Microsoft Office

[Juanco20]

What's the easiest/cheapest way nowadays to get Excel & Word on to a single laptop for personal use.

Or is there a free alternative out there that actually works?

[Cpl nobby nobbs]

Libreoffice is pretty good, works on windows or mac. This will do Word Excel PowerPoint etc can output docs in the same format.


https://www.libreoffice.org/

[p4cks]

https://www.cjs-cdkeys.com/products/Microsoft-Offi...

[Derek Smith]

Juanco20 said:

What's the easiest/cheapest way nowadays to get Excel & Word on to a single laptop for personal use.

Or is there a free alternative out there that actually works?

I've used both MS Office and Libre. In some ways, I prefer Libre.

Libre is stable, it is easy to learn and does enough for me, and I write for a living.

It has a downside; when using large and/or complex spreadsheets, it is not entirely compatible with Excel. Or so I've read. It's not something I've ever experienced.

I had my copy of MS Office supplied by a customer who was shocked to discover, after some months of us working together, that I was using Libre. It came up in confersation. He supplied me with a key to the version he used at his company that had a number of users available. So I tend to use it. I expect him to withdraw it at any time, and then I'll go onto Libre without any qualms.

I've used Softmaker Office way back, about 2010 or so. I liked it. It was fast, useless-feature-free and had the best interface of any suite. There's a free version, which I haven't tried, but has excellent reviews.

[williamp]

I use a 365 account. Not free obviously, but you can use them on any machine, and you get huge storagewhich can be accessed anywhere

[mikebradford]

Just had the same issue.

Bought a new computer thats Windows 10 home. As such it has Microsoft 365 which is browser based versions of word etc.

Its an absolute nightmare to get traditional office apps on this computer even though I bought the licence key of Amazon.

Everytime I go to download the pc based version of office it wants me to pay, and I cant successfully say I've already got a key

[littleredrooster]

I've been using OpenOffice for years and prefer it to the modern versions of Word.

[AJB88]

I use Libre and/or Google Docs.

[paulrockliffe]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

2019 was the last version on Home Use Program that is pay once and keep forever. It's now a discount on O365 from £9 to £6 a month or something. It's still a good option if you use it, but the £10 and off you go option was perfect for people like me that can go months without using it, but need it there for occasional stuff.

I don't use anything other than Excel to be honest, but even that I can live without now as SQL Server and PowerBI Desktop are both better for what I use it for and free. Rather than learning Excel formulas, just learn SQL and DAX instead.

The good thing is that MS are quite lax on Office licensing, I guess they really don't care as the more you use Office the more likely you are to end up on a 365 subscription. I recently built a new machine and went around the houses to make sure I could move my 2019 license over, did it the way the internet says to do it and it moved, but it's still activated on the other machine as well. I guess so long as the machines are both on the same Microsoft Account, with the keys associated with the account too, they can be fairly sure it's the same person using a different machine rather than some grand scheme to defraud the system.

If you download and install Office you can delay activating it for as long as you like too, if it's like Windows activation, it probably works fairly adequately unactivated anyway.

[jimmydash]

After a career using Excel and Word etc. I was nervously reluctant to move off that suite, however, got brave, and gave Libre a go about a year ago. It's superb with No downside. I can swap info back and forward with MS users with no issues and it does everything I want it to.

[Man-At-Arms]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Looks like you ‘buy’ an educational email (.edu /.ac.uk or similar) and gives you access to a O365 A1 account
Which is actually free from Microsoft
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/acad...rimaryr1

Won’t be long until this is found out by Microsoft and stopped.
Or even discovered by the sysadmin at the education establishment and reported, then stopped.
Whatever, I wouldn’t entertain the idea

[hyphen]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Normally these are Family accounts, i.e. they buy one membership and then split and sell.

The lifetime license does seem odd, but Microsoft is fully aware and has been for years that some people won't pay anywhere near the full price, and if these types of resellers are not around, they would either pirate, or worse, use Libre Office or something else.

