MS Office

AlatMartins

My free 30-day trial of MS Office is ending, renewing it is expensive, but cheap offers of MS Office Professional 2019 keep appearing on my Facebook page.
They claim to be legal, at various prices between $9.99 and £27.95, around £100 less than on the official MS site.  If they're NOT legal, why doesn't Facebook block them?

unforeseen

Most of them are mis-used volume/education licences that are liable to be pulled by MS

Petriix

I bought a licence key on Ebay for about £3. It worked fine and the software is all still running fine after 4 months. As far as I can tell they can't 'pull the licence' on your installed software, but it almost certainly wouldn't work again if you needed to reinstall it later for any reason.

unforeseen

They can pull it while it's in use. Just don't allow it to do updates because that's one of the routes that invokes the licence validity check. 

J_B

Petriix said:

I bought a licence key on Ebay for about £3. It worked fine and the software is all still running fine after 4 months.

I got a 'five user' one off E Bay for about a fiver about 18 months ago - still working fine with all updates.

Just got a new PC but couldn't find the password for the above so had to splash out another £1.99. It has updated so far without issues.

Neil49

You can always use Libre Office which is free and, for general purposes, just as good. 

unforeseen

Neil49 said:

You can always use Libre Office which is free and, for general purposes, just as good. 

Just don't do anything slightly more than basic that an Office user might look at though

inspectorperez

Neil49 said:

You can always use Libre Office which is free and, for general purposes, just as good. 

Have to chip in and say that I do like Libre Office and if Microsoft ever start pulling licenses for whatever reason, I would have no hesitation in ditching Office Suite altogether. Mind that would be a huge financial write off - all of £5 I think!

[Deleted User]

Never tried LibreOffice but find the free online version of Office does suffice for simple documents.

twopenny

Gabi, could you put a link to the online version please? Can you save documents to your hard drive with it?

I've used Libra Office and find it runs really well. Now I don't need to input loads of data or run off multiple letters it does the every day things I need at home.

Were_Doomed

twopenny said:

Gabi, could you put a link to the online version please? Can you save documents to your hard drive with it?

I've used Libra Office and find it runs really well. Now I don't need to input loads of data or run off multiple letters it does the every day things I need at home.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-online-for-the-web
https://uk.pcmag.com/office-suites/90356/how-to-use-microsoft-office-for-free-on-the-web