The Lemon Fool

I'm running Office 2010 and have decided an upgrade is necessary.

Amazon have Office 2019 CD ROMs and licence keys for £82.99, below the usual £120. Sold by Amazon, not some Marketplace scammers.

That seems like a good deal to me. The only thing holding me back is the possibility of Office 2021 being launched soon.

My choices are Office 2019 @ £82.99 or wait for Office 2021 at an unknown price. Second opinions are welcome.
I don't even know if Microsoft typically offer good upgrade deals or special offers when a new version of Office is launched.

I'm EXCLUDING the following options:
1 Open Office -I've tried it and it does not meet my needs
2 Office 365. No way ! I have an aversion to recurring subscriptions. 10 years at £59 =£590. I'd rather make a one off payment.

jaizan wrote:I'm running Office 2010 and have decided an upgrade is necessary.

Amazon have Office 2019 CD ROMs and licence keys for £82.99, below the usual £120. Sold by Amazon, not some Marketplace scammers.

That seems like a good deal to me. The only thing holding me back is the possibility of Office 2021 being launched soon.

My choices are Office 2019 @ £82.99 or wait for Office 2021 at an unknown price. Second opinions are welcome.
I don't even know if Microsoft typically offer good upgrade deals or special offers when a new version of Office is launched.

I'm EXCLUDING the following options:
1 Open Office -I've tried it and it does not meet my needs
2 Office 365. No way ! I have an aversion to recurring subscriptions. 10 years at £59 =£590. I'd rather make a one off payment.

I used to think that but Office 365 gives you 1,000 gb of Onedrive online storage (so I stopped my Dropbox subscription which was £99), brilliant as backup etc, and also you can use it on multiple PCs (I have it on all 6 of mine). Finally I do find the stock market functions in Office 365 Excel very useful and easy.

Microsoft are steadily making it less attractive to buy Office outright. I doubt there will be any significant difference between Office 2019 and the next version for day to day use. Microsoft's main aim seems to be to move us online, so I would expect even closer integration between the Office apps and the cloud/Onedrive. If you don't want this, then stick with standalone Office 2019. For example, it used to be that my Excel spreadsheets would all autosave. Now, this only happens if the document is saved in the cloud on Onedrive. You can't autosave a local-only document any more!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/off ... 39bd27eb96

As above, the main benefits of the subscription are: 1) install on up to five devices for the same price 2) cloud storage/backup 3)integration of the two so that your Office documents are easily saved to and accessed from the cloud 3) automatic updates as new features or fixes come along. But it costs more if you haev only one device and you're willing to run the same Office version for more than 2 or 3 years.

I think the deal you are looking at is for the Home & Student version of Office. Note this does not include Outlook - only Word, Excel & Powerpoint. Subscription users get Outlook as well (plus Publisher I think).

If you do buy it, you end up downloading it, and it's linked to a Microsoft account. If you ever need to download and reinstall it in the future, you must know the password for the Microsoft account you used. There is no other way!

scrumpyjack wrote:

jaizan wrote:I'm running Office 2010 and have decided an upgrade is necessary.

Amazon have Office 2019 CD ROMs and licence keys for £82.99, below the usual £120. Sold by Amazon, not some Marketplace scammers.

That seems like a good deal to me. The only thing holding me back is the possibility of Office 2021 being launched soon.

My choices are Office 2019 @ £82.99 or wait for Office 2021 at an unknown price. Second opinions are welcome.
I don't even know if Microsoft typically offer good upgrade deals or special offers when a new version of Office is launched.

I'm EXCLUDING the following options:
1 Open Office -I've tried it and it does not meet my needs
2 Office 365. No way ! I have an aversion to recurring subscriptions. 10 years at £59 =£590. I'd rather make a one off payment.

I used to think that but Office 365 gives you 1,000 gb of Onedrive online storage (so I stopped my Dropbox subscription which was £99), brilliant as backup etc, and also you can use it on multiple PCs (I have it on all 6 of mine). Finally I do find the stock market functions in Office 365 Excel very useful and easy.

What scrumpyjack says, and you could buy the single user Personal edition for £45 from Amazon.

I have the family version, RRP £80, but this year's subscription renewal cost just £49, also from Amazon.

HTH,

Watis

jaizan wrote:I'm EXCLUDING the following options:
1 Open Office -I've tried it and it does not meet my needs
2 Office 365. No way ! I have an aversion to recurring subscriptions. 10 years at £59 =£590. I'd rather make a one off payment.

