Review of Microsoft Office 2016
(as of October 2015)

So, you've just purchased a shiny brand new copy of Microsoft Office 2016.

How much did you pay?

Now, you have a presentation to give tomorrow morning when you get off the plane in St. Louis.  But, you're not quire done.  No problem,  you figure, you'll finish it up on the plane.  That's the kind of thing laptops are for, right?  That's why you bought Microsoft Office 2016.  So now you are on the plane and you're typing feverishly.  Ah... a snag.  Can't quite figure out out how get the formatting right.  No problem, just hit F1.

BAMMO!  "Help is only available online"

You:  WTF!?! (except, you use the real words, and loudly, possibly waking up the woman snoozing next to you.)

"You aren't connected to the Internet."

No shit Sherlock, I'm on an airplane.  My computer is in "airplane mode".  No Internet.

"Check your connection and try searching again."

Check my connection?  CHECK MY CONNNECTION????  WTF!   WTF!!!

I've searched for a solution using Bing and Google.  Here are some of my search terms:

Microsoft Office "offline help"
Microsoft Office "offline help files"
office 2013 help files
Microsoft Word help file when not connected to the Internet
Microsoft Office help files when offline

Check out this search:  https://www.google.com/#q=office_365hp-word%2Fhow-do-i-work-with-office-2013-offline

From the blogs and message boards I could find, there doesn't look like there is a solution.  There are no help files to download.  The situation gets even worse if you were unfortunate enough to buy one of the subscription services like Microsoft Office 365.  This program requires that you are connected to the Internet every 30 days, or it stops working.  Some reports I read said that even though they had an earlier stand-alone version, when they "upgraded" to Office 365, and then deleted it, the Office programs still were insisting on the user logging into an account to get it to work.

So Microsoft has made it so you have to be connected to the Internet to use the Office.  So, why not just use the Google wordprocessor, spreadsheets, or whatever?  Or, you could use LibreOffice or OpenOffice?

The point is, if you shell out the bucks to buy a stand-alone piece of software that runs on your computer, you expect to be able to use it even if you don't have an Internet connection, and there are many situations where an Internet connection isn't practical or even possible.  Being on a airplane is one.  Taking your personal computer to your work to finish up homework is another common one.  Or, maybe you are visiting someone's house where they don't have an Internet connection or they don't want you using theirs.  Maybe you are out in the middle of a wilderness documenting the activities of Bigfoot.  Who knows, but Microsoft doesn't give you any options with their programs.

November 2, 2015:  It looks like Bill Gates removed the font Arial Unicode MS from Microsoft Office 2016 and Windows 10, and does not provide a way to restore it, so if you have documents that you created using this font, Bill Gates says, "up yours!".  I guess you could find a copy of the font file on a computer with an old version of office and copy the file.  It should be in C:\WINDOWS\Fonts.  I've found this font very useful because there are a lot of odd characters available in it that the other fonts don't appear to have.

Another offense Microsoft is forcing on people in Windows 10 is this abortion they call "Microsoft Edge".  I guess it's supposed to be a replacement for Microsoft Internet Explorer.  IE was clunky, but at least it functioned.  Edge smugly omits anything that the programming team in India decided the world doesn't need, like, if you right-click on a link to a file, the menu that pops up doesn't give you the option of downloading the link target.  I'm sure we'll find other gems as we go along.

With the level of concern for the customer Bill Gates is showing with his latest products, no wonder he thinks so highly of socialism.  Capitalism will crush his arrogant empire.


Adding Equation Numbers to Equations in Microsoft Word 2016

It's clunky, but there's a way: In the equation edit box, after the equation, type #, then after that, type pretty much whatever you want, and it will show up at the right margin. It's klunky, and it messes up the horizontal alignment of the equation if you put too much text after the #.

For earlier versions of Word, such as 2010, you used to be able to just insert a “style separator” (CTRL-ALT-ENTER from the keyboard) after the equation, outside of the equation editing box. Then, you could set up a tab stop, tab over to the right margin, and life was good. But in their infinite wisdom, Microsoft decided to make this method not work in Word 2016.