Buying Microsoft Office

Olinda99

I have a very back-level of Office running fine on Windows 11.

Neil_Jones

Problems with older versions of Office tend to be related to things like OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), which is a technology that hasn't been bundled (officially) with Windows since the days of XP, and its existence in Vista and later is purely for legacy reasons.  Vista implemented User Account Control, which screwed up things for a lot of legacy software as the default was to assume you were an administrator (which you 99.9% of the time were), and things like OLE tied into bits of Windows that required the extra permissions..

IIRC Office 2003 introduced something that does break in 7 and later, but I can't remember what this was, I think it was one of the default add-ins.

On a basic level the core functions of typing, saving, raw functionality in Office is usually unaffected, but the likes of Outlook will probably keep losing features (particularly with email servers/support/technologies) as time passes.