Cancel MS Office 365

[zinger1457]

Registered at my local community college for a class but never signed up for the class because of schedule conflicts. Got an email from the school reminding me that some software products were available as 'student use'. I've been using their Office 365 Pro product for about 2 years now, I think I had to reconfirm my student email after the first year. Not sure how long I'll be able to use it, still have my Office 2010 CD standing by if needed.

 

[aja8888]

We have kind of migrated over to Gmail these days. Nothing important is on e-mail and the work stuff is long gone.

Actually, the offspring just sends us texts these days.

My only living sibling (younger sister) doesn't use a computer (or email address) and has no cell phone.

Most of my communication with friends is face to face....remember that? Or we call each other....

 

[cranberryjoe]

I plan to install Libre Office for our Word, PPT, XLS needs, but apparently I'm going to lose Outlook too?

Keep in mind LibreOffice is not 100% compatible with MS Office file formats. If you have existing MS Office documents, they may not load correctly in LibreOffice and vice versa. Most of the problems I experienced were with spreadsheets that made heavy use of colors/shading and other fancy formatting, and documents with macros. If everything you have is relatively simple, no problem.

I used LibreOffice during my first two years of retirement before subscribing to Office 365 (first year was included with the Surface tablet I bought). I'm much happier now. I experienced a number of minor annoyances with LibreOffice that I knew I wouldn't have with MS Office. I do something with word documents or spreadsheets nearly every day, so $100 per year is acceptable to me.

I use the Gmail web client and phone app. I'm not super-happy with it and would like to find an alternative that I like, but haven't looked too hard yet. Since I have Office 365, I tried connecting Outlook to my Gmail account. Aside from Outlook struggling to handle my Google calendar and Gmail archive (can't recall the details but it just didn't work well) it brought back many bad memories at Megacorp spending all day long in Outlook dealing with emails and over-committed calendars while not actually getting any real work done. I'm ok using Word and Excel during retirement, but Outlook causes PTSD!

 

[Katsmeow]

As I mentioned, I like Office 365 and it is worth it to me for the cost.

That said -- there is one thing that could cause me to get rid of it. I have an SSD drive for my OS and I really don't want to Office 365 on that drive. It could be on my other hard drive just fine. But -- Office 365 can't be easily installed anywhere else.

I am about to have to upgrade the size of my SSD drive solely because of this issue. That is going to cost me a lot more than the price of Office 365.

 

[T-Minus]

I’ve gone back/forth on this issue for quite a while. My PC e-mail client is Postbox - a modified Thunderbird program. It pulls from both Gmail and Outlook mail perfectly, although about six months ago, an update introduced crashing issues that have been fixed in the last couple of updates. I’ve used Google docs/sheets for a year or two, but it didn’t meet all of my needs. Especially when we had a 2-day internet outage at my house, and the locally cashed copy DID NOT WORK! I tried LibreOffice, but my 1,300 row investment spreadsheet brought it to a grinding halt. Excel in the Office 365 package just works like I want, and I’m making extensive use of the included 1TB cloud storage space. However, I’m always on the lookout for ways to further optimize my set up, so love reading threads like this.

 

[Ready-4-ER-at-14]

I believe office 2007 is no long supported (regardless of windows version operating system), which is why I upgraded to 2016.

I really only use excel and my spreadsheet was very slow opening with the free programs. However if you did not shut it down and leave the machine on it seemed just as good. I have 42 linked tabs though so the free stuff may work just fine for you.

 

[Jerry1]

I believe office 2007 is no long supported (regardless of windows version operating system), which is why I upgraded to 2016.

I really only use excel and my spreadsheet was very slow opening with the free programs. However if you did not shut it down and leave the machine on it seemed just as good. I have 42 linked tabs though so the free stuff may work just fine for you.

Yes, 2007 is no longer supported. That is what I have and while not supported, still works. I just looked at the Office 365 site and they do have a version for home and students that just has Word and Excel (sorry, no Outlook) for $149 - no subscription. I may buy that and see if I can get that to last for the next ten years. Since I really only use Word and Excel, that limitation is not an issue.

 

[USGrant1962]

I bit the bullet and subscribed to 360 after I retired and my free corporate "home use" MS Office expired. The subscription includes six installs (I use 4 of them right now) and an extra gigabyte of storage on OneDrive. Works for me.

 

[Cobra9777]

For email, I mentioned earlier that I switched to eM Client Pro as a replacement for Outlook. For spreadsheets, I still use Excel. I have Office Pro 2010 on my main desktop PC. I obtained it via Megacorp's enterprise license for home use before I retired. I earned a living with Excel and I know it inside/out. I'm still a fairly heavy spreadsheet junkie. So I'll keep using it as long as it works for what I need. But just like with Outlook, at some point, I may have to look at alternatives. Outlook 2010 was no longer playing nice with the latest versions of Google calendar/contacts. When I researched email clients, I never found a free product that suited my needs completely.