As long as Microsoft's office sales are growing acceptably, I suspect they will continue to tolerate these. As the last thing they want is Libre or anything else to grow to a significant level.

[deckster]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

What they also don't mention is that they'll have full access to anything you use and/or store. Plus they'll be able to revoke the account at a moment's notice.

I also wonder what their customer service is like when you forget your password?

But then somebody who thinks that paying £7.50 for lifetime access to the entire Office suite is in any way legit probably doesn't think, or care, about anything like that.

[paulrockliffe]

Exactly, but it's more than that - all the money is in corporate accounts, where no one else gets a look in because, "All our staff already know how to use Office" is a very persuasive argument.

I'm sure the only reason they charge for proper office desktop is that it would undermine O365 personal subscriptions, which is also a gateway to corporate money.

Look at SQL Server, Visual Studio, PowerBI, Azure too, everywhere they make good money from corporates they let personal users have it or play with it to learn. In those cases it's all free because there's no conflict.

[nikaiyo2]

littleredrooster said:

I've been using OpenOffice for years and prefer it to the modern versions of Word.

OpenOffice is VERY good, agree on Word but I find excel to be miles better than the O/O equivalent, but its likely just familiarity.

[LordGrover]

I'm Microsoft 365 user and quite happy as my employer supplies the licence.

From playing about on Linux and not getting on with Libre Office I usually end up using OnlyOffice. It's pretty good and free for home use.

[Harpoon]

mikebradford said:

Just had the same issue.

Bought a new computer thats Windows 10 home. As such it has Microsoft 365 which is browser based versions of word etc.

Its an absolute nightmare to get traditional office apps on this computer even though I bought the licence key of Amazon.

Everytime I go to download the pc based version of office it wants me to pay, and I cant successfully say I've already got a key

What license did you buy from Amazon? Office 365 Personal / Family? Or a "classic" Office Home & Student type license?

[eeLee]

O365 for a family is brilliant value, also available on the HUP (home use programme). You get Office on all of your devices + 1Tb of storage EACH for a family of 5/6 (I can't remember which).

I pay about 50 quid a year for this. It's better than perpetual licences in my opinion, I hammer OneDrive storage.

[paulrockliffe]

eeLee said:

O365 for a family is brilliant value, also available on the HUP (home use programme). You get Office on all of your devices + 1Tb of storage EACH for a family of 5/6 (I can't remember which).

I pay about 50 quid a year for this. It's better than perpetual licences in my opinion, I hammer OneDrive storage.

Yeah, though it's worth bearing in mind that the cloud only O365 is free, including Teams if you wanted to setup a cross-family collaboration space.

You make a great point about One Drive - I'm integrated into Google Drive and pay £3 a month for the extra storage on there, at some point I should wean my photos off that and go back to Microsoft as the same money just about gets you into O365 and perpetual Excel updates!

Data storage aside, as I see it, unless you're using Excel extensively you're only really paying to avoid reliance on the Cloud and you might as well carry on using a £10 perpetual license even then if you can. There's not much in Word that the home user needs that wasn't there 10 years ago, there' s nothing in Excel 2019 that wasn't in 2016 that wasn't in 2010 that most people use. All the development in the last decade has gone on integrating data sources and a relational database model aimed at corporate users, people at home just bash out painfully inefficient formulas using functions that were available way back.

Does anyone make PowerPoints at home? And if you do, would you admit it?

It would be great if they really went to town on O365 for the home though, they could spin it into something really good for running your household with a bit of thought. Eg, if you give your school your email address it auto APIs the school calendar from their O365 setup for your kids, then they could build an education platform that bridges home and school so you can see if they've done their homework and what marks they got. Integrate Open Banking and resurrect Microsoft Money, etc etc etc.

[paulrockliffe]

I just had a look at pricing, it's £56 a year for 1Tb for me and 1Tb for my wife on the Home Use Program, plus I could pretend to be 4 other people to get another 4Tb. Vs £19 a year for 100Gb of Google One - Which is enough for me. The 2Tb storage option is £80 a year, so Microsoft are trashing Google on that!