I've tried G Suite and struggled.

@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:

end users have the benefit of already knowing it (in most cases.)

This is a benefit for the owners to, as it reduces training costs, and increases productivity. I've been using Office for years and I'm still pretty rubbish with it (as in only using about 20% of its features), so moving to another office suite would almost certainly reduce my productivity, at least in the short term, whilst I had to learn how to use it.

Calculating the TCO of different suites is an impossible task, but I don't think one should assume that Office is the most expensive, just because it has the highest licencing costs.

Full disclosure, I work for a Microsoft partner, so I may not be entirely unbiased

@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:

As an MSP, when we talk to customers about their options, costs, and whatever, we find that LibreOffice is the most commonly deployed because once management looks at its features, easy of use, low unnecessary change rate, near zero IT costs (it deploys to every platform via free repos, it's the most broadly available, lowest overhead of any product we've seen) they generally override individual objections to wanting to keep whatever their person and not personally paid for products.

MS Office is super common, and universally hated. Nearly every customer we have with it loathes it and whatever factors are leading them to use it prove to be a weak link in some other product's armor. This is so dramatic that I'm working with a team to make software for whom a major selling point is that it does not use or require MS Office. Most of our customers that use MS Office do so either because it is deeply entrenched from a time before organizational level planning was done and/or the existing files are so entrenched in their workflow that updating would be problematic.

Interesting. I've never come across an organisation that doesn't use Office. And I've never come across one that hates it. Sure, everyone swears at PowerPoint when it doesn't do what they want it to, and years ago I had a few people bemoaning replacing their beloved Lotus 123, but never "hate".

My biggest issue with using anything else would be compatibility, as Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are routinely shared across organisations. How do people deal with that?

There's also Microsoft courses (and others) on the awesome edX:
https://www.edx.org/course?search_query=python

I don't know if these are different to the ones on Microsoft's websites.

I'm planning on learning Python to help my son who is studying it at school (with a useless teacher).

I use Trello

@scottalanmiller said in Why Microsoft Wants You to Think Windows 7 Can't Be Upgraded:

@Carnival-Boy said in Why Microsoft Wants You to Think Windows 7 Can't Be Upgraded:

Desktop OS is important, because you need a desktop to access the cloud - but it's only important in as much as it is used to sell Azure.

But you can access Azure just as well (or better in many cases) from Ubuntu, ChromeOS, Fedora, macOS, etc.

Of course, but you can push users towards Azure by controlling what users see on the desktop - think pre-installing Skype or Edge or the Microsoft App Store. Google do the same for their OS. Amazon are probably the most explicit in practically giving away Amazon Fires just to push Amazon services.

@scottalanmiller said in Why Microsoft Wants You to Think Windows 7 Can't Be Upgraded:

But their "real" money comes from sources like Azure, Office 365, MS Office, and such... all of which benefit from the OS being free and more wide spread.

I'd shorten that to say the "real" money comes from Azure (or at least, will do in the future). All other Microsoft products are now merely tools to sell Azure. They are now a hosting company rather than a software company.

I now work in Microsoft Dynamics, and it's not about what companies use to run their business applications, it's about where their business applications are hosted. Microsoft are happy for you to run Salesforce (ostensibly a competitor), if you run it in Azure.

I don't expect them to do much with their server OS, as I don't think they see that in their future. Desktop OS is important, because you need a desktop to access the cloud - but it's only important in as much as it is used to sell Azure.

I have various WhatsApp groups for family and friends, which is perfect for my needs. My niece loves to hear that my daughter won her swimming gala, but a bloke I went to school with who I haven't seen in 20 years really doesn't want to know. So WhatsApp group great, Facebook rubbish.

I just wish Facebook didn't own WhatsApp.

Access is included in Business Premium isn't it? They added it in 2016 I believe

How do you judge if a resume is successful or not? I really have no idea. As an employer, I was only really interested in who a person worked for, for how long, and what their job title was. Stuff about, for example, "system transformation", like Kelly's example, just went straight through me - it meant nothing to me. But for other employers, that stuff might be gold and just what they're looking for.

The other issue is that your resume normally has to go through at least two people - firstly, an employment agent, and then the employer. So who do you target, as they are two very different audiences? An agent will probably spend 20 seconds reading your resume, looking for keywords, whilst an employer might spend ten minutes, especially if they're interviewing you.

I do like to hear about hobbies, especially interesting ones. I think you can tell a lot about a person by his hobbies. But it's de rigueur to leave these off these days, sadly. Probably for the best.