Silly me
Just realised you have to re-install your operating system to make it...
Reaches for coat
Microsoft might be patting itself on the back prematurely for wrangling the technical gremlins that downed its Office 365 services for some users in the UK and the US. Reports on Twitter from disgruntled admins about an online productivity suite-shaped hole in their lives began on Friday as users struggled to log in, and then …
To downgrade is simple.
Just update to the newest version of Office each time it's released.
Less features, less reliability, the perfect downgrade.
I had a rather interesting conversation with a client lately where they demanded to know why our staff webmail was only running <old but still-fully-supported version> and not the new-new-newest.
"a) it works, b) it's not insecure, c) it's supported, d) we have no need of any upgrade" was the gist of my answer.
It has often been said that to plan for the future you should look to the mistakes of the past.
With that in mind I think it would be fair to rename the ailing productivity suite back to that well known oxymoron:
"MICROSOFT WORKS"
(ps. anyone under 30 who hasn't a clue about what I'm on about should read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works )
So...
In my environment for patching I have a canary group, which gets updates first. The Canary group is comprised of less essential but voluble users who rarely (if ever) pass on an opportunity to report a problem, real or imagined. If the canary group snuffs it following a patch, I know not to apply the patches to production.
Has nobody told Microsoft staff that this is best practice with their software...?
I recently bought a new laptop that came with a free trial for Office three-sixty-whatever. Day one, I uninstalled it because I don't need it, don't want it. A recent compulsory Windows 10 update reinstalled it, so again I uninstalled it. I get the feeling I'm going to have to keep doing this after each big update.
Yes, formatting the HDD/SSD (WTF is an SDD??) will get rid of the bloatware. Unfortunately you then need to install an OS and if your chosen OS is Windows 10 then the bloatware will automagically reappear. World of Candy Minecraft whatever - always there, will be reinstalled at just that moment when you think you got rid of it.
... that Microsoft still calls Office "productivity software", even though virtually all things you can do with it can be done better and with less work with more suitable software packages. It's probably more of a time waster than Minesweeper and Solitaire combined.