MS Office on my laptop - got 365 personal currently, expires soon

[AleisterCrowley]

Background - I took voluntary redundancy end of last year so was flapping around trying to get a phone and laptop sorted, having relied on work for these.
I ended up getting a mega-cheap Lenovo IdeaPad with Windows 11 Home and 1 Year of Microsoft 365 Personal (<£150 for the lot)
The 365 is about to expire.
I only really use Excel, and Chrome for browsing the internet.
I have no interest in IT for its own sake - and we had a good IT department who dealt with that

What's the cheapest way to keep the dashed thing running - buy another year of 365 or buy MS Office outright ? I'm 'always' going to need Excel etc for accounting/record keeping.
I'm somewhat confused as to what will stop working when the 365 expires, and the whole MS setup now is complicated with all the cloud based gubbins.
I really don't want/need to have access on my iPhone or multiple devices.

thanks
AC

[Urbandreamer]

Background - I took voluntary redundancy end of last year so was flapping around trying to get a phone and laptop sorted, having relied on work for these.
I ended up getting a mega-cheap Lenovo IdeaPad with Windows 11 Home and 1 Year of Microsoft 365 Personal (<£150 for the lot)
The 365 is about to expire.
I only really use Excel, and Chrome for browsing the internet.
I have no interest in IT for its own sake - and we had a good IT department who dealt with that

What's the cheapest way to keep the dashed thing running - buy another year of 365 or buy MS Office outright ? I'm 'always' going to need Excel etc for accounting/record keeping.
I'm somewhat confused as to what will stop working when the 365 expires, and the whole MS setup now is complicated with all the cloud based gubbins.
I really don't want/need to have access on my iPhone or multiple devices.

thanks
AC

The cheapest way is to ditch 356 and move to LibreOffice.
https://www.libreoffice.org/

I've been using it for years.

You say that you are not interested in cloud based stuff, so it's pointless to say that goggle sheets would also probably meet your needs well.

I suggest that you download and install LibreOffice as soon as possible. Then make sure that all your spreadsheets are converted.
A quick word though, while it LibreCalc does what excel does, it doesn't handle charts the same way.

[AleisterCrowley]

What's the LibreOffice business model?
What's their security like?
I don't want something full of malware, as I do all my banking etc online

[monabri]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

"The Document Foundation estimates that there are 200 million active LibreOffice users worldwide. Approximately 25% are students and 10% are Linux users; the latter usually find LibreOffice part of their preferred distribution"

[Urbandreamer]

What's the LibreOffice business model?
What's their security like?
I don't want something full of malware, as I do all my banking etc online

I haven't looked too deeply into their business model.
A brief investigation suggests that they sell paid support, which is not unusual in the FOSS community.

Personally I have few concerns about the security and also do my banking online.

You will also find others on TLF, running it. Indeed if you visit the Financial software board, you will be redirected off TLF to a different server where HYPTUSS (a spreadsheet produced and maintained by TLF members) can be downloaded. You will find both excel and LibreOffice versions.

You say that you have no interest in IT, so it is possibly that you have missed out on the existence of things like the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community and groups like FSF (Free Software Foundation).

GNU (the outgrowth of FSF) have produced huge amounts of free software, and encouraged others to do so.
For example here is TMF talking about one of the products under their umbrella.
https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/small-b ... sh-review/

Basically, strange as it may seem, there actually are people out there who work as a community to produce free software for the benefit of all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement

[Watis]

If you do decide to stay with MS 365, to renew for another year is £60 - you probably know that.

But it is only £54 from Amazon.

I couldn't justify the cost for Excel alone but, for me, the Onedrive cloud service makes it worthwhile.

I've used LibreOffice but it always feels slightly clunky compared to MS Office. Perhaps it's just me.

Watis

[Infrasonic]

Free...https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microso ... or-the-web

Free...https://support.google.com/docs/answer/ ... %3DDesktop

[AleisterCrowley]

My mum has some version of LibreOffice on her PC - I've never had much luck with it and a lot of the functionality I'm used to in Excel doesn't seem to be there, but it may well be an old version and I've never been bothered enough to check it out.
I've used MS Excel for work for the best part of 30 years, so I tend to 'think' in Excel, and all my tracking s/sheets etc are Excel

What about buying Office as a one-off?
The MS site has it as
but a search shows a lot of 'bargain'' deals - presumably there's a catch ?
https://getrenewedtech.com/product/offi ... c4QAvD_BwE
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Offi ... 338&sr=8-3

[Lanark]

but a search shows a lot of 'bargain'' deals - presumably there's a catch ?

