Interesting. If I already have iCloud and my MacMini for storage and and my personal domain on FastMail for ad-free secure email, does Microsoft Basic give me anything I need? All that I need on the higher levels are Word (which I need for Change Tracking and ability to write equations and other sophisticated math or science stuff that I send and receive from other people). I haven’t tested how compatible Keynote is with PowerPoint, but I haven’t given any talks lately. My spreadsheet needs are minimal and I have no interest in Copilot. Maybe I’ll see how long I can go without Office 2024.
That’s interesting. I have the Microsoft 365 Basic subscription, charged at $69.99 yearly. That’s what a Personal subscription used to cost before MS added AI and raised the price to $99.99. But I found out that the $69.99 price point was still available without the CoPilot integration, so I changed my product from Personal to Basic. Maybe if a person is about to cancel they offer a lower price.
EDIT: Ooops, I misspoke. My subscription is called “Microsoft 365 Personal Classic,” not Basic. I have all the locally-installed apps, plus the 1TB of cloud storage in OneDrive. Of course that all changes come July 13.
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Sorry for being pedantic, but I’m pretty sure that you have licensed the “Microsoft 365 Personal Classic” edition.
As others have said, Microsoft 365 Basic is $20/year for an annual subscription, so I’m just trying to avoid adding to the confusion.
Then export the Pages & Numbers files to Word & Excel format. Alternately, use LibreOffice, or other non-MS software.
Or stay with Word & Excel, which don’t require the export.
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And pay Micro$oft’s protection racket, 
Yes, pay for the tools you need. I’ve written books in Pages and in Word and they’re about the same if you take time to set them up. So, yes, I pay for the tools I need, either software or hardware.
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True…but that’s mostly long use muscle/brain memory. Numbers is different but not really better or worse overall.
I just looked at Pages 14.5 and it does offer ways to do change tracking and add in equations, but that will at best require more of my time to figure out the work-around. More likely the work-around will yield a Pages version of docx that does not exactly work with MS Word, which is likely to cause problems for my clients and take even more time to fix.
It’s like why I use tax preparation software software. I worked for H&R Block one tax season long ago, and I could sit down and file a return by hand to save money if I needed to. But paying for the tax software usually saves a lot of time and grief.
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Those options can work well for many people, but if you are part of a team that is routinely sharing or exchanging documents that go beyond basic formatting, you can run into some real headaches. Examples include tables, equations, placed graphics, and comments/tracking features.
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