Need air-gapped version of Word/Office

In My Humble Opinion
21

Yeah, if that involves paying an annual subscription, i ain’t doing it. I might even write to my Congress critter to bitch about it. I need a copy of office because i collaborate with people who use office on a variety of volunteer stuff. It’s going to be a huge pain if i need to downgrade to libre office. It’s a great suite, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not quite compatible, and that matters if i want to edit my slides and then toss the presentation to the other guy presenting with me.

22

I’m wondering if it’s already too late to keep Word from committing seppuku, or if it will be too late after the deadline.

23

Open Office has been essentially unsupported for over 10 years. If you want to try an alternative to Word, you should use LibreOffice, which is a fork of Open Office but is still supported and maintained. I use LibreOffice and it’s pretty good, although it is not 100% compatible with Word, so you should definitely try all the Word features you use to verify that it has the full functionality that you need.

24

Similar user of LibreOffice here, and echo the same “mostly” compatible.

My compromise is if I do have to share a fully compatible file is to use the online “free” version of 365 (blech, boo, hiss) but otherwise use LibreOffice for any personal documents.

I do note this isn’t the best fix for the OP’s stated needs, but for anyone else facing such, it beats paying $100+ a year in subs, or laying out the better part of $200 for a one-computer only licensed copy that may or may not be fully installed locally.

25

Wait, OP, if you’re on Windows, then:

  1. The read-only mode shouldn’t apply to you anyway. What exactly did the notice say, and are you sure it was from Microsoft and not malware?

  2. Was your copy of Word activated before you blocked its internet access? Strange that a perpetually licensed copy would de-activate itself after losing internet connectivity, hmm. Was it a retail copy, or possibly one of those cheap ebay keys, or..?

26

You should be able to get its license status with this (just run it from Win-R):

cscript "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS" /dstatus

Or for the 32 bit version:

cscript "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS" /dstatus