Nope they are reselling corporate licences, Microsoft don't like the idea but they lost a major court case a few years ago and these stand-alone licences are 100% legal and supported.

Theoretically you could say they are second-hand, the company buys 1000 licences to get a bulk discount, they only use 900 and sell the other 100 to one of these resellers.

Now that we are no longer in the EU this could change in the future if Microsoft grease the right palms in westminster but so far that hasn't happened.

[AleisterCrowley]

So rather than pay £60 a year for 365, I could buy Office 2021 professional from Amazon for £35 and use it 'forever' ..??

[Infrasonic]

So rather than pay £60 a year for 365, I could buy Office 2021 professional from Amazon for £35 and use it 'forever' ..??

That's predicated on MS supporting stand alone Office for years to come with security and feature updates - as they make a ton of money from MS365 as SaaS with its annual fees I wouldn't like to bet on it...

[AleisterCrowley]

Nothing is ever simple...

[Howard]

I purchased MS Office 2021 from Livecards.co.uk for around £8 (it's currently around £8.25). A one computer lifetime licence. Have been using it for over a year. About four years ago I purchased Office from a similar supplier for a similar price for my PC and it's still going strong.

You do have to follow their advice on registering the product code after downloading but it's a simple process.

regards

Howard

[bungeejumper]

I purchased MS Office 2021 from Livecards.co.uk for around £8 (it's currently around £8.25). A one computer lifetime licence. Have been using it for over a year. About four years ago I purchased Office from a similar supplier for a similar price for my PC and it's still going strong.

You do have to follow their advice on registering the product code after downloading but it's a simple process

Yeah, that's the bit that bothers me. I'm no techie, but I gather that there are hacked versions of Office out there, where they take a licence and somehow disable its once-only, one-user registration. (Or something like that. ) And then they sell hundreds or maybe thousands of licences with the same registration, and they all work perfectly until Microsoft gets wise to them and disables them all. Without warning, since MS doesn't know who you are.

Fair enough, I suppose, you might get years of use out of a hacked copy like this. But the non-techie in me wonders. If there are a thousand other people with the same registration thingies as you, can they access your account? I mean, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean.....

Personally, I don't think £1 a week is a lot to pay for a kosher copy of 365. I buy a five-user Family licence for around £65 a year (shop around), and I use maybe three of them, and then I'm free to share any left-over userships with my friends or my family, or anyone else. Each user has his own account, and he can't access my data and I can't access his. Seems good to me....

BJ

[AleisterCrowley]

I'm vaguely worried I might get a hacked version with malware included that uploads my files and keystrokes to a server in God knows where

[Urbandreamer]

I'm vaguely worried I might get a hacked version with malware included that uploads my files and keystrokes to a server in God knows where

It's wise to be concerned, but also to think about where your concerns come from.

For example it it wise to download a pirated version of proprietary software rather than pay the producer. To be clear, this is not what anyone has suggested with respect to MS Office, but I raise it as an example.

Alternatively what are the dangers of downloading FOSS stuff. You are not a techie but the term open source actually means something. It means that those who are can examine the software. Indeed they can go further and rather than install the software they can compile it from source code, ensuring its safety.

Most of us don't usually compile such, but one or two of us have done so for specific reasons. In my case I had to compile the source for the WiFi adapter that I'm currently using.

The usual method is to be careful about where you get your software from. Then be cautious about how it runs.

My copy of LibreOffice came with my Linux distribution and is automatically updated. I provided a link to their home site, as it's the best place for you to learn about it. I'd also argue that I regard it as the best place for you to obtain an up to date copy. But you could download a copy from the Microsoft store.

