Microsoft Office for Windows 10

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

As Mike said, it depends on which version of MS Office you're talking about.
I've been using Open Office at home for the last few years, and while it will do everything that Word and Excel do, it's not as smooth and polished. If both were free, I'd choose MS office every time.

[paul cottingham]

Or just download open office which is completely free.

And install it on Linux, which is also free. And free from Microsofts latest spyware infested "updates."

[paul cottingham]

As Mike said, it depends on which version of MS Office you're talking about.
I've been using Open Office at home for the last few years, and while it will do everything that Word and Excel do, it's not as smooth and polished. If both were free, I'd choose MS office every time.

And i would argue, actually, that it is just as smooth and polished, you just may not be as familiar with it, cause its not locked into Offices GUI. Oh, and open office has a far greater compatability range with existing docs, and often opens them more cleanly, with less reformatting.

[Ralph Boumenot]

I agree with you. I have both and I prefer to use open office. I've been using it for years now and I find it as good if not better then the Microsoft offering.

[Matt Meiser]

I've been using Open Office at home for the last few years, and while it will do everything that Word and Excel do, it's not as smooth and polished.

Is that true? Last time I evaluated it, it did not support quite a few features like macros and pivot tables from Excel and some animation features from Powerpoint. I also saw it mess up some formatting in a Word doc. If one expects to bring home a document from school or work, work on it, and take it back they may be sorely disappointed or worse. That killed it's viability in our house.

No one has mentioned OneNote either.

[Al Launier]

Interesting questions that I hadn't thought of.

I currently have W8.1 & use Office Home & Student 2007 which includes: Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007 and OneNote 2007, as well as Windows Live Mail. I have the free W10 download that I'm holding off installing. Will the W10 be able to use the Office Home & Student 2007 suite and thw WLM?

Also, is there a time limit on how long I have to download the W10?

[Curt Harms]

Is that true? Last time I evaluated it, it did not support quite a few features like macros and pivot tables from Excel and some animation features from Powerpoint. I also saw it mess up some formatting in a Word doc. If one expects to bring home a document from school or work, work on it, and take it back they may be sorely disappointed or worse. That killed it's viability in our house.

No one has mentioned OneNote either.

That's a problem. It's also why European governments are beginning to mandate no .doc, docx, xls, xlsx etc. documents that are to be archived. .PDF is fine. Someone might want to open a digital document in 10,20,30,50 years and be able to read it as written. They have no confidence in proprietary Microsoft formats there. Here's a trick I've seen for editing MSOffice documents in Openoffice/Libreoffice but I have no experience with. Open the MSO document, save it in a native format - .odt, ods etc. and edit that. Save that native format version then do 'save as' and select the MS format. .doc and .xls are reputed to be more reliable than .docx and .xlsx. Worth the fooling around? I guess it depends on how often you have to do it. Newer MSO versions are supposed to be able to open and save .odf formats; I wonder how well?

[Matt Meiser]

Archiving is different than editing. And it doesn't matter what Europe does or whether Office can open odf files if the corporate or school standard is the latest Office formats.

[paul cottingham]

Office isn't compatible with old office docs, at least not without some reformatting, so thats a red herring IMO. And you get to pay for the privilege of reformatting your old docs.

[Matt Meiser]

Its no red herring. Its life. If the boss says you use XLSX or DOCX or whatever, that's what you use. You destroy it because you wanted to work on it at home using it with an incompatible product because you're too cheap to pay $80 a year, you pay the consequences.

And over the last several years I've seen very little issue with migrating Office versions with Word and Excel. I've got a couple clients who use spreadsheets with a bunch of VBA code behind them that haven't been modified in 8-10 years. No issues using them today other than adjusting macro security settings. I have some ancient word docs about the same age that I can open fine too but other than formatting to corporate appearance standards, they aren't terribly complicated.

[Barry McFadden]

I use a fairly new version of MS Office and when saving a Word document I always save it as a doc file rather than a docx file and have no trouble opening it in older versions of Office.

[Curt Harms]

Archiving is different than editing. And it doesn't matter what Europe does or whether Office can open odf files if the corporate or school standard is the latest Office formats.

That standard may not be immutable. Remember .wpd and .wks?

[Matt Meiser]

I don't disagree. But again...editing...here...now...

[Jim Becker]

The table on this page describes what's included with the current version of MS Office

https://products.office.com/en-us/co...ffice-products