I'm not surprised Open Office doesn't meet your needs - it's pretty much dead. All the serious open source support moved over to LibreOffice years ago.
The latest release is 7.2 and is well worth trying before handing over any money to Microsoft.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

PhaseThree wrote:

jaizan wrote:All the serious open source support moved over to LibreOffice years ago.
The latest release is 7.2 and is well worth trying before handing over any money to Microsoft.

Actually, Libre Office is what I have. Ideally I would be delighted if they could stick it to Microsoft, but Libre Office doesn't meet my needs at all.

Watis wrote:What scrumpyjack says, and you could buy the single user Personal edition for £45 from Amazon.
I have the family version, RRP £80, but this year's subscription renewal cost just £49, also from Amazon.

I'm after a one time purchase & a subscription is out of the question.

jaizan wrote:

PhaseThree wrote:

jaizan wrote:All the serious open source support moved over to LibreOffice years ago.
The latest release is 7.2 and is well worth trying before handing over any money to Microsoft.

Actually, Libre Office is what I have. Ideally I would be delighted if they could stick it to Microsoft, but Libre Office doesn't meet my needs at all.

I'm curious - what is it that you find LibreOfiice can't do ? I use both LibreOffice and Microsoft 2016 and find them pretty much interchangeable.

Watis wrote:I have the family version, RRP £80, but this year's subscription renewal cost just £49, also from Amazon.

Yes, it is well worth keeping an eye out for offers on Amazon. It's on a "Deal of the Day" for the next 5 days - £50 for 15 months plus a copy of either Norton or McAfee (you don't have to install them!).

I use Libre Office on my desktop and find it almost perfect. The only thing I find it fails at is probalistic modelling (Monte Carlo simulations).

My wife has Office 2010 on her desktop, which handles that work just fine.

I hope that helps.

Allitnil wrote:

Watis wrote:I have the family version, RRP £80, but this year's subscription renewal cost just £49, also from Amazon.

Yes, it is well worth keeping an eye out for offers on Amazon. It's on a "Deal of the Day" for the next 5 days - £50 for 15 months plus a copy of either Norton or McAfee (you don't have to install them!).

Also I'm fairly sure you can buy that Amazon offer and then use it to extend your existing subscription by 15 months, rather than pay for the Microsoft renewal.

I have similarly used offers on Amazon to extend my Ifit Treadmill subscription for £10.34 as compared to the ifit renewal of $183!

scrumpyjack wrote:Also I'm fairly sure you can buy that Amazon offer and then use it to extend your existing subscription by 15 months, rather than pay for the Microsoft renewal.

Yep, I always do this. Actually bought 2 lots of 15 months when there was a similar offer earlier this year, no issues getting both added to my account.

Also another point on the family licence is that it can be shared with 5 other people and then each of them can install it on all of their devices and each can be signed into 5 devices at once. Also each of the 6 family users gets their own 1,000gb of OneDrive storage.

scrumpyjack wrote:Also another point on the family licence is that it can be shared with 5 other people and then each of them can install it on all of their devices and each can be signed into 5 devices at once. Also each of the 6 family users gets their own 1,000gb of OneDrive storage.

I have the same subscription, I wasn't sure initially (as I don't like subscriptions normally), but Microsoft 365 has been excellent in my opinion.

Latest up to date office and managed to get rid of my NAS too which was on it's way out, happy having everything in the cloud and saves me a lot off hassle.

PhaseThree wrote:I'm curious - what is it that you find LibreOfiice can't do ? I use both LibreOffice and Microsoft 2016 and find them pretty much interchangeable.

Well, with Word, the first thing I like to do is copy RNS announcements from Investegate, paste into Word, then I can highlight and annotate what's of interest.
With Word, this works.
With the Libre office thing, I get lots of unwanted artefacts which take a lot of removing. I do not want to waste any time at all on that.

The spreadsheet is more a case of getting used to it. When I have tried it, I end up crawling back to Excel 2010.

I have seen this place recommended on HotUKDeals https://theunitysoft.com/

I haven't used it myself as i am on Libreoffice as i don't want to pay a subscription.

This doesn't answer the OP but in case anyone is interested Amazon have Office 365 Family for £49 for 15 months today.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/deal/8d374d4b? ... 2_8d374d4b

Boots wrote:I use Libre Office on my desktop and find it almost perfect. The only thing I find it fails at is probalistic modelling (Monte Carlo simulations).

My wife has Office 2010 on her desktop, which handles that work just fine.

I hope that helps.

Gloriously off-topic, for which I apologise, but I'm curious as to why you perform probabilistic modelling, and why on a spreadsheet?

WinBUGS/ JAGS etc are easily obtained (and free).

MDW1954