grass is always greener and all that.
It became so insanely expensive my work started making us apply for 3 month licenses until we gave up and found something else.
About 15 years ago my Industry was using MS Visio for every diagram.
But they updated the GUI entirely and nobody could be bothered with the new format.
Now people use DrawIO and MS Visio is forgotten.
One application of AI I have found useful is in the quick composition of graphs via text-based graph description languages: graphviz (the great granddaddy), mermaid.js, plantuml, and of course derivatives like WireViz and CircuiTikZ.
A typical ask would be something like "generate a mermaid network diagram showing the relationships of all markup languages". It's surprisingly good.
A neat trick you can do if writing in Asciidoc: conditional directives are pre-processor directives, which means they're interpreted before the graphing engine goes to work. So you can make art that has sections which can toggle on and off based on document variables (the Asciidoc lingo for these is "attributes" but using that word can be confusing for old XML hands). Very neat when you have a block diagram you want to reuse for lots of different configurations.
[1] Unless I need 3d, in which case I'm afraid I like Blender a lot. Even more than Asciidoc.
I don't condone or like this kind of thing from MS. We all know though who MS copies...
You support the company that perfected it. So pot meet kettle.
"Why do people still buy Microsoft?" Because admins can make weird configuration settings.
(Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)
However, I do think that the information itself (videos, documents) should be in open formats with open specifications, that allow new / other programs to open them.
Don't forget: https://www.libreoffice.org/
MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license.
This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
My, memories are short. In 2008 Microsoft "Play for Sure" became play no more. Exactly the same stunt, 11 years before you bought that perpetual licence. Why anybody trusted the company after Play For Sure was a mystery to me.
And that was just the beginning. Then came Sony being ripped a new one, Azure being taken down by expired certs - twice in 6 months, critical certs signed with MD5 until it's so weak they were exploited, more recently China running rampant in hosted exchange scraping state secrets, GitHub with record down time, and Windows has become a dog slow ad platform. And yet today Microsoft makes the most revenue than any other software firm.
I dunno how they do it. After decades of treating their customers like shit, business has never been so good. They must have one mother of a sales team.
Salesforce, Microsoft, Atlassian, and co. are obviously sold on their merits.
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Well, Baby steps I guess?
I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
It seems to work fine for me, with a legit Office 365 account.
I can't promise it will fix your problems but it's the "real", full-fat Windows version of Office, so it might be a starting point if you want to avoid virtualization.
The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application.
What have we become?
Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.
Heck, you can use cracked Windows on any compatible machine. Can you do that with MacOS? Apple is selfish, it wants to control the entire chain.
We Hate You Microsoft.
Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.