Here is a link, though I recommend not using the link, but using the store app on your version of Windows.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/libre ... n-US&gl=US

This is of course not to say that the copy in the Microsoft store is certain to be free from defects. There was an issue with a weakness in the version of curl supplied with windows that Microsoft took their own sweet time correcting. Problems caused by attempting to install a more up to date version abounded. The only correct thing to do was simply to wait for Microsoft.

Hence why I think Windows users should download from the software home.

[Infrasonic]

...Alternatively what are the dangers of downloading FOSS stuff. You are not a techie but the term open source actually means something. It means that those who are can examine the software. Indeed they can go further and rather than install the software they can compile it from source code, ensuring its safety.
.

Linux Mint had it's main site hacked in 2016 and the download server had a compromised image put onto it - it got fixed within 24 hours but it highlights one of the issues with FOSS - you still need to pay people with very high level networking security skills to bombproof your infrastructure and they cost a fortune...https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994

Exim email...https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/0 ... worldwide/

Exim is an open source mail transfer agent that is used by as many as 253,000 servers on the Internet...

...Some critics have called out the Exim project for not transparently disclosing the vulnerabilities. Adding more fuel to the critiques, the ZDI disclosures provided a timeline that indicated company representatives notified Exim project members of the vulnerabilities in June 2022. A handful of back-and-forth interactions occurred over the intervening months until ZDI disclosed them Wednesday.

Cont.

Commercial Linux based NAS brands like QNAP, Asustor, Synology et al have all had security alerts over the years and their responses have varied from very fast (Synology mostly) to somewhat tardy. Microsoft have also had issues with response times to bugs, so it just shows that it's more dependent on the companies rather than the OS per se and whether it is open or closed source.

Most of the infrastructure of the internet is either Linux based or (decreasingly) BSD, so the OS hacks and exploits there are nothing to do with Windows or other closed source OS'.

There's a reason enterprises will use paid for Linux options like RHEL, Canonical (Ubuntu) et al, you get professional support with it and their coders will be contributing to the upstream codebase.

Netgate who do pfsense firewall contribute a big chunk of the upstream BSD code - they recently came under fire over starting to charge $100 a year for the semi-pro 'home lab' version of their firewall, despite there being a free community edition with almost as many features...

OPNsense is still entirely free but has security issues common to all free firewalls - developing them robustly costs a lot of money hiring coders as a modern FW is extremely complicated due to the exponential rise in the sophistication of the attacks.


Malicious AI is only going to accelerate the defensive complexity of the codebases.

The big players like MS, Google are under constant 24/7 cyberattack - they have no real alternative but to employ lots of highly paid security staff and have robust defences. Cloud services are much easier to patch quickly for zero day exploits than self hosted options (hence MS withdrawing from self hosted Exchange email options which rely on clients being up to date patched and configured correctly).

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-fbi-r ... -the-idea/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft ... nes-in-uk/

[Lanark]

I'm vaguely worried I might get a hacked version with malware included that uploads my files and keystrokes to a server in God knows where

I would also worry about that if buying via Amazon, they have an untold number of dodgy 3rd party resellers, but I used digital-zone.co.uk and they were fine. The install files were downloaded direct from Microsoft.

[Urbandreamer]

...Alternatively what are the dangers of downloading FOSS stuff. You are not a techie but the term open source actually means something. It means that those who are can examine the software. Indeed they can go further and rather than install the software they can compile it from source code, ensuring its safety.
.

Linux Mint had it's main site hacked in 2016 and the download server had a compromised image put onto it - it got fixed within 24 hours but it highlights one of the issues with FOSS - you still need to pay people with very high level networking security skills to bombproof your infrastructure and they cost a fortune...https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994

Indeed. To be fair it was not my intent to point the finger at Microsoft. Hence pointing to the Microsoft store.

In fact I had originally written some stuff about fake crypto wallets being added to Canonical's snap store. Then I removed that from my post as overly complicating things.

My point wasn't that FOSS is "safer" but that it is not inherently less safe.

You need to be careful whatever route you take.

[Howard]

l registered the code direct with Microsoft, so can't see any problems.

The software firm has been around for a while and get good reviews,

Everything is backed up by OneDrive and also on usb.

The risk of something nasty arriving by email is much higher in my view as an IT layman.

Regards

Howard