Help required purchasing Microsoft Office

Tigsteroonie

dipsomaniac wrote: »

I bought office 2016 for less than a fiver a couple of years ago from eBay or just use office online for free

As I don't need to use my laptop when on the move (i.e.only when on wifi), I use Office Online too. Free with a microsoft login.

Frozen_up_north

A couple of issues here... adding an external DVD reader/writer costs around £12 for a USB powered one from eBay. I bought one for my Dell desktop recently, it is a “business” PC that only had a DVD reader.

Secondly, copying files from home to work on a USB stick will have your IT department going purple... any company or organisation worth its salt will either have disabled USB or restrict its use to specific encrypted USB sticks, it’s a huge security risk from both malicious software and sensitive material being leaked/lost.

Inner_Zone

Frozen_up_north wrote: »

A couple of issues here... adding an external DVD reader/writer costs around £12 for a USB powered one from eBay. I bought one for my Dell desktop recently, it is a “business” PC that only had a DVD reader.

Secondly, copying files from home to work on a USB stick will have your IT department going purple... any company or organisation worth its salt will either have disabled USB or restrict its use to specific encrypted USB sticks, it’s a huge security risk from both malicious software and sensitive material being leaked/lost.

Who mentioned company PC's, oh you did.



As for disabling USB ports, I visit numerous companies and occasionally have to install software or copy off data and the only organisation I have come across that restricts USB access is the MOD.

Frozen_up_north

The OP mentioned it yesterday, read the posts before criticism.
”I want to be able to open a document on one machine save it to a memory stick and then transfer it to the other and open without complications.”

It’s not just the MOD that lock down USB ports, still you know best.

Inner_Zone

Frozen_up_north wrote: »

The OP mentioned it yesterday, read the posts before criticism.
”I want to be able to open a document on one machine save it to a memory stick and then transfer it to the other and open without complications.”

It’s not just the MOD that lock down USB ports, still you know best.

I did not say it was, I said they were the only time I had come across it.

J_B

kazmeister wrote: »

........... does not have a disc drive so I am unable to install an old disc version we have of Office Home and Student.

Which year's version of Office do you have?


You could download it and then enter the key that you already have.

that

Tom99 wrote: »

I use OpenOffice and as far as I am aware any macros I wrote in excel do not work at all when the file is opened with OpenOffice.

MS's own versions of excel sheets are sometimes not even backward compatible with newer versions.

hyubh

kazmeister wrote: »

I want to be able to open a document on one machine save it to a memory stick and then transfer it to the other and open without complications.

LibreOffice will allow you to open a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file fine. The problem will be if you then want to edit it, and have things appear as if you had edited the file in the original application - it's not that even advanced features aren't implemented in LibreOffice, it's that the implementation of those features will obviously be different, which makes things appearing 'a bit odd' will be a running issue.

Basically, if you want to be able to edit MS Office files without worrying about whether the changes will appear as intended by the recipient, you need a copy of Office itself. If so, go for Office Home & Student 2019, i.e. the 'perpetual licence' version, rather than Office 365, which is the annual subscription version.

hyubh

that wrote: »

MS's own versions of excel sheets are sometimes not even backward compatible with newer versions.

Not true in any substantive sense... clearly, if you use the odd new function added in 20 years, it's not going to be compatible with an old version, however you can quite easily work with .xls files created in Excel 97 and for the changes to be 'roundtripable'.

that

hyubh wrote: »

Not true in any substantive sense... clearly, if you use the odd new function added in 20 years, it's not going to be compatible with an old version, however you can quite easily work with .xls files created in Excel 97 and for the changes to be 'roundtripable'.

Actually there is or was a mortgage sheet to be download. The link to the site was posted here some years ago on MSE, then a newer version of excel came out and the sheet no longer worked, so now there were two sheet of the same thing, and neither version worked in Libre office correctly