I pay $84/year for Microsoft 365. I have been looking at Open Office and it does the same thing for free. I, almost exclusively, use it for spreadsheets with a very occasional word document.
Is there any reason for me to keep Microsoft 356?
Thanks
[OP]
Contributor
I pay $84/year for Microsoft 365. I have been looking at Open Office and it does the same thing for free. I, almost exclusively, use it for spreadsheets with a very occasional word document.
Is there any reason for me to keep Microsoft 356?
Thanks
Dennis
Contributor
But it does not have all those important new features!!! WHAT? I need to write a letter or do a spreadsheet, what has changed I Need in the past 30 years?? I stopped buying Office with XP. Be sure to Save with the .doc and Excel formats.
Last edited by Bill George; 02-10-2023 at 7:51 AM.
Retired Guy- Central Iowa.HVAC/R , Cloudray Galvo Fiber , -Windows 10
Contributor
If it works for you, no reason not to. Similarly for using Google Docs, or the Apple productivity suite, or any of the other alternatives. Some of us have 30+ years of brain training that make us reluctant to switch and learn the subtleties of a new system at this point, so pay for that privilege. There probably hasn't been a critical new feature in Word since Word III way back when (I think that's when good footnoting was introduced), but knowing all the tricks and shortcuts that decades of daily use has engrained has value. If someday they'd make placing images actually work well I'd revise my opinion of the best version.
Moderator
My reason for not considering that? OneDrive. A terabyte of storage for every user with access to the account for a hundred bucks a year and accessible from multiple devices per person. I don't actually use the applications much, but do use Word, Excel and Powerpoint from time to time. Others use the apps more because of school or work, depending on the individual.
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
Contributor
The biggest reason to stick with MS Office would be file compatibility. For business use that can be critical. Libre Office (Open Office successor and recommended) doesn't really support MS macros. Especially in Excel that can be a deal killer. There are other office suites that are said to have better MS Office compatability. OnlyOffice and Softmaker Office are other choices. WPS Office is said to have the best MS Office compatibility. I haven't tried any of them, Libreoffice does what I need it to do.
Contributor
I haven't checked into the 3rd party spreadsheet offerings lately but it used to be that they didn't offer the macro programming capabilities and some of the more sophisticated data anslysis worksheet functions that Excel does. I was a bit of a power user of Excel during my IT career and none of the Excel alternatives could do what I needed to. That was a few years ago though.
If you are a basic user of spreadsheets then Open Office is probably going to meet your needs. If you are a power user, you should dig in to the details to see if it will meet your needs.
Brian
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger or more complicated...it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - E.F. Schumacher
[OP]
Contributor
Thanks everyone for the advice.Originally Posted by Brian Tymchak
I am very far from a power use, so I think Open Office will do everything I need. I plan to work with it for a week or two before I cancel my subscription
Dennis
I would recommend LibreOffice as it is the more active version. I recently ran into a problem with Open Office that occurs in the Calc program. You can copy and paste a single cell as many times as you want. If you select more than a single cell the spreadsheet locks up and you have to use the task manager to shut it down. Then you have to try to recover your spreadsheet. This problem has been reported, yet no permanent fix has been forthcoming. LibreOffice doesn't have that problem. My understanding is that the majority of programmers that supported OpenOffice got fed up and started a new free software package that is actively supported.
Lee Schierer
USNA '71
Go Navy!
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(raises hand) Yup. Sometimes there's no substitute for real programming.
I've gotten pretty good with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, which CorelDraw also uses). I'm sure the open-source versions have something similar (using Python or Ruby or some such), but I'm well past the point where I need/want to learn yet another language/dialect. And at only $60/year for every device in the house, there's just no real incentive to do so.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
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I have been running Office 2000 since it first came out. no need to pay yearly
Contributor
Maybe not for a home user, but, I could write volumes about the times, in business, that people had really serious compatibility issues because they didn't upgrade when they should have.
+2 for Libre Office. It has active support and is regularly updated.
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon
Member
Funny you should mention the updated features. I still have and use Office 2000 with W11 on my desktop machine! They say it can't be done, but I have the original disk and it works. Unfortunately my new laptop has no CD/DVR drive, like most. So I downloaded Libre-office.
Member
May be unique to the first machine I tried using Open Office but it was so slow to open that I've never used it since. LibreOffice seems fine for my limited use.
Contributor
As long as the desktop still has a CD/DVD drive, it can be shared to the laptop. (I'm assuming the two machines are networked.)
Worst case, you can export the disk's image to an ISO file and copy it to the laptop. Win11 can open it as if it was a physical disk.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
As an Excel power user, one major feature missing in all other spreadsheet apps is Power Query. This gives Excel an in-memory database capability that allows it to extract, transform, load and analyze just about any data source. I’ve seen Excel load and analyze more than 300 million rows which far exceeds the max row limit for a worksheet. Granted this feature is only needed if your doing more complex analysis work in a business environment.
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