God, if you have personal and work accounts under the same email bring on the insane pain. There is sometimes confusion on the MSFT backend (or was) in these cases and you'd get jammed into weird corners (ie, reset would do just your personal so you couldn't ever get a work account reset etc).

It's something about their federation tech vs google. Google, if you are in wrong service, nice switch account, one redirect it feels like.

I thought this was bad, then my work changed from on-prem AD to Azure AD. Now my account is "linked" to my computer, and the only way I can log into a different Outlook inbox is by opening an incognito window.

It really does feel like something is broken on the back end of Microsoft's SSO, but I'm sure it's just so complicated with decades of cruft that it's hard to dig out.

Same here but with the added pain of an early "onmicrosoft.com" account that splits our users between their domain and ours, doesn't let me use my work domain address, and yet denies the onmicrosoft.com one access because it's not a "work or school account".

It's seriously bemusing to be logging in to an organisational account with admin access only via a personal Gmail account username but there's literally no migration path for these early adopter accounts.

Exactly. this is such a pain, especially if you happen to be apart of one organization that's AAD Connect and one that's full AAD (Azure Active Directory).

As far as I can tell, the easiest way to switch users is to go to https://www.office.com/login?es=Click directly (?es=Click is important) which will present you with all the accounts you're 'Signed in' with, even if office.com has you locked into one. Then you can use the app switcher to switch domains, which ensures the correct account.

I wonder if this is a generational thing. If there's a decent app for a thing, I use the app¹. In this case Outlook. I have 4 email addresses to manage my personal email, throw-away registrations, website comms, and website SSL/admin.

I never access any email ever from a browser - Outlook is unbelievably good, and with the .PST file size restrictions no longer being restrictions I have my entire email archive of ever in it. Been doing things like this since 2002.

¹ Social media is the exception. Where I have multiple social media accounts (Instagram) I use seperate browsers (Edge for hobby account, Firefox for personal account). This is not ideal but the workflow is easy.

Have you tried multi-account containers in Firefox? I've found it less painful than multiple browsers.

Ye there is something fishy about Office365 login. Sometimes the account switch for no good reason. Even if I just entered the username and password in a prompt.

It is a great mistake login in on different accounts on the same computer ...

> I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

Here's my libre stack:

  - Thunderbird for e-mail (whichever provider you like, i also self-host a mail server for automation etc.)
  - LibreOffice, which i use as a local piece of software, because web office apps rub me the wrong way
  - Nextcloud, which i also self-host and which has both desktop software and mobile apps

Of course, that's not something that everyone might want to use for themselves, but personally it has worked out pretty nicely for me, allows me to keep my data private (for the most part) and is a rather cost effective way of doing so!

> no one asked!

Hmm, but the above post clearly states:

> ...but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

Is me offering workable alternatives counterproductive or unhelpful? The fact that the software is free and open source is just a nice boon to have and something to mention in my eyes.

Here are the links for the aforementioned software so that anyone may attempt to switch to it, if they so desire.

Thunderbird: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/

Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/

(the latter needs a server, much like Google Drive does, have a look here for a non-self hosted option if that seems like a hassle: https://nextcloud.com/providers/)

If anyone has thoughts on the viability of any of these solutions, hearing arguments for or against them would also be nice! I know for a fact that many prefer to just use web browsers nowadays as opposed to installing software on each platform locally, which could be one such argument!

LibreOffice also opens up Wordperfect documents. My wife had a church project and one of the teachers had Wordperfect. Office could not read it. So we coverted it in LibreOffice.

Also LibreOffice can edit PDF files so no need for Acrobat Pro.

I've had Libre Office completely destroy hours of work multiple times.

one example: In Excel, I was going great work dissecting raw data provided in another worksheet tab, and apparently writing formulas that LO couldn't understand, so upon opening this file in LibreOffice, LO stripped those cells out. just completely emptied those cells, and then saved the file, all without a warning or a prompt or anything. and, best part was that I was showing someone how LO can open Excel sheets just fine, without worrying. so not only did I prove myself wrong, destructively, I lost all of that work.

I will no longer use anything with "Libre" in the name out of principle.

> I've had Libre Office completely destroy hours of work multiple times.

And I've used it (well, back before it was forged) to clean up things that others had messed up to bad in MS Office.

