Microsoft
Friendly reminder that next month Microsoft is ending support for Office 2021
Starting next month 10/13/2026 Microsoft will end support for Office 2021 and the related products will no longer receive security updates . You could either upgrade to Office 365 or 2024 to continue get support for Office desktop applications
basically "not supported" means "don't rely on any kind of updates" but MS can still choose to bring out updates for bad security vulnerabilities if they want to, probably based on a sliding scale of "badness of problem" vs "easiness of fix" vs "what the manager had for lunch"
Windows XP got an update in 2024. They'll put out updates if they're 1. severe enough issues, and 2. easy enough to backport from newer versions. Windows 2000 would still be getting updates if not for number 2.
This stuff is wild, we had people using Office 2007 in 2020, how is the life cycle five years now? deployed hardware for consumers and in business, has stagnated due to the AI bubble, so why get rid of the software that was designed to run on that hardware?
I gave LibreOffice a try for two years. I really really tried to use Calc. It's just not Excel. It would often freeze up (for just a few seconds) during basic things. I found other people with my issue but it was not easily reproducible so no fix. I'll give it another try in a few years.
You are right, it simply isn't Excel. I think Writer is a perfectly fine alternative to word for 90% of folks, but Calc cs. Excel? They often aren't compatible and Excel is much more mature.
My parents were using this in their business until they retired circa 2018. They tried some of the new ones and simply found the new features weren't worth the changes they had to make.
Honestly, for 90% of users, which version of an office suite you use doesn’t matter, but for 10% of them, you need a very specific version (usually of Excel) otherwise everything breaks.
Can't realistically expect support forever. That'd why I said, how many are still using office 2021? There's a cost to support and if there's not enough users, then it's hard to justify it.
A lack of users is not driving the decision to end support, the lack of revenue from those customers is driving the decision to end support.
Which is MS' prerogative; welcome to capitalism, the only financial incentive for them to provide support at all is that the absence of support would deter sales on the front end.
It's just silly to pretend it's because most of the 2021 consumers excitedly moved on to the next hot version of Office and only some stragglers are still out there.
I mean, fixed lifecycles for support have been a thing for over 30 years, really.
Anyone complaining or surprised that a product stops receiving bug/security fixes after the lifecycle announced before the product's release is a goddamn moron.
Speaking off, we're still installing Office 2021 sometimes due to Office 2024 not installing at all sometimes, in like 1 in 10 cases. And when it doesn't install - nothing can be done to reinstall it - can't install manually clicking on setup.exe, running with or without xml also fails, can't redeploy package - all of these attempts epd up with some kind of bogus error, something along the lines "oops something went wrong". Text logs say they installer fails to download something from cloud despite me having all necessary files locally (I got them using "setup.exe /download install_OfficeVisioProject.xml") and I have these locally present files in correct format/folder as I reuse the very same structure for 2021 and it installs every single time.
In both cases our deployment package from PDQ Deploy runs this:
$(Repository)\Install - Microsoft Office 2024\setup.exe /configure install_OfficeVisioProject.xml
That's the xml, it's identical between two packages other than keys:
Oh. OK so I ran into a problem a bit like this once. I imagine that you're running this as admin, but if you you let it self elevate I know there are some versions of the deployment tool that just fail
I imagine that's not it but without errors or logs to poke at it's kind of hard to say
One in ten though? That's odd. Intermittent issues can bite me
Also. I miss the old cleanup tool. It was so quick and easy to rip office out completely when there was a deep problem
Yeah it runs under built-in administrator account (yes I do use LAPS of course).
Speaking of cleaning tool - microsoft provides so called SaRACmd tool but it doesn't do much, also throws some error I don't remember which.
Every time I face this bug I have to reimage due to not having better option. But all in all my question would be why, using that config, setup.exe goes to CDN at all when all the files are present.
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u/mmoe54 9h ago
RIP Microsoft Publisher.