I haven’t had MS Office on my private computers since Office 2003 and have been working with Open Office since then. But my main email for 25 years has been on Hotmail, which morphed into Outlook a few years ago and then even into a general personal MS account that’s linked to my Windows 11 installation. With these changes, the online Outlook app got extended with Word, Excel and Powerpoint some years ago, but I never bothered to use them because I thought they were somehow restricted because I’ve got no key for Office.
So today I had to type and print a small letter, and I thought why not give the online Word app a try. I could type and edit the document like with the desktop version, without any obvious restriction. The only restrictions were that I only could save the document to OneDrive, but it is synched with Windows Explorer anyway so this doesn’t matter, and strangely when I printed it, it was first transferred into a PDF before printing, but that was just one tiny additional step. So all in all, I could work with Word as if I owned a fully activated Office version. Why is that? Are there further restrictions I didn’t notice in such a small document (file size, advanced formatting etc.)?
Ah thanks, that site contains a table comparing the features of the free with the paid version, which answers most of my questions. I don’t write books or other large documents with complicated formatting and only need basic features for the occasional letter, so the free Word version should suffice for me.
MS also has competition from Google, which offers clones of MS apps for free, like Google Docs (Word), Sheets (Excel), Slides (PPT) etc. MS Office is better for managing business communications, but for the individual, Google’s apps are fine, and MS is at least going to offer a free equivalent.
That’s a good explanation for why MS does have the free versions. I was first surprised because for most of their existence, MS wasn’t exactly known for giving away their software for free, but I should have remembered that they even made Windows Home a virtually free OS in the last years (of course also caused by pressure from Google/Android).
The obstacle for me was not being able to access (local) PST files except with installed Outlook. I keep old emails, pack rat that I am. It’s only a matter of time before some services decide email older than, say, 5 or 10 years is not relevant and will disappear.
Just wanted to add that if you can’t or don’t want to use the online version of MS Office, but don’t want to pay the monthly (or yearly) subscription fee there are many third party sellers from which you can purchase a permanent license. If you are okay using an older version, the price is quite reasonable. I purchased such a license for my MacBook Pro about a year ago. Was very satisfied.
Yes, that’s what I did. A one-version-back copy of MS Office for about $60 I think it was. They sent a key and a download link. The key failed, but their tech support uggested “try the activation by phone”. That worked. It’s legit, they are usually copies that have been resold, for reasons like a business closed or changed to subscription service. As long as it’s not OEM and in the end user(s) abide by license terms, you can resell software you bought.