Hey all! Got a [probably dumb] question...

Replaced the main PC here at HQ a few months ago, and it had an old v of MS Office on it (2007 maybe?) and it went away with the old HD.

Anyway, I use Excel and Word on occasion, but not much else. With Win11 upgrade, I got some knockoff substitute (OfficeSuite) and don't like it.

What's the scoop on getting an older copy of Office? Or do I need to go to the MS Store and just spring for a new copy of Office?

Have you considered going indie?
Softmaker (from germany) has a real nice office competitor/emulator that I like a bit better.
Its low cost or no cost.
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/

I use Open Office 4.1.11 from Apache. It's free and beats the crap out of MS.
https://www.openoffice.org/

AZhitman wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 09, 2021 3:03 pm

Hey all! Got a [probably dumb] question...

Replaced the main PC here at HQ a few months ago, and it had an old v of MS Office on it (2007 maybe?) and it went away with the old HD.

Anyway, I use Excel and Word on occasion, but not much else. With Win11 upgrade, I got some knockoff substitute (OfficeSuite) and don't like it.

What's the scoop on getting an older copy of Office? Or do I need to go to the MS Store and just spring for a new copy of Office?

I believe you were using Office 2010. Microsoft moved it to a cloud based system, and you have to pay an annual subscription fee to use it.

VStar650CL wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 11, 2021 6:31 am

I use Open Office 4.1.11 from Apache. It's free and beats the crap out of MS.
https://www.openoffice.org/

How does that compare with their other program, LibreOffice? I know they're both completely free, but are they both fully compatible with MS Office?

Haven't used Libre so I can't really comment. Open can import/export in all the MS formats, and the full suite has all the functions of Excel, Power Point, Paint, and the other popular MS utilities. I use it for everything.

I've used LibreOffice on Linux deployments... didn't realize they had it available for Windows!

I only ran into issues with LibreOffice to MS Office in a very uncommon scenario of using a node.js script to calculate/populate fields on a spreadsheet and another node script to build a PDF report based on contents of the spreadsheet. The LibreOffice format would sometimes include an extra space or otherwise empty character that wouldn't convert to XLSX properly... if that gives you any idea of how far in the weeds I had to get into LibreOffice to have an issue.

There are ways to "acquire" older versions of Microsoft Office, typically through torrents and such.

If you'd like to delve into it, let me know and I'll help you.

Openoffice is good enough for simple encoding.

I've been using OpenOffice for several years now. I find it to be a really good substitute, especially for the price of $0!