[Closed] Buying older version of MS Office, online sellers legit?

If it sounds too good to be true...

Just use libre or the like?

Just use libre or the like?

Not heard of that, I'll take a look. Thanks. I have tried to get by with the Google Documents stuff but they are pretty limited. I'm comfortable with word, access, excel etc and have loads of old documents I still access, so whatever I get needs a similar interface and ability to open and modify older office docs. I'm too old and CBA to learn anything too different!

They aren't legit - it's usually reselling MS volume licence keys so they may work or they may not (MS invalidate them once they become aware they're being resold).

I've used Softmall before - I bought Office 2019 from them last year for around £20 and had no problems.

How often do you use it?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/free-office-online-for-the-web

Mrs F wrestled with Libre Office but I gave in, in the end and I got a 2019 Home and Student (so Word, Excel and Powerpoint) from Groupon for around 30 quids. Was it legit? No idea? Did it work? Yes.

Cheers all, food for thought and some leads to follow.

@Cougar has it - just work on a free hotmail/outlook account in the cloud. It really will only take a few goes for you to get used to it.

MS invalidate them once they become aware they’re being resold.

I had a VM delicense itself as MS revoked the license (which was a legit one through work).

Almost certainly not legit. I approached a seller a few years back who was flogging Office 20xx for Mac for about twenty quid and asked them if it was a genuine licensed product. His response was classic:

"yes, it's all legal mate. I purchased it earlier this year and deceded [sic] to share the love"

This looks like it might be legit for £83

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Student-one-time-purchase-multilingual/dp/B086916RPB/ref=sr_1_11

After reading this thread...

https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/the-best-way-to-buy-microsoft-office/

... And despite no response to my post, i took a punt on softmall. I did need to phone the activation number and it involved a load of entering of key info but it was all an automated service and worked fine

2010 and 2013 can be bought SH on DVD and downloaded. Support has ended for 2010 but so what your house won't burn to the ground!

I use 2007 on one machine 2010 on another and Libre when in the mood, they all get the job done. Unless you need specific advanced features or are fussy about UI consistency they are still just word processors, spreadsheets and presentation slides.

Admittedly MS made patching 2007's validation process a PITA on purpose to discourage people from using it, but it does patch up and work fine in W7, W8 and W10 once you know which updates it needs!

So after following the thread link @nuke posted I bought Office 2019 Home and Student from softmall.co.uk/ for £24.99. I got a free upgrade to MS Office Pro. I've just been through the product activation process with Microsoft and all seems tickety boo.

I did see your link to the free online version @Cougar but as I said in the OP, we have a flaky rural internet set up, so I prefer the ability to work and save stuff offline. Our kids are grown up and we don't have any grandkids so the student/school licence option was no use to us.

I've tried a couple of cheap office licences because I'm tight.

1st cost about £4 and worked, but the licence was a pain in the ass as it came attached to a gibberish e-mail address so wouldn't work with Teams etc.

2nd cost £15ish and was a bit of a faff, followed the instructions, but then it wouldn't accept a licence key (I suspect this was user error), eventually it expired but the website sent a new one without any faff.

Do I feel guilty? No. Back when I had a real job I paid £6 for a licence via work, but that expired with my job. And there was no way I was able to pay for a full licence without a job. Now I've got a new job with a Microsoft licence. But I'm not going to dig into how to change the licence key just for the sake of it.

Most of these cheap versions are not legit. So it will come down to your moral compass and how you feel about it. The software may well work but there will be no guarantees, as mentioned above. Microsoft 365 Personal is currently £60 per year. It is a subscription model so if you go that route you will be on the treadmill as the software will more or less be disabled when your subscription expires. There also seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around about Microsoft 365 as well. Yes, it is a subscription model and yes Microsoft offers cloud services but the M365 Office products are still downloaded and installed locally on your machine. They are not "cloud" versions.

Also, going for older versions: Yes, they will still work but no, you won't get any patches or updates for them as they will be outside the support lifecycle. Again, your choice. They will work just fine but be aware that any security issue that hasn't already been identified and fixed, won't get fixed.

The other option can be dependent on your work situation or whether you have one or more students in the house. There is usually a very good student deal for Office that will better the M 365 Personal option. Or, if your work has an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft they may well also have home use rights which would allow you to download and install the Office products for about £20. And that is a legit way of getting the software. 🙂

Check out www.guru3d.com
Scroll down main page for Advertorial offering Windows & Office Inc standalone 2019 ver) for not much
Caveat: Haven't used myself - work in IT for a Uni - but Guru3d itself is a long-standing site

Another one for softmall with no issues, bought the 2019 version for around £20, hought it was worth a gamble.

Received instructions, online instructions didnt work, however went through telephone verification and worked a treat.

Did it sound like a scam? Yes - was i worried it was a scam? Yes
Turns out it was completely fine.

Out of interest,

What do you all need MS Office for?

Work? Your employer should be providing it. There's also the HUP programme.

School? Same, the school should be providing it.

Writing a letter twice a year and keeping a track of personal expenditure? Wordpad, OneNote, MS Office Online, Libre Office, Google Docs, a supporting cast of thousands of other alternatives.

Who actually needs MS Office for personal use, aside perhaps from the self-employed? It's a huge suite of collaborative productivity tools, I've used it for 25 years and I've barely scratched its surface. What are you all doing with it?

Out of interest,

What do you all need MS Office for?

Work? Your employer should be providing it. There’s also the HUP programme.