> one example: In Excel, I was going great work dissecting raw data provided in another worksheet tab, and apparently writing formulas that LO couldn't understand, so upon opening this file in LibreOffice, LO stripped those cells out. just completely emptied those cells, and then saved the file, all without a warning or a prompt or anything.

I've never had LibreOffice save the file without asking.

In fact I think it also usually tries to convince me to make a copy in the official LibreOffice format instead.

I'm going to be extremely blunt here and ask you to look for a PEBKAC.

no pebkac, I assure you. this happened multiple times, to multiple people, at multiple employers. all felt MS Office was too expensive until free solutions cost them thanks to problems like these.

couldn't be the software, huh? you sure? no bugs? ok...

It is the first of these reports I can remember seeing and for now the only thing they have in common is you reporting them.

Do you happen to have links handy to relevant issues in the bug trackers?

> Is me offering workable alternatives counterproductive or unhelpful?

If it is done unprompted, then I would argue that it at least is an attempt to take over the conversation, and at worst it is saying that the person who has the problem brought it on themselves because they aren't using what you're using.

The following things are very different:

* stating that there is a problem

* stating that there is a problem and asking for help with it.

Confusing the second for the first is a terrible thing that a lot of people do these days, and intentional or not, it is destructive to constructive debate and discussion.

> If it is done unprompted, then I would argue that it at least is an attempt to take over the conversation, and at worst it is saying that the person who has the problem brought it on themselves because they aren't using what you're using.

I don't think that this is a charitable interpretation. If i said that a Python library X doesn't work for parsing nested YAML structures and someone recommended library Y instead, i wouldn't feel like they're blaming me for using X, rather offering a workable alternative.

If i told them that it's impossible for me to use library Y because of reason Z then that's a different discussion, but in lieu of clear information about these constraints, it's perfectly fair to suggest alternatives. That can prevent us from falling into certain dead ends, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Furthermore, in a threaded medium, i'd argue that taking over discussions is a moot concept, since you can have any number of branches that the discussion goes in. If most people prefer focusing on a branch that's of no interest to you, then i guess the majority has just decided for things to be so.

> The following things are very different:

> * stating that there is a problem

> * stating that there is a problem and asking for help with it.

> Confusing the second for the first is a terrible thing that a lot of people do these days, and intentional or not, it is destructive to constructive debate and discussion.

I've heard this opinion be voiced in regards to social interaction - for example, when someone is upset about the way things are but doesn't want a solution, only empathy and for the other person to acknowledge how upsetting the situation can be, and therefore feels frustrated when potential solutions are offered instead.

And yet, in regards to technical discussions, isn't solutions what we should focus on most of the time? If i have a problem to solve but have no idea how to do so, i don't want someone to say: "Sure, that seems pretty rough.", instead, i want someone to offer me advice on how to tackle the issue and move on. Mere empathy alone here is kind of useless.

Admittedly, it's perfectly fair to introduce others with your particular circumstances and concerns for others to consider them, though that's a different discussion once again. Describing a problem and not addressing any potential solutions isn't as much of a debate or discussion as it is just stating the fact, the net value of which can be pretty close to zero.

In my subjective opinion, the value add here is to actually discuss how to solve problems, or why a particular solution or a group of solutions might not be valid for the set of constraints at hand, or what their shortcomings could be. For example, a sibling comment brought up a point about the integration between the mentioned non-libre pieces of software being much better, which is a fair point that's worthy of consideration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146365

I think for the original poster complaining about not being able to switch was because of integration between the different tools which they find too useful to forego. Thus, while free open source solutions will be useful for many people they seem unlikely to be able to fix the issue that is keeping that particular user from switching.

> I think for the original poster complaining about not being able to switch was because of integration between the different tools which they find too useful to forego.

Ohh, that's a good point, something that i didn't consider in detail!

The closest that i've seen would be OnlyOffice integration (https://nextcloud.com/onlyoffice/) and the mail app (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/mail) for Nextcloud, but neither are as polished as living within either Google's or Microsoft's walled garden would be.

Edit: just to be clear, it's still really cool to see them pulling off something so usable with such limited resources, that speaks positively of how extensible their platform is.

In that regard, perhaps i'm just old fashioned, preferring to use my local file system as the intermediary, though the cloud oriented way of interfacing with software probably shouldn't be discounted either!

