I probably use a Microsoft Office product only about once or twice a year, since, for ages now, I’ve preferred Apple’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers for normal day-to-day stuff. (I definitely recommend getting to grips with them if you’re in the Apple world and aren’t taking advantage of them yet.)
But Rose needs to use Word and so, like many others, we reluctantly pay for an annual Office 365 Family subscription, and a few months ago, the price of that went up by a little over 30%, from £80 to £105.
But here’s the thing. You don’t have to pay that new price.
You see, in a move that is particularly sneaky even by Microsoft standards, what they actually did was to add a new feature that not many people want: the Copilot AI system. They called this enhanced plan ‘Microsoft 365 Family’ and migrated everyone on the old ‘Microsoft 365 Family’ to it, charging them for the new facility.
If, like me, you positively dislike it when your software pops up and says, “Would you like me to write this letter for you?”, then you should know that you can switch to ‘Microsoft 365 Family Classic’ and go back to the old price, and this also gets you a new feature: the absence of annoying AIs!
They don’t make this option easy to find, though. In my case, I was set up for recurring payments, and on the web site I had to go to the ‘Manage subscriptions’, say I wanted to cancel the recurring payment for ‘Microsoft 365 Family’, and was then given the ‘Classic’ option at the old price of £79.95.
My sincere thanks to the AtomicShrimp YouTube channel for this video which alerted me to this dastardly practice!
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Alternatively, if you’re a bit too old (& tightfisted) to learn the new Apple Office products, you can use MS365 online, take 5gb of free storage and carry on using Word, Excel etc. to Rose’s heart’s content free.