I use MS Office for work and I’m beginning to get fed up with the never ending series of updates. By now they send updates every week. It disrupts my workflow as I need to close all the documents I’m working on (which I prefer to leave open for several days). In the past I thought updates were needed for security. But if you need weekly security fixes, something is very wrong.
I suspect they are actually doing this mostly to push new AI stuff through, which I could (or couldn’t?) care less about.
I can’t get past leaving documents open for several days. 90% of my work is in Office and some of my documents are pretty large. The idea of leaving them open when I’m not actively working on them would cause me as much stress as letting my phone battery get down below 20%.
Yeah, I was going to say that I was able to set both Windows 10 and 11 up so I could defer an update 12-24 hours, which lets me finish my day, put everything away, then let it update.
The reason I have documents open for days on end is that I’m working on multiple projects/documents simultaneously, and if i close them I need to (1) determine which documents I was working on, (2) find the document on my computer, and (3) go back to the specific spot in the dcoument where I stopped (much of my work consists of editing sizeable documents). I hate that when I close Word I have to go through to effort of re-opening all the documents I had open previously (if Word would do this automatically I wouldn’t mind as much to close it). I also often need to cut and paste passages from one document to another, which is another reason to have multiple documents open.
Come to think of it, this workflow is probably taken from my paper workflow where I have books/paper open on my desk.
I’ll think about whether it is mere inertia that keeps me stuck in this workflow. I use the open documents partly as the list of projects I’m actively working on, and that is probably not the best process.
Even then, I’m beginning to resent having to stop working every few days to install an update. It has come to the point that it is easier to click away the update process when it pops up (I’m going to let it run once in a while, though).
You can disable updates for Office, assuming that your company hasn’t disabled that in their policy settings. Click on Account (lower left on Word) and then select Update Options (roughly in the center of the page).
I don’t think there is a way to set the update rate, but you can enable or disable automatic updates from there.
If all of the documents that you work on are generated by you then it’s probably fairly safe to disable automatic updates. If you routinely get documents from other folks then it’s not so safe.
If you do disable updates, you should probably periodically update Office on your own.
Thanks for the information. In fact I have auto updates disabled for quite some time; the problem currently is that the update program pops up once every few days to ask me to update manually.
Yes, but it lists the ones I did opened recently, not the once that were open when it was closed. If I have a document open for a long time, it won’t be in that list.
I didn’it know about the Shift-F5 trick, thanks, I’ll try it out!