Why Microsoft Office is no longer needed – BGR

Microsoft Office used to be the best office suite for all your productivity needs. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were so ubiquitous in office work, school work, and personal use that few would consider using anything else. However, things have changed a lot over the years, and Microsoft programs are nowhere near as important as they were decades ago.

While Microsoft has expanded the office suite in what it now calls Microsoft 365, to include other applications such as OneNote, OneDrive, and Teams, it has also made the software package more expensive while adding unwanted and confusing features. That includes adding a Copilot AI chatbot to the service to help with what it calls “vibe working.”

These changes, combined with the availability of free versions that provide a better overall user experience, mean that Microsoft Office is no longer necessary for anyone who doesn’t have a workplace or school that specifically needs it.

Currently, Microsoft 365 plans start at $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year for Membership, with Family and Premium options that allow up to six accounts to be connected. That follows a January 2025 price increase that coincides with Microsoft adding Copilot as part of all plans. This period has made it clear that consumers are being asked to pay more for AI features regardless of whether they intend to use them or not.

Users have also reported growing frustration with Microsoft 365, especially as the company continues to push Copilot. One Reddit user received more than 2,000 upvotes for calling it “an effective hindrance to work flow.” Others shared more obvious complaints about the service, such as Outlook search being useless and Copilot sometimes making it difficult to do simple things like opening your email. Add to that the general concerns related to AI (such as security, privacy, and environmental impact), and it seems that many Office 365 users are overpaying for software that doesn’t work as well as outdated versions that are already available.

If you just want the classic apps without things like cloud storage or AI features, there’s Office 2024 Home, which charges a one-time price of $179.99. This does not include features such as Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft Defender, and will not receive updates with new features. Office Home 2024 is great for those who don’t want to add another subscription to their monthly budget. However, if all you plan to use is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, there are inexpensive (and even free) options that will get the job done.

Fortunately, there are many alternatives for anyone frustrated with Microsoft 365, many of which are free. The most obvious is Google Drive, which offers versions of Word (Docs), Excel (Sheets), and PowerPoint (Slides) to anyone with an online Gmail account. Since everything lives in Drive and is linked to your email, it’s easy to find your files on any device or share them with others. The extra storage of more than 15 GB that all Google accounts come with is not cheap, and with the highest part of the Google One subscription – which includes 2 TB of storage, access to the paid features of Gemini, and more – it costs the same as Microsoft 365’s. low level for $9.99 per month and $99.99 per year. That does not include discounts or rebates available to new subscribers.

There is also LibreOffice, a free office suite that provides the Microsoft Office experience many miss. It includes the equivalent of Word (Writer), Excel (Calc), and PowerPoint (Impress), as well as applications for creating graphics, data, and editing mathematical formulas. In addition, it is open source, so anyone with knowledge can modify it to improve, or add new tools and share their work with other users.

Stand-alone options like LibreOffice come with their own problems. They don’t have cloud support, and you can’t interact with other users while using anything other than Calc. However, for the average user who only needs the basics, it’s worth considering as an alternative to Microsoft 365 and its increasingly confusing and expensive offerings.