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Microsoft likes to do the "opt out for the next 30 days", including uploading all my spreadsheets to Copilot to be training data.
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"Can we do X, Y, Z?" Yes? Or maybe later?

It's so annoying. No means no, not "pester me later"!

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Consent used to be "Yes" or "No" now it's "Yes" or "I'll give in later"
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There's a reason the tech industry is said to be rapey. Such fundamental misunderstandings of consent likely do not ultimately stop at the digital.
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Woman in tech (rare here, I know) and I can confirm, they don't stop at digital
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That would be enough to get me to spend those 30 days migrating all my spreadsheets to a new format.
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Google Sheets is slower/has enough usability issues it's not an option and OpenOffice is missing a few features too, not to mention neither really can do VBA at all, nor do they have PowerQuery. So Excel it is.
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Is this stuff… like, good? I don’t know anything about the MS ecosystem. If you could start from scratch, would using something more like Python, pandas, that sort of stuff, be viable?
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You're not going to get non technical coworkers like the finance department entering their data or reports in pandas. So it depends on how much labor you want to put in helping them do it, I guess?
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I thought I read something similar in Levy's book "Hackers" but the following is from https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

"It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was [2]. He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program."

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No, none of it is good, excel is basically a bad tool for almost any job. There almost always exist a better thing for everything people use excel for.

But excel has inertia, and it's the only programming non-programmers are able, or rather willing, to do. So we're basically stuck with it.

And yes, I consider crafting and maintaining excel workbooks programming, even if no VBA is involved.

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Excel works, the VBA macros with random business rules work, people with business knowledge know how to use it, the workflows are set up.

If we were starting from nothing it wouldn't be built, but the value of what already exists is massive.

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I have a client who migrated from Sheets to Excel. Google has all the same issues Microsoft does too when it comes to privacy.
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Sure, if you never have to collaborate on them with anyone else.
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This annoys me with Apple devices, iCloud and all it's related backups of..well everything are on by default and it doesn't ask at any point in the setup of the device.

You have to then go into settings -> icloud and disable the main one and then like 30 individual ones.

There should be a big toggle at the top that says "Disable All Cloud Backups" they can feel free to throw in a warning.

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This is just... not true? I'm curious what you mean, because iCloud cannot be on by default since it requires you to set up an iCloud account. You're asked to sign into iCloud during device setup, which you can decline.

Do you mean that, after consenting to and signing into iCloud, all of iCloud's feature are enabled by default?

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I don't disagree. But defaults are important, and you are in a tiny minority with wanting to disable iCloud. 90% of people using Apple phones want or expect things to be magically backed up for them
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Not saying they shouldn't have that, Apple feels it necessary to ask if I want Siri, if I want a Dark theme and if I want to give them payment details during device setup, I feel like "Do you also want us to back all your data up to a remote computer" could be on that list.
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The phone backup is one toggle. The 30 individual ones are for syncing data for apps.

If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you? Without any cloud sync, I’m not sure what the value is, just sign out.

I’m sure you’d lose the ability to download apps, but most of those are also using iCloud to sync data.

For what it’s worth, Apple seems fairly decent about not opting users in to new stuff. When they released Messages syncing via iCloud, I had to explicitly turn it on for my various devices. The same was true for several other things.

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> If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you?

Nope, You have to have an apple account tied to a physical phone number or you can't sign in on the device or use it at all and they opt you in to the 5GB free plan and yes, the 30 sliders is apps but that doesn't alter the fact that I want to be asked before they exfiltrate my data, technology should exist to serve the user and part of that (at least in my opinion) is respecting privacy.

Yes you can sign out and you can untoggle the boxes but that is rather my point, it's opt out not opt in.

I don't want default exfiltration of data from my devices to a faceless American corporation without that been my choice.

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I daily my work MacBook without an Apple account or phone number. And no, it’s not in ABM, or any other MDE. App Store is unavailable because of the missing account, but it does not prevent me from using the device like you’re claiming.
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An iPhone with no apps is pretty hard to use. A mac doesn't need the app store, but when I last set one up, I needed to install the devtools from the appstore to bootstrap macports or whatever, so that pushed me into an account.
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