May I recommend Libre Office? [0] For casual/home use, it should meet needs. Free, no subscription. Spreadsheet can collaborate. [1]

Collabra Office seems to be the port of LibreOffice to ios. (free) Look it up on the app store.

> Collabora Office is a text editor, spreadsheet and presentation program based on LibreOffice, the world's most popular Open Source office suite - and now it's on iOS, enhancing your possibilities to work on mobile devices.

Collaborative versions, a.k.a. Collabra online are available, but hosting is never free.

But TBH, I am your "more casual than casual" office suite user and the bundled Apple apps do my minimal office tasks, and are compatible with MS formats.

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/

[1] https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...

[2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/

I’m furious that there’s apparently no way to even downgrade if you’re an iOS/iPadOS Office 365 subscriber as I am. Co-pilot isn’t only useless, it’s an actively hostile encumbrance I’d pay good money to rid myself of.

I 'cancelled' down to a non-AI family sub, but ended up full cancelling before the kick-in date for the annual renewal. I'm done with the nonsense and dark patterns. The shenanigans has worn thin.

I'm tired of the price hikes for AI - if it was good enough without AI, it's should be optional and a separate sub. It's an enhancement not a core feature.

I loathe copilot and have reverted to using an old version of Outlook desktop, which I then had to regedit to remove copilot buttons etc. It's a horrible product being shoved down our throats.

I can confirm that Microsoft used a similar tactic in the US. I was only aware of it because I had seen some news articles at the beginning of the year, I doubt most people who don’t read tech news would have been aware of this.

> Microsoft said in a statement it regretted the way it handled the situation.

Is there _actual_ regret here, or is it more of a "sorry we got caught" type of thing?

I remember when this came up and you had to go the “cancel” route to get back to the normal pricing. Tip to product folks: if you have to hide the cheap option to get people to choose plan with more features, you’ve failed at your jobs. Choosing this path is lazy, cynical, unethical, and in a just world, criminal.

Yeah, well, that seems entirely unsurprising. Despite nominally being "on the Microsoft platform", I don't see many results from their "AI strategy", and what I do see is entirely underwhelming:

-The Copilot key on all my recent laptops literally does nothing, other than pop up a preferences dialog that allows me to choose between 'None', 'Search' (which just redirects to a Bing-Webview-from-hell) and 'Custom' (which just informs me that I have no suitable providers installed). So, yeah, 'None' it is!

-The Copilot button dropdown on my MacOS 'New Outlook' (the only platform on which that is slightly usable) displays an empty menu. Asking web-based Copilot about that, its response is "yeah, well, that is quite a tease, isn't it"... Uhhhm, sure?

-Copilot code completions in Visual Studio only ensure a quick trip to disable them. I mean, maybe 5% of the time they're topical, but the remaining 95% is just cases of it trying to insert 20+ lines whenever I make a simple typo. I mean, really?

But, yeah, I guess we're stuck with this kind of nonsense for the foreseeable future, until it starts to hurt. But, that might be a while...

http://archive.today/BRCuY

Was this just a dark pattern or did they flat out hide the classic option?

But AI is not a bubble.