The Lemon Fool

Hi,

My dad has a 12 year old Windows laptop originally with MS Word. He spent a lot of time creating a document of our family history and I set it up so he could use headings, numbered bullet points etc. He had a live copy on his laptop and backed it up onto a memory stick every so often.

Unfortunately he got taken in by some scammers who managed to get onto his laptop before my niece arrived and intervened. However, it left him locked out of the machine so he took it to PC world who flattened it and rebuilt it with a base Windows 12. No MS Office.

He has a smart phone and tablet, so the only use for this laptop now is just for this document. Therefore I would like to get this document restored, then disable Internet access so it's basically a stand alone machine.

So can someone recommend a free program that will run on a Windows machine, that doesn't require internet access? I don't really need to convert the .doc, just read it and I can manually change the headers etc.

thanks

Mick

MickR wrote:Hi,

Therefore I would like to get this document restored, then disable Internet access so it's basically a stand alone machine.

So can someone recommend a free program that will run on a Windows machine, that doesn't require internet access? I don't really need to convert the .doc, just read it and I can manually change the headers etc.

thanks

Mick

1. You could buy a new Mcrosoft Office for £8.25 to include Word (and Excel, Powerpoint,Outlook,Publisher)

https://livecards.co.uk/en/microsoft-of ... -1-user-pc

I've used this company twice this year as have other Lemons.

You can then open the existing file that your Dad has created.

You will need to have internet access to download the software and then to "register" it using the umpteen digit code that Livecards sends you.

ok - not quite free but ~£8 for MS Office.

2. You could download LibreOffice for Free.

If your Dad had an old version of Word, LibreOffice might be more look-a-like to the old "Word". Microsoft brought out their ribbon interface and it might be confusing ...well it us to me, I'm forever trying to find out where something is.

You will need to have internet access to download the software.

You can then open the existing file that your Dad has created.

As it is "free" ...why not try it.

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/


Having downloaded (1) or (2) you should then be able to disconnet from the internet.

LibreOffice Writer

The LibreOffice user interface might be more familiar to your Dad if he was using an old version of Word.




Microsoft Word with "ribbon" interface

monabri wrote:

MickR wrote:Hi,

Therefore I would like to get this document restored, then disable Internet access so it's basically a stand alone machine.

So can someone recommend a free program that will run on a Windows machine, that doesn't require internet access? I don't really need to convert the .doc, just read it and I can manually change the headers etc.

thanks

Mick

2. You could download LibreOffice for Free.

If your Dad had an old version of Word, LibreOffice might be more look-a-like to the old "Word". Microsoft brought out their ribbon interface and it might be confusing ...well it us to me, I'm forever trying to find out where something is.

You will need to have internet access to download the software.

You can then open the existing file that your Dad has created.

As it is "free" ...why not try it.

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/

Having downloaded (1) or (2) you should then be able to disconnet from the internet.

Another rec for LibreOffice. You can install it as a normal Windows application, or you could download the portable version to a USB memory stick and just copy that across to your Dad's laptop (or even just run it from the memory stick). The portable version is identical in features and usage to the installable application
https://portableapps.com/apps/office/li ... e_portable

--kiloran

kiloran wrote:The portable version is identical in features and usage to the installable application

--kiloran

Is it? Not that it matters for the OP, but the installed linux version skips the python macro extensions, which must be installed separately.

This only matters if you are going to write and use macro's and the macro's are different from Word. But identical is quite a strong word.

Ps, I'm also fan of LibreOffice and agree that it will do everything that the OP wants.

Urbandreamer wrote:

kiloran wrote:The portable version is identical in features and usage to the installable application

--kiloran

Is it? Not that it matters for the OP, but the installed linux version skips the python macro extensions, which must be installed separately.

This only matters if you are going to write and use macro's and the macro's are different from Word. But identical is quite a strong word.

Ps, I'm also fan of LibreOffice and agree that it will do everything that the OP wants.

Everything? That's quite a strong word

--kiloran

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to try the libre office option. I'm not keen on ms word as they will ultimately push everyone online to 365.

Thanks again

Mick

If your dad doesn't get on with LibreOffice for whatever reason, you might want to consider WPS, which does feel very similar to Word with all the buttons and drop downs in the same place, although it can be naggy - but there are ways around that I understand.
https://www.wps.com/office/windows/

torata

(nb: I use LibreOffice for personal and am happy with it, but Word nowadays tends to be more intuitive. My wife hates LO)

torata wrote:
(nb: I use LibreOffice for personal and am happy with it, but Word nowadays tends to be more intuitive. My wife hates LO)

I have found that what tends to be more intuitive, is what you are use to. You know, like driving on the left and using a knife and fork for us. If we were in the US, no doubt it would be driving on the right and using a knife OR fork.

FWIW, my wife uses LibreOffice because I didn't buy word decades ago. She seems quite happy to use the spreadsheet for household accounts.

MickR wrote:...Unfortunately he got taken in by some scammers who managed to get onto his laptop before my niece arrived and intervened. However, it left him locked out of the machine so he took it to PC world who flattened it and rebuilt it with a base Windows 12. No MS Office...

How did he get scammed, by a telephone call or spam phishing email?

Depending on how modern the smartphone is you could set him up so only calls from numbers in his phone contacts come through, everything else gets dropped/sent to voicemail.

With email you can set up many webmail accounts to be safe senders/contacts only these days and the authentication requirements for email have just been upped by the big providers like Gmail/Yahoo et al to cut down on spam (which seems to be working if my most spammed Hotmail account recent volumes are any indication).

I presume you meant Windows 10 as a PC that old (14yrs) won't officially run W11 and W12 isn't out yet

If you want to go down the Libreoffice route it will run natively on Linux and there are distros that are very Windows like in their look and operation...https://itsfoss.com/windows-like-linux-distributions/

On older hardware you'll probably find Linux will run better than Windows as there's less code bloat. If you google the exact model number with something like 'running linux on ********, any issues' then if it comes up clean it should be relatively straightforward to install and get running/update.

Another advantage would be scammers running windows scams are unlikely to follow up on someone running Linux (so far anyway...), you can still access free MS365/Google Docs via the browser interface if you really need to at some point in the future (I've been using both since inception), updates can be invoked manually which helps stop unexpected background slowdowns etc.

Forgot to say above...

Ransomware lock outs.

Properly configured cloud storage will actually help in a ransomware situation as it will auto-save previous versions of documents as immutable 'read only' copies until you 'restore' them - at which point they become read/write only if you have editing permissions.

Same with a decent NAS at home with cloud sync as offsite backup and snapshot/WORM capabilities locally.

With free cloud services you just have to watch out for the time limits on versioning retention which are often only 30 days. Some paid solutions are unlimited / ten years but then you'd need to keep an eye on max storage limits being far more easily breached.