https://liliputing.com/2018/08/soon-youll-be-able-to-install-office-365-on-as...

In other words, if you’ve got a dozen PCs between your home and office, you can install Office on all of them. But you’ll need to sign in to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or other Office applications. And if you try to sign into more than five devices at once, you’ll see a message letting you know that the limit has been reached and that you need to logout from one of your other computers.

Microsoft is also increasing the number accounts you can link to an Office 365 subscription from five to six.    (ain't that confusing ....)

In other words, if you’ve got six people in your household, each of you can install Office on as many computers as you like… and each user can stay logged into as many as five at a time. So $100 per year kind of lets you install and use Office on up to 30 devices at a time.   (not really, they are just letting you spread it out all over the place so you will lose track of it quicker ......)

Or you can use LibreOffice for $0 per year. But while the free and open source office suite is pretty great, it doesn’t have every feature available in Microsoft Office, just all the ones you normally use.

There is some good and a lot of bad here with this latest Mickeysoft innovation.

The bad is keeping track of a new password set AND HAVING TO CONSTANTLY LOG IN ALL THE TIME to use software you pay a yearly fee to license.    AND YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER TO LOG OFF EACH AND EVERY TIME OR THE LICENSE STAYS LOCKED FOR THAT ONE OUT OF 5 INSTANCE.

This is aggravating and it is restrictive and when your password goes out on you (or you forget to log it off) your arse is grass until MS customer service can be convinced to fix it for you.  

And Mickey will simply want to sell you a new license if you get them all locked up by stupidity, not being very helpful about off line locked up license stuff at all.

And here is the good stuff.

You can group share in a family and up to 5 of you (on 10 different devices per license no less) can be up and running at the same time.   The 6th person gets denied access until somebody remembers to log off on that particular computer that has a license assigned to it.

This might be a cool money saver if you are restricted into using only Mickey ware and you simply have to use it.   But ALL of you HAVE to practice very consistent and clean log on and log off practices.

But Mickey is gonna aggravate you to death over it if you don't, as well as pick your pocket for a new license periodically.    

And I can just hear the foreign speaking voice from India saying "We are sorry but all your licenses show to be locked on various computers that are no longer showing to be on line at this time.   We cannot help you with this issue, you must go to the computers, go on line and then log out of the software to free up the licenses.  

However, we can help you with a new set of licenses to get you going today if you can give us a valid charge card number."

       ....... so now you have to keep track of a Microsoft log in for using Win 10 and a separate log in for Office 365 ????

Betcha your grand kids have enough friends and school buddies out there to spread your license that you shared "just for them" sooooo thin until the bread shows through all the time.

It's MS, the GO signal will get tucked into a EULA "click to approve" and then will get applied to your hardware as soon as you are legally bound to it.

Or, you can just go download the software for free, you can count on the idea that Mickey will catch up with your wallet later on that same evening ..... or whenever you want the stuff to actually open up for you so you can actually go use it.

Your auto log off idea is excellent, and any reasonable company would do that from the very beginning.   What sort of time period would you pick to have to go back through the log in activity all over again for the 15th time today?

Me, I think I'll stick with Libre Office.  

It has a NO HASSLES feature built into it and it is a lot less expensive than Micky-ware.   And you can install it 100 times for 1,000 people and not  have to keep up with your two sets of passwords and ID and you don't have to worry about logging off each time.

Have you ever had a power failure that suddenly shut your machine off?

You need your MS login ID and password then (something that you picked like over a decade ago) just to get your machine to start back up.   This is current, today, standard Windows 10 Home requirements that have been in place for over a year now.    When you move over to the proposed new licensing model, you will need it more often.

Eegore, didn't you say your system was administered by an IT department?    You may be running a "managed" Pro version of Win 10 for Business.  

I was trying to think of what sort of environment would not let you have to bump into the ugly realities of Win 10 Home as an OS system.    One where you have never bumped into the Kiosk for multiple users, ever.