> but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

Until you:

- Use Google Drive and its subpar desktop experience of sync'n files (OneDrive is far worse, but Dropbox+MS Office beats it out)

- Experience Gmail's hostile user stance against non-Google calendaring. (1) Automatically creating Google Meets for every invite (or did they fix this recently?) and (2) the terrible formatting that gets sent to non Google-based accounts that gives me the "fingers on the chalkboard" feeling every time it gets sent to my O365 based email.

> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

100% agree.

> Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.

Agreed. And I feel like anyone who sends me email/cal invites from GSuite are essentially amateurish. Can't explain it either.

Desktop experience? This isn't the 2000s grandpa.

There is no web substitute for Excel yet, especially when you get into bigger files.

Because at web scale you don't use individual files.

> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

I dread logging into any Microsoft product for this reason, I just know it’s 30 mins of BS trying to find different passwords for different accounts, none of which relate the thing I’m actually trying to do.

Flashbacks to when i started a new job and just got the credentials for microsoft 365 but for some reason even after logging in through my work email the service seemed to be tied to my college email had to open an incognito tab for it to work

As much as I hate using Azure, the integration of DA makes it so simple. The login screen just lets me select which account to use. That's it.

A password manager and the Authenticator app makes it dead simple

It's really not. I have no problem remembering or calling up the passwords or emails for my personal, Xbox, current work, previous work, or previous student (!) accounts. And yet Microsoft somehow gets them confused; I haven't ever signed in with this PC or from this ItoP address to my student account, the email no longer works, and it obviously can't access my work document...but something is tied together there and MS insists that must be the account I want to use. Private windows don't always fix it either, there's something shady going on behind the curtain.

Contact support and let them know you have multiple accounts and these issues. I thought they were going to be clueless but they were able to resolve some of these issues quickly behind the scenes.

It does not. I have some combination of my work, school and personal microsoft accounts signed in across a couple different computers. It seems to randomly pick one based on some really poorly inferred context. For example, going to outlook.office.com will (usually) load my personal Outlook email. while going to outlook.office365.com (which redirects to outlook.office.com!!!) always loads my school email.

All of my accounts are meticulously password-managed. The ONLY Google property with this problem is Forms. With Microsoft, the entire authentication system is a disaster. Did you know you can sign into your microsoft account with a security key if the moon is waxing crescent, your computer is at least 3 OS updates behind, and you recite a secret incantation?

I got locked out as an admin of a Microsoft 365 workspace while using password manager. I still haven't recovered the account. You can only recover your account by contacting their support on mobile but they are clueless.

I have a feeling they truncate or santise password somewhere.

I switched to gsuite immediately.

And it carte blanch refuses to work in lynx or links too, even if the site behind an SSO login would work perfectly. Bah.

This is getting downvoted quite a lot. I don't understand why. There are lots of legitimate uses for a text-based browser, from quickly looking something up on an SSH session to trying to script something. Servers are often placed behind an SSO wall and Microsoft's authentication regime means that you can't, for example, curl server/data without passing a token coming from a graphical browser and a whole world of pain. This is explicitly a design decision from Microsoft: you need to support javascript to use their SSO login.

Anecdotally, O365 products always felt like disjointed attempt by various engineering and sales teams to put a modern spin on the client side offering. In these contexts, it never had to be good - but just similar enough to the old products that excel, word, and outlook power users would use it and find value.

GSuite, Notion, Confluence, and others appeal to an audience that either never required MSFT office nor felt the need to become power users in it.

I don't know why people like gmail so much but I found gmail's design, or Google's Material language in general, really bloated. Outlook.com has a flat and simple layout. Of course it's inferior to gmail in search and I don't understand why they makes me type out the "@outlook.com" part at login.

Another reason I use outlook is that I already gave everything else to Google so just diversify a bit.

>I don't understand why they makes me type out the "@outlook.com" part at login.

Probably due to that's not the only address they support still - I've got a hotmail.co.uk account and outlook login page for me.

Another thought is universities and other groups use outlook as their MX signing in via outlook.com which can then redirect

gmail has the same thing, but username will autocomplete to @gmail.com unless otherwise provided

If only they had different websites or domains to use for those different login pages.

Yup - my old LSE e-mail was via outlook.com

It is a running joke in our team that MS cannot even implement a login page without problems.

Yes, the article is good but that's where it goes off the rails. There's lots of talk about how MS has 96,000 "talented engineers". Yeah? Where are they then?

