Sometimes you need to check things out, as they could be costing you money for features you don’t need.
My monthly charge for my Microsoft Office subscription came through and it had risen from £5.99 to £8.49 a month.
I didn’t recall getting an email, but then realised it would have been to my outlook.com email address which I don’t really use and look at rarely.
I was a little surprised and a little annoyed. However I do use Microsoft Office a fair bit, so decided for the moment I would keep subscribing, well for the moment.
It was interesting then to note a day later I was on the Money Saving Expert website, looking at other things when I saw a link to an article.
Microsoft’s auto-adding up to £30 a year to 365 subscriptions for its AI software – but we’ve a trick to avoid it
I read the the article and I saw that the increase was due to the addition of AI functionality to the Office suite. Now this was something I had seen when using Office, but never used. It would appear that you can downgrade back to Classic and though you lose the AI functionality, the charge is the original £5.99.
Microsoft says the option to switch to a Classic plan will be offered for the next year. To make the switch:
Sign in to your Microsoft account.
Go to ‘Subscriptions’ and select ‘Manage’.
Select ‘Cancel subscription’. This will give you the option to choose a monthly or annual Classic Personal or Classic Family plan.
I did this and my plan reverted back to Classic.
I had seen the AI functionality whilst using Office, but most of the time I either wanted to turn it off, or I was ignoring it. So for me, no real loss of functionality, if anything it will improve my productivity as I won’t be distracted by it.
You would have thought that Microsoft would remember that paper clip… Did people really appreciate that paper clip saying You appear to be writing a letter…. I certainly turned off that functionality back in the day. For me in many ways AI functionality is something akin to the paper clip. Thanks, but no thanks.
Not sure what happens next year, maybe we will all be forced to upgrade to have AI. One of the lessons here is to look at your subscriptions and emails.