Many here on the list NEVER upgraded to Win 10, and were wise to do so as they got years worth of "no hassle" computing by doing so.   They get threatened by Mickey sometimes, but their old stuff still works for them in a separate remote PC sort of fashion.

I did upgrade my wife's machine to Win 10 back while it was a free upgrade, and I can attest to what Mickey has done since then as my wife's PC is bone stock Win 10 Home, limping from slowdowns, changed drivers and suffering periodically from "nightly upgrade syndrome".

Win 10 has changed over the last 3 years, you could say it got better, but you can also say that there are little bumps and potholes in the road as you go down it.

 Ok so my IT guy said all I did was skip the step for entering a Microsoft Account when I installed the operating system:

"You don't use an MS account ever so when you installed the OS you had to click "skip this step" and it installed WIN10 without an account linked to it. I do the same thing so I only need to remember a local user account password and I don't have to deal with MS everytime. You must have shut off your Local Admin User password on login through user accounts in the control panel. That's a password free setup for WIN10."

 That sounds right because I wouldn't use any account setting that I don't absolutely need to.  When I install Windows 10 I click every option to "off" even.

Eegore offers empirical proof that Win 10 "as installed" by an original OEM and maintained under IT control is different from an original "free upgrade" Win 10 installed as per required prompts and as maintained for several years by Microsoft nightly update.

I have an opening screen called Win10 Kiosk that pops up that requires the MS ID of the current user (of which there can be several, obviously) to log in to start Win 10.   My log in instance is called Alexander and it responds to a Microsoft ID and password that belongs to my wife (something that she got from work so she can log into the University systems from home).  

I don't think my wife's laptop's system is really typical any more, I think it has been tweeked by the school's IT people to access her work accounts through the internet, so she can pull up school email, pull up her grade book, pull up school planning calendars, pull up University Dropbox accounts and pull up Turn-It-In (a restricted student account that they have to use to submit papers and work that stores their papers and actually pre-grades the work and logs it into databases and checks what they turn in to make sure it contains no copied (plagiarized) work inside it.

Life is quite complicated for a University level teacher any more, really.

Eegore's IT guy says that if you follow the MS set up prompts when you first set the machine up you get result "C" while if you ignore all start up screens you don't want to respond to you get result "B" like Eegore gets on his new machines that he has set up at home.  

That is interesting, really.

OK, your mileage will certainly vary between WinXP, Win7, Win8 and Win10.   This is something we can all agree upon.    We don't expect them to act the same, and they don't.

I knew from reading that IT driven and maintained Win 10 was different from consumer Win 10 Home, that point is discussed a lot by Windows forum groups.

What I didn't get was that even your choices during an original set up could key up whole levels of Windows BS stuff that you would have to live with hereafter.

Windows 10 as upgraded apparently can be more complex as it sets itself up and acts "more variable" than I had ever thought before.  





(now why should this all surprise me ......   it is MICKEY doing what Mickey does best.)

Students are pushing back now against all this MS BS complexity, they have been learning on and running off Chromebooks all the way up through Highschool and then they go to college and hit up against the world of MICKEY and they are choking hard at the experience ..... and these new students are rebelling against it more and more each year.

There are required freshman classes now to teach them how to use University systems, systems that have always been Mickey driven.   New inbound freshman students are pushing back, they think the University is out of date and is using computer systems from the stone ages.  

To them, this is true.

The IT guys are now making adjustments to their systems to accept Chromebooks much better as students simply want to continue using what they know best --- and they are the ones paying the bills after all.

Life was a lot simpler when I went to college.   Do you know that students take their text books electronically now like Kindle books as the old style paper bound books cost well over a hundred dollars a pop for some of the upper level classes?    You can buy a download key for less than $75 or buy an old revision paper copy shipped to you off the web for even cheaper?

Makes the assignments tough if you buy used off the web, as the page number and chapters have changed on you.   Plus the exercises are different (wife reports she can spot somebody using old text revisions by the consistently wrong answers as they are reading and responding to the old book's exercise questions as they do their homework).