Ask Paul: March 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This has been an incredible and momentous week, but I’m ready for the weekend and some terrific reader questions. This one’s a doozy.
Eternal Spring
doon asks:

Wanted to take a moment and say "thanks" for your Eternal Spring series. It's fascinating and informative to watch your experiences in Mexico. Your candor is invigorating. It's also helpful to both my wife and myself as we consider a move outside the US. While we're not nearly as adventurous on the culinary side, the cultural changes look really interesting.

Well, thanks. :)

For those who aren’t paying attention to this YouTube channel, my wife and I recently discussed our plans to write a travel guide for Mexico City based on our experiences there and because there is no Rick Steves-style expert for the area. In some ways this will be like the Windows 11 Field Guide and my other recent technical books in that it will be published as it’s written in the open and with the hope that readers will improve it with feedback. But in some ways it will be quite different because this book will be much more visual and will have a beautiful design. That’s something that still bothers me with Leanpub and the Field Guide titles. Maybe that’s something I can fix eventually.
Individual Office apps
stevem57 asks:

Why is it so difficult to get a new copy of MS Access? I've been using it since 97, made a living with Access and VB until I retired 5 years ago. I still manage a few databases for church. When I looked into it all I got was an endless loop of Microsoft websites.

Funny you ask, I was just thinking about this myself, regarding Microsoft Word in my case. And in looking around for such a thing—the standalone apps are out there, as it turns out—it occurred to me what’s happening. Obviously, Microsoft would prefer for customers to move to Microsoft 365 subscriptions and the steady, consistent revenues those subscriptions generate. And as obviously, Microsoft can’t kill off the perpetual standalone versions of the Office suite, given the customer demand (and the resulting regulatory overtones should they try to do so). Some keep expecting that whatever standalone version of Office is “the last version,” but they keep announcing new versions, each of which is limited in new ways. The recently announced Office 2024 will not be compatible with paid Copilot subscriptions, for example.

But what about standalone Office apps?

In the sense that previous versions of Office were long the biggest competitor to the new version of Office, I think we can safely assume that good enough products continue to be the biggest competitors today, and that in this age of Microsoft 365 subscriptions, those things are standalone (perpetual) Office suites, third-party office productivity suites (OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc., plus the former iWork apps on Mac), modern new productivity solutions like Notion and Slack, web-based solutions like Google Docs or e...