Customers all over the world are used to frequent price increases of subscriptions by now. Many online services that require a subscription increase prices regularly, often once per year or every second year.
That is bad enough, especially if the service does not get any better because of it. While services argue that inflation and rising costs force them to increase the price of their product, it is getting harder and harder for them to convince customers to accept the price increase and continue their payments.
If only there would be something that would make it clearer for customers to pay more. Microsoft may have found a way, or so it believes: how about removing features from products to move them into another product, that costs extra?
As a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you pay Microsoft a monthly or yearly sum for access to the most recent version of Microsoft Office. You may also get some other features on top of that, including cloud storage space or access to Copilot, Microsoft’s AI.
However, some Copilot features are only for subscribers of plans that are more expensive. Home users, for instance, need a Premium subscription to gain access to otherwise restricted Copilot features.
Microsoft changed the tactic for business customers. Instead of limiting Copilot to a specific plan, Microsoft integrated Copilot AI features into the business plans and announced a price increase arguing that customers would get more out of their subscriptions because of that. Most plans increase by up to three Dollars per month because of that from 2026 onward.
To make Copilot look more valuable, Microsoft started to remove features from Office programs.
Martin Geuß, from the Geman website Dr. Windows, highlighted two recent examples on the site recently:
- PowerPoint: The option to reuse slides is going to be removed from the presentation software. Users may ask Copilot to do that for them.
- Excel: The function to extract data from images is being removed. Starting in July 2026, this option won’t be offered anymore. Microsoft says that it is working on a better function that will then be powered by Copilot.
There you have it. You just have to be inventive to justify price increases.
AI is losing tons of money and there’s more competition then ever.
I predict soon we’ll see an AI war where the greedy bastards of big tech use them against each other and the public gets caught in the crossfire.
I remember when I theorized that Favicons could be used for tracking, everyone said i was crazy.
Usually, there is a way to work with deprecated features in a program. PowerToys for text extraction, Power Query in Excel for PDFs
PowerPoint options =
Alternatives to Reuse Slides
While the Reuse Slides feature will no longer be available, there are several alternatives to achieve similar results:
Manual Copy and Paste
Open both the source and destination presentations.
Select the desired slides in the original presentation.
Right-click and choose “Copy.”
Switch to the destination presentation, right-click, and select “Paste.”
Using New Window Feature
Open your current presentation.
Go to the “View” tab and select “New Window” to create a duplicate of your presentation.
You can then drag and drop slides from the original presentation into the new window.
I don’t think users realize or remember or affirm that MS is a business with the ticker MSFT; its first obligation is shareholder satisfaction. Naturally, it can produce a higher quality product that results in greater user satisfaction which in turn results in greater profits through increased purchasing of a product; but MS is basically a monopoly, and it won’t suddenly disappear from the OS landscape regardless of 1,000,000 or more disgruntled users because two features have been removed. It’s not the way a 3.5 trillion dollar business works.
Developing Azure may be more lucrative. Windows and Office are side dishes that receive attention as time permits.
LibreOffice is listening, hopefully.
No Copilot here on Windows 7, no AI, but I’ve discovered something (a Powershell script in fact) which may interest those of us who strive for a clean (cleaner, anyway), AI-free, Windows 11 OS:
“Remove Windows Ai
Why?
The current 25H2 build of Windows 11 and future builds will include increasingly more AI features and components. This script aims to remove ALL of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security.”
Available at [https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI]