Free MS Office downloads - are they safe?

searchlight123

I keep seeing Youtube videos to download and run free MS Office software. The videos are pretty straightforward and appear (on screen at least) to work fine.

What's the catch? Do they work? 
One such vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7FbMAKzBU

Has anyone done this and been using it successfully? I'm still on an extremely old Office 2007 package that works fine but I realise how outdated this is now.

Peter999_2

Hi,

If you follow the instructions in the video then it is perfectly legal and fine to do.   I used to create the configuration.xml files for deployment where I worked (we'd deploy thousands a year) and it is fine.

However, you will have problems in that it will not activate and a lot of the functionality will stop working.

What the guy in the video is saying is that if you are lucky, your PC might already have a digital licence to use MS Office but I can't see that being the case for you.   If you've never bought it previously and you have never bought Office and linked it to your Microsoft account then it will not activate.

If you read the comments to the video you will see that he confirms that.   To be honest, it's just clickbait really (though it's interesting to know that you can use a GUI now to create the configuration file - I used to have to manually create it back in the day.

There are ways to activate Office but they would be illegal (though quite easy to use).

Andy_L

you can use the web versions of Word, Excel & PP free & legally via Microsoft

Olinda99

I have office 2007 and just use word and excel. I have no need for more.

400ixl

Just use www.office.com and set yourself an account up. Then you can use the online versions free for as long as MS support that. Pretty much all of the features that people use are available in the online version.

Downloading and installing the Office applications locally you can do free and will get a trial period. That will expire though and you won't have a legal way to permanently active the install legally or free though.

GDB2222

I think the office.com url still works, but I use:

https://m365.cloud.microsoft/

It's fine for occasional use.