Do we need to buy Office 365?

growler834

I am a volunteer for a local charity & my husband has just been selected for 'ad hoc' work a few weeks a year with a large UK company. Both companies send information to their 'staff' using Office 365 attached to emails. We can't open these attachments on our home computer as we don't have Office 365 & the companies say they can't send them in another format and that our completed replies need to be returned in the Office 365 format. Does this mean we have to subscribe to Office 365 just to open these documents? Why do businesses assume that everybody has Office 365 on their home computer? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

GunJack

if it's word, excel, etc then any version of office from 2010 on should do it...2007 will work, but with some reduced functionality...if they are using the document-sharing aspects across many users you may not have a choice. I'd ask the company concerned for some clarification...

have a look here:-

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-should-know-before-buying-office-365/

Paully232000

Can you ask the organisations for access to 365. I work for a large company and it gives access to all its employees for up to 5 personal and work devices. They may allow you access. Worth asking.

Big_Graeme

What message are you getting when you try and open a document?
It may be a security setting that needs changing, try saving a doc to your hard drive, right clicking it, choose properties and on the first tab if you see an unlock button click it.

Big_Graeme

Better instructions here http://www.howtogeek.com/136901/how-to-open-blocked-files-in-office-2013/

Farway

You are volunteers, the organisation should work around you, if they will not or cannot then stop doing it

I am unpaid volunteer at local Age Concern FWIW

J_B

Can't you D/L and use Libre Office???

MS1950

growler834 wrote: »

I am a volunteer for a local charity & my husband has just been selected for 'ad hoc' work a few weeks a year with a large UK company. Both companies send information to their 'staff' using Office 365 attached to emails. We can't open these attachments on our home computer as we don't have Office 365 & the companies say they can't send them in another format and that our completed replies need to be returned in the Office 365 format. Does this mean we have to subscribe to Office 365 just to open these documents? Why do businesses assume that everybody has Office 365 on their home computer? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This free office suite (WPS Office) is probably the most compatible with MS Word and should allow you to read/save and change any word documents you receive:

http://wps.com/wps-office-personal/

There are also other free office suites that can also open read and save almost all word documents - particularly LibreOffice and OpenOffice

https://www.libreoffice.org/

https://www.openoffice.org/

RumRat

I Volunteer for a Military charity and we use office 365 at our office. We got it free with the BT business Broadband and most of the people in the office have just got into the habit of opening it up for emails etc.
Any emails we send are readable by whoever they are sent to. If I send stuff home to my own email address there is no problem opening the email and attachments and I use WPS office suite (free).
We receive emails from many sources into Outlook (part of 365), they all open and their attachments have no problems.
If you have an older version of windows i.e XP maybe the problem is just not being able to open docx documents or formatting your attachments as docx. As suggested, any one of the free programmes mentioned would solve this problem.
They changed from doc to docx in 2007.
Hope that helps.

paddyrg

Most likely you can use Office Web Apps versions (free) to fill in forms etc.

Mr_Toad

Why not just Office online?

It's free and should do what you need.

https://office.live.com/start/default.aspx