Fucking Microsoft

I was working on my spreadsheet for my Oscar pool using Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. I clicked on an URL in the cell and it said I need to upgrade Office to use this feature. That's odd. I bought Office 2011 for Mac in November of 2010 and have used it (occasionally) since. I've used this spreadsheet the last two Oscars. I found the license key in a note I keep and entered it, nope, said it was invalid.

I checked for updates and installed a couple, I'm now on the latest 14.3.1. Even that was an annoying experience. I had to install an update to the updater then it had to grow three updates and for each, download them, show me the first few lines of an endless license agreement, make me click continue and then accept. For one of the updates it took 30 seconds to scan other drives, of which none are attached. I made me choose the drive to install the updates and told me each would take over 300MB (apparently they can't subtract what's already installed). In contrast, Apple manages to update you to current levels all at once and with much less clicking.

So I'm all caught up. I had Googled and saw something about 14.3.1 updated six days ago that fixed a licensing issue in 14.3. Ok, that must be it. So I open my spreadsheet, click the URL and get a new Activation window:



I have no idea what Office 365 is and never bought such a thing. I enter my license code and it says it's invalid. I dig up the box Office came in and check that it's right. It is.

The activation window had a link to a local ReadMe file. It had three links. I followed the support link and followed link after link but nothing help. A few told me to activate by phone but provide no phone number. I looked for 5 minutes finding page after page that said the same thing and didn't actually help, as well as a few dead links.

Searching twitter led me to this article, Microsoft updates Office for Mac 2011 to include Office 365 activation. "Microsoft made available this week an update to its Office for Mac 2011 product which includes some fixes, plus activation support so that it can be installed as part of Microsoft's newest Office 365 subscription offerings."

At this point I'm done. Either an update of Office decided that after two years I have to pay more to be able to click on links, or it's a bug that will be fixed in some update. I like Pages and Keynote much better than Word or PowerPoint. I'm using Numbers a bit and it's good (I like its model of sheets, charts and graphs much better) but Excel is still much more full-featured and I'm more likely to have to share spreadsheets with people, so there are a couple of uses. But honestly, there aren't new features that I can conceive of that they could add to Excel that would make want to upgrade. The only reason is compatibility.

But if it turns out this isn't a bug, and Microsoft has decided that clicking on an URL in a local spreadsheet to have it open in a browser now requires a monthly subscription (in a product I bought TWO YEARS AGO), I'm never giving them another cent.

Update: Even better, it's not all URLs, just some. That does suggest it's a bug to be fixed.