I’m long retired. I use Word and Excel sporadically only out of habit cuz I use to use them at work and I’m familiar with the commands.
This entire renewal process for software that you formerly could buy and use forever sucks. What alternatives exist for Word and Excel that are free or low cost?
Thanks for any input.
The most common one is Google Docs & Google Sheets. It is fairly well regarded but not 100% compatible with Office.
I know Excel VB doesn’t translate well and Word bookmarks really don’t convert to Google Docs well.
So for semi-advanced older stuff, there can be many problems. But for most people it is pretty smooth.
ETA: I fixed the title for you. Typo and added Office.
I’m also retired and I’m still using my Microsoft Office 2010, someday it won’t work anymore but thus far it is fine.
It will cost you a big, fat, zero to install LibreOffice and see if you like it.
In popularity, LibreOffice is #2 to the Google Workspace. Only Microsoft Office is ahead of them. So another good choice.
Stranger
I think we’re getting to the point where it’s more accurate to say that Office isn’t 100% compatible with Google.
I went looking for the current numbers, it appears Office is still ahead of Google thanks to businesses, but at home, that might be accurate.
Also at schools. Nobody (student or teacher) in any K-12 school uses Microsoft Office any more, thanks to Google’s tools being both free, and inherently cloud-based (and integration with Google Classroom doesn’t hurt, either). And what schools are doing now is what businesses will be doing in the near future.
Removed as untrustworthy Links.
Moderating: As they are known as a scammer site, I’m going to remove the reference to them completely.
This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.
Sorry. I didn’t know that site wasn’t reliable.
Almost certainly true as to newly created documents.
But for our audience here, who have a large legacy Office document collection and a fairly slow new document creation rate, and are looking to migrate from Office, using Office as the ruler and measuring Google is probably the more logically useful approach.
All this is timely for me since I’m about to replace my Surface and will need to decide if now is the time to migrate from locally installed Office (mostly Word & Excel; a smidgen of the other things) and local Outlook as my sole email / calendaring / contact / task manager tool. And what to migrate to.
I used to use Open Office back in the day, but it’s no longer supported. LibreOffice basically took its place. If it’s anything like Open Office was, it should work fine as a substitute for MS Office.
My rule of thumb is if the price looks too good to be true, it probably is.
I’ve seen scams like that enough to immediately go into Googling mode and it was indeed a Medium Risk Scammer Site.
So best to remove it I felt.
It’s the same lineage (which you probably know but the OP might not?) LibreOffice is a derivative of OpenOffice. OpenOffice became OpenOffice.org and then an evil company (Oracle) took control of it, so the community spun off LibreOffice. Oracle eventually gave OpenOffice to the more trustworthy Apache Foundation, but by then it was too late. Apache OpenOffice is mostly abandoned, and LibreOffice is now much more actively maintained by the community. (Edit: Much drama. TLDR LibreOffice is just the modern, maintained version of what used to be OpenOffice).
Still, I think Google Docs is way easier, personally. But if you like having files on your desktop, LibreOffice works fine. Either one is likely to work with low to medium complexity Word and Excel docs. Google is free for home use. LibreOffice is completely free.
Microsoft Office online is also free (it changes names and branding every so often, can’t remember what it’s called now, maybe 365 or something), and can open docs from the desktop app, but it isn’t as good as the desktop Microsoft apps or either LibreOffice or Google’s stuff.
I agree. The ONLY thing Microsoft is best at these days is Excel and then only for power users. If you really want to be able to make scary complex spreadsheets Excel is still the best, by far. But I doubt 95% of users come close to that level and the free stuff will suffice.
Maybe MS-Access? Not sure if there is a good free version of that (but I have not looked at it in a long time).
Otherwise, Word still kinda sucks. OneNote…some like it but not sure it is best. Outlook? Why bother when so many free options are available? Publisher is being discontinued in late 2026 so…why bother with that? Skype has been discontinued.
I do not see any value proposition for MS-Office anymore. Not at those prices unless you have a very specific use case.
I’m running Office 2003 on Windows 7. It works perfectly fine. Let me repeat that for those accusing some of us of being out-of-touch Luddites:
It works perfectly fine.
I can import and export the fancy-pants XML version of document formats via the add-ons that Microsoft kindly provides. I can even install Office 2007, but I don’t wanna, because I dislike the new interface.
Out of curiosity, what do y’all keep in your big piles of old documents anyway? Are these like old love letters, school reports, business contracts, tax returns…?
Are they treasured heirlooms you hope to hand down someday? Transaction records that you’re keeping around just in case? Works of personal creativity you hold dear?