MS Office Professional Plus 2013 - free upgrade?

DIYhelp76

Hi,

I have an old laptop which has MS Office Professional Plus 2013 on it.

I had been completely happy with this, but for some work I am doing, the employers have asked me to download and use their licensed online MS 365 (cloud based and most up-to-date).  I downloaded this but there seem to be compatibility issues and I'm now not sure which version I am running.

When I log on, the laptop now keeps saying "configuring MS Office Professional Plus 2013" and I've been unable to open some docs I had previously created using the old software.

Is there a way I can upgrade for free from the version I have on my laptop to the latest cloud based MS Office 365 (rather than relying on my employer's version).

Alternatively should I somehow (how?!) completely remove the MS Office Professional Plus 2013 and just rely on my employer's provided version?

The only thing that concerns me about doing that is if I no longer work for this employer and have wiped off my own version, then I would end up with no MS software.

I'm not very knowledgeable about this, so grateful for any advice/recommendations. Thx in advance.

giraffe69

It is better to have only one version going. You can uninstall Office pro 2013 from the control panel in Windows. You won't lose any documents. Older versions of Office used doc format and newer ones docx (similar difference for Excel and Powerpoint). I believe Office 2013 uses docx. If you stopped working for the company a. they might let you continue b. you could buy a version of office  or c. you could use on of the free versions such as Libre Office or Google docs which would open all the documents you already have

[Deleted User]

Office 2013 reaches the end of support in April next year so unless you think your job won't last that long then just uninstall.

Neil_Jones

Prior to 365 you could have as many versions of Office installed as you like, though only one of them can be the default for opening the files, and Outlook would the main exception to this rule, as the latest will always prevail. 

However since then the waters have muddied and while it can still be done, there are various caveats now:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/install-and-use-different-versions-of-office-on-the-same-pc-6ebb44ce-18a3-43f9-a187-b78c513788bf

ece69

Have you considered using the online versions of the MS Office 365 apps? Search for MS office 365 on line The forum police won’t let me post a link. 

Jenni_D

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-online-for-the-web