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Office Suite Suggestions?
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ghporter
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Dec 29, 2020, 01:52 PM
 
I need to set up a Windows laptop and I don’t want to buy into Office 365. I also don’t want to go with a subscription-based option.

What free or nearly free suite should I look into? Are OpenOffice and Libre Office as smooth and stable under Windows as under OS X?

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
ghporter  (op)
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Dec 29, 2020, 06:30 PM
 
Once I got my hands on it, this laptop comes, out of the box, with a full blown (and apparently stand-alone) Office installation. Even has Access...

So I’m just going to get rid of any bloat/crapware (which doesn’t seem to be a lot) and move on.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
Thorzdad
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Dec 29, 2020, 06:56 PM
 
You sure? I’d search around for some doc explaining the 30 day trial you’re now running.
     
Waragainstsleep
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Dec 29, 2020, 09:48 PM
 
It might be a free year, but it'll be limited one way or another.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
ghporter  (op)
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Dec 30, 2020, 10:24 PM
 
I’m doing what I can to figure this out without actually starting any of those apps. It’s a Dell business class laptop, new out of the box, so I’m not expecting a lot of sketchiness. But a little searching on the web site, and yeah, it’s a 30 day trial. Darn it...

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
OreoCookie
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Dec 31, 2020, 03:08 AM
 
Open Office/Libre Office should work fine. It’s been quite a few years since I used them under Windows, but I am sure they still work fine.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
     
P
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Dec 31, 2020, 11:08 AM
 
Depends entirely on which apps you need. There are lots of word processors and email apps, but there is nothing in this world that will even touch Microsoft Excel.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
Laminar
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Dec 31, 2020, 11:58 AM
 
For my uses, Google Sheets does what I need Excel to do, but my use cases stop at vlookup, I'm not fancy enough for pivot tables or any of those goodies.
     
ghporter  (op)
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Jan 2, 2021, 05:44 PM
 
Well since not even Numbers handles a couple of the Excel sheets I use, that seems to be a big issue. I’m also hoping to get something as Access-like as possible so I can start making better sense of some of the stuff I keep track of.

Yes, you can use Excel as a “kinda-sorta” database, but if you get past a couple of linked sheets, it gets hairy.

In doing some price research, I’ve found that there are third parties that sell licenses for Office. Disregarding the obviously sketchy ones (“only $9.95!!!”), it looks like the real question is whether there are any interesting catches involved in just exactly what kind of license one gets from these third parties. If anyone has any insight into this particular market, I’d love to hear about it.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
P
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Jan 4, 2021, 08:09 AM
 
For those not aware - Access is a dead man walking at this point. It doesn’t get any new features, and there are periodic rumors that MS is going to kill it.

As for the key resellers - these are so-called grey market keys. They can be from where someone bought them in one country where office is cheaper than in the US. That is legal, but I’m not sure how MS treats that these days. I think they generally accept them if you do phone activation, but I’m not sure.

They can however also be money laundering from credit card fraud. The way it works is this: Criminal steals a credit card number online. Criminal uses credit card to buy licenses - Office, Windows, games, etc. The card owner notices this and the bank issues a chargeback. The seller cannot invalidate the license key, so someone is out that money - it is either the software reseller or the developer. The criminal then sells the key on a site like G2A.

When it comes to games, legal reselling used to be common, because you often get a new game when you buy a GPU and some people want to sell that. Over time, GPU manufacturers began closing that loophole by checking for the presence of the hardware before activating the game. Second thing was buying games out of region and reselling them - e.g., buying a game in South America and reselling in the US. That hole was closed by having all the online stores implementing region checks, so that Brazilian code doesn’t work in the US anymore. This means that if you’re buying a grey market game code these days, chances are well over 99% that you’re financing credit card fraud. I don’t know that it is the same for Office. I don’t think MS region locks their versions, so it can be simple re-importing of out-of-market keys. I would be very suspicious, however.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
ghporter  (op)
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Jan 6, 2021, 04:15 PM
 
I’m not as much worried about advancements with Access as just having a full-featured database (that I already know how to use) in the first place.

I’ve spent some time researching “third party” vendors and the variety of prices and such. I almost got the MS suite through New Egg, but it turned out that the offer I liked was both “academic priced” and (this wasn’t at all clear on the web page) required purchasing 4 or 5 copies... So I’m really looking hard at one of the free suites now.

I might still give one of the third parties a shot, just to see what happens. If I’m risking a fairly small amount of cash (and only through a good credit card company), I would be more comfortable trying to learn something about MS licensing.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
reader50
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Jan 6, 2021, 04:30 PM
 
Try LibreOffice - it's the better-supported of the two. You can always spend money later if it doesn't work out.
     
el chupacabra
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Jan 6, 2021, 07:29 PM
 
… …
( Last edited by el chupacabra; Jan 5, 2024 at 12:07 AM. )
     
ghporter  (op)
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Jan 7, 2021, 03:06 PM
 
I had some time yesterday, so I installed Libre Office. Haven’t had time to mess with it yet, but the blurbs seem to indicate that “if you know Office apps, you’ll be fine with Libre Office’s apps.” We’ll see.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
   
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