School? Same, the school should be providing it.

Writing a letter twice a year and keeping a track of personal expenditure? Wordpad, OneNote, MS Office Online, Libre Office, Google Docs, a supporting cast of thousands of other alternatives.

Who actually needs MS Office for personal use, aside perhaps from the self-employed? It’s a huge suite of collaborative productivity tools, I’ve used it for 25 years and I’ve barely scratched its surface. What are you all doing with it?

OP here. Retired, so can't get it from work. Kids grown up and working, no grandkids so can't get a student licence. When I worked I used it a lot, so familiar with the interface. I have lots of old forms and spreadsheets I've designed for various hobbies and household stuff. My wife runs a small business and I do the admin for her so have used it to track accounts, produce flyers, design invoices etc.

I have occasionally dipped my toe back in to employment, consultancy or volunteering and may do so again. So have had to produce powerpoint presentations, CVs etc. for interviews. I am well aware that there are probably hundreds of other programs that could do what I want for free, that may be better suited and that I am barely scratching the the surface of Office's capability. However I'm familiar with it, like the interface and the fact that I never have issues sharing documents with others. I simply can't be arsed to research alternatives and learn how to use them. At 57 I just don't have the patience to learn how to use new software unless there is a very good reason for me to do so. I'm currently trying to learn how to use DaVinci resolve which is a massive ball ache. I'm sticking with it because I want to be able to do a fair job of video editing and I don't have years of experience of similar programs. I've nearly given up loads of times but I have a motivation to keep at it but its effing hard work.

Edit to say "Who actually needs MS Office for personal use"? No one probably, but delete MS Office and insert a thousand other things people own/use but don't strictly 'need'.

What are you all doing with it?

easily and reliably opening/saving/sending out documents to other people using MS Office suite. I used office at work for years but nearly always turn to the simplicity of G-suite now for my own stuff but that doesn't completely reliably maintain formatting and layout for Word docx (and the spreadsheet is still missing loads of commonly used stuff from excel). Any doc with images in it is pretty certain to get scrambled for a start.

Excel is probably the most misused piece of software of all time - I've seen it being used as a page layout tool amongst other things to present a largely text based report each month to senior management. just the sort of formatting that all gets completely ignored or scrambled by switching to another app.

What are you all doing with it?

Its mostly excel i use to be honest, i do something called matched betting and excel allows me to track where my bets are and my profit and loss very easily.

Its also easier to have word on the computer in case i need to write any letters, but i dont tend to use word very much anymore.

I have a word form to book my sons nursery hours, and trying to use the free version online that the nursery supply is an absolute pain in the harris.
So for £20 odd quid i will happily pay to be able to use it for the infrequent use i need it for.

easily and reliably opening/saving/sending out documents to other people using MS Office suite.

For personal use?

Its mostly excel i use to be honest, i do something called matched betting and excel allows me to track where my bets are and my profit and loss very easily.

Google Sheets?

Its also easier to have word on the computer in case i need to write any letters

Wordpad? Free, already installed on your computer and perfectly adequate to write letters.

I'm not looking to have an argument, I'm just curious. I rather suspect that in a lot of cases it's because "that's what we use." It's an office productivity suite, it is feature-rich and one of its primary powers comes from it's collaboration features. From experience spending many years in support, the majority of people who use it in a professional capacity don't know how to actually use it properly. Hell, I'm likely better than many and I don't. Mail merge? Pivot tables? VLookups? Not a clue.

For occasional use there are many, many other options that don't require either a monthly subscription, a grey licence that might stop working tomorrow, or an lump outlay North of £100. It feels like it's the default choice simply because it is the default.

For occasional use there are many, many other options that don’t require either a monthly subscription, a grey licence that might stop working tomorrow, or an lump outlay North of £100.

hmm. just Ebay searched and maybe MS have had a crackdown.

I picked up a Mac2016 (in 2017) 3 user volume licence for £9.50. The volume licences are legally sourced (though they're obviously not supposed to be sold to individual users) and I've never had one stop working. Likewise MS OEM operating system licences (which were sometimes sold with a bit of hardware to comply with licecene terms that never actually got sent out)

Doesn't seem to be anything like that on eBay at all now.

Apache OpenOffice is pretty good, at least for what I use it for (speadsheets and basic word processor stuff) and it's free.

I'm converted to Office 365, full suite, 5 users, 1 Tb each cloud storage, £80 per year, less than Netflix. I never liked the idea of subscription software but In this case seems reasonable.

Same as @stumpyjon - that's for my business (2 of us) and two offspring. My youngest is still at Uni so gets hers free but at £80 with the cloud storage, it seems a no brainer. I did used to use the stuff supplied with the Mac, and it's fine but ALL my customers use MS and sometimes there were issues between the two.

All of ours are downloaded. I use Visio on the web as there isn't a Mac version.

For one user tho, there might be a better option.

Just try LibreOffice and see how you get on. It's free and will open/save MS Office and lots of other formats too. We use it at work alongside MS Office 2016, though MS stopped providing updates for that version.

It's perhaps not as slick as MS but it's genuinely free and open-source. At home I've converted a lot of my personal Excel files to the OpenOffice formats so I'm not locked into Microsoft (which is what they want).

https://www.libreoffice.org/

Otherwise there's Google docs/sheets/drive. Zoho.com is a free alternative that I use for some shared spreadsheets. Admittedly using these online apps in the browser is slower than a desktop app but it's all backed up for you and again it costs nothing to give them a try.