My experience of Microsoft products in the past decade, both Azure and Windows, as a developer, has been extremely poor. The decay inside the Windows org has been very sad to see in particular. Windows was never exactly bug free but it had a certain robustness about it simply due to the sheer weight of apps using it. The Win32 docs were extremely verbose but mostly did tell you what you needed to know. But, those apps have been evaporating for 20 years and it shows.

From the perspective of a developer trying to do stuff on Windows in 2022 is an exercise in frustration. Nothing modern works right and their developers don't seem to know or care. Trying to do absolutely basic tasks using their recommended approaches will yield an un-ending stream of stupid, impossibly basic bugs. To name just a few bugs I've hit in recent times: they've managed to screw up things as simple as taskbar icons, downloading files from web servers correctly and restart apps after an upgrade. I never thought I'd find myself actually liking Win32 but it does at least tick all the boxes and the standard code paths are bug free.

Nothing about this experience radiates experience or talent. It leaves you with the constant impression that everyone working on the Windows team is a new grad who learned C++ 3 years ago and is shielded from the reality of what their customers experience by a wall of even less talented program managers whose primary job is to post vague reassurances and empty promises to (badly implemented) web forums.

That's Windows. Azure was little better. Again my experience was one of incredibly simple bugs in basic functionality, like holding TCP connections open for more than a few minutes. The fact that people keep finding "root@azure" bugs is also indicative, because usually these reveal that there's no defense in depth of any kind.

What you’re experiencing isn’t the result of bad engineers, it’s the result of business decisions that prioritize new features of testing. There are many talented engineers in Microsoft (as well as some terrible ones) but they don’t have full control over the goals of the business.

Exactly this.

To be fair, the authentication for Microsoft is far more complex than any other comparable system. They have to deal with their own Microsoft accounts (Outlook, Live, Hotmail...), federated domains (via ADFS or third parties) and domains hosted in 365 too - Some of those being synced passwords from AD, some of those using pass through authentication from local servers...

Google just has to deal with accounts with Gmail domains and third party domains that they host.

I totally get that. This is why it would make sense to implement login a way that it is obvious to the user what is happening. I am not sure how much time I wasted on trying to figure out which system I am logging in to and with.

> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

whenever I login to Gmail it redirects me to YouTube and then back to Gmail

For my professional stuff I’ve actually dumped O365 and Google.

I’m using Apple stuff only (pages, numbers, keynote, mail, calendar, reminders, icloud). It’s completely different to anything else and there are a few small compatibility issues but it works really really well and doesn’t stab you in the face with complex problems. Add zoom and slack and you have enough interoperability.

I set three simple standards that I will not budge on which ensures this solution will remain working. Documents via PDF only. Copy via cut and paste on slack. Data via CSV and JSON only.

I also only use spreadsheets internally to my “partition”. They are shitty for everything else.

I’m not going into the long time rants with my extensive experience with O365 and GSuite and LibreOffice here but this feels like I’m being shafted the least hard at the moment.

I think Excel is the main moat on people/company keep using Office. Even the spreadsheet product on macOS is unmatched. I think it's the defacto tools in the salaryman-world for any backoffice work requiring some spreadsheet app.

I know an avid iOS fanboy that uses Excel on Windows for their main job, it's on a different level than its macOS counterpart.

Yes that’s true. There are better ways to solve all the problems that spreadsheets solve but no one way of solving them all in one place as badly that’s quite as good :)

That hurt to write.

Zoom and Slack are defacto standards which have similar issues as O365 and Google.

That said, I love Numbers. It has some features like easy to use formulas right out of the box. I'm not able to do it that quick/easy with any other spreadsheet product.

However, given I don't use Mac on work as now, I'm bound to Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel.

I'm usually in Teams all day. It's our VoIP, file share, and chat. We have scheduling, notifications, interactive web cards, and multi-user document editing all in there as a single interface.

I get that that it's a duck-on-water front end to OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype-for-Biz, etc... but it works well enough to get things done.

I use gsuite for my own needs, but unfortunately whenever I deal with anyone on the non-technical side (marketing, support, etc) I always need to switch to word/excel/powerpoint.

I have been waiting for this to change, but I can't yet free up the gigabytes of space on my work laptop that is currently occupied by MS software.

> I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

This is how other people feel about the Office suite FWIW.

I can't stand google docs myself, or using gmail for actual business emails.