Programs available to cut ties, save fees for Microsoft Office
A few readers have asked us what would happen if they stopped paying Microsoft $70 to $100 a year for Microsoft Office 365. Would there be a knock on the door late at night? Men in black suits? These are questions we have asked ourselves many times, usually just before breakfast.
We ask no more. That’s because we switched back to Microsoft Word 2007, which is more manageable, and of course out of date.
So the next question to be answered is this: Does it matter? In short, what do you use Microsoft Office for? Most people get Office 365, the $100 a year version, just to use Word. That’s their word processor. The other popular features are Power Point, for presentations, and Excel for spreadsheets.
The next question to ask is are you a business or a home user? Because if you’re not a business, one with many demands from the computer, it’s hard to justify paying an annual fee.
The next, next question is: so where do we get the earlier version? Do a Web search and you get prices ranging from around $60 to $150. You can go to WPS.com and get a program very similar to Office for free; it’s gotten good reviews. Walmart has a $29 program similar to Office called Libreoffice. Apache OpenOffice (OpenOffice.org) has a free program very similar to Microsoft Office and it’s been available for decades.
These are not made by Microsoft, of course, but they work and you only have to answer the last question: what do you really use it for?
HOW IT BEGAN
Our rejection of Office 365 was triggered when Joy couldn’t get her computer started, and had no idea why. At the opening screen, she couldn’t type more than a few letters of her password before the computer stopped
accepting keystrokes. So she used the Windows recovery option to reformat her computer. This is a drastic solution, and recommended only in dire circumstances The recovery process held on to her files but wiped out all of her programs. The good part was this turned her computer into a speed demon. The central processing unit used to run at close to 100 percent, and so did the disk. Now, when we check the Task Manager,
both are usually running at less than 5 percent.
Windows put a list of the removed programs on the desktop as a reminder to reinstall them. It’s a long list. We are pack rats and tend to keep all the programs we’ve ever used. We have stuff that’s still on floppy disks and even old hard drives that have been removed from our computers when we replaced them. We have a tape drive printer that went out of production forty years ago.
Chief among those programs we decided not to reinstall was Office 365. We have a perfectly good copy of Office 2007, and there are many things we like about it. For one, although Office 365 claims to back up the files you save to the OneDrive folder on the computer screen, it never did. Every week we save a rough draft of our column to OneDrive, but when we looked, the most recent one saved online was from June. It turns out you have to be signed in to OneDrive, by clicking the icon in your task bar. But it’s flawed. You can right-click a file to “keep it on this device,” meaning it’s on your computer and in the cloud. But if it’s accidentally erased on your computer, it disappears from your online account too.
We love the old Office 2007 file-listing feature, which is also in previous versions of Office. By clicking the “orb” in the upper left corner of Word (or by clicking the word “File” in previous versions), you can see a list of whatever files you most recently worked on and then click on the one you want. Office 365 removed that ever so convenient orb and now the files list opens up in a separate app. The programmers probably laughed all the way through that meeting.
So why did we sign up to renew our subscription to Office 365 last year? There was a dire warning about losing our files. But it turns out this happens only after 30 days, which gives you plenty of time to move the files to a new folder on your computer, or to an external drive. Thumb drives are really cheap these days.
To cancel a subscription to Office 365, search on “cancel Office 365.” They don’t make it easy. We went round and round a couple of times until we found the billing page. To save time, go straight to account.microsoft.com/services/ office/billing. (There should be no hyphens in that address.)
THAT DARN HYPHEN
A reader wrote to Joy, saying his note to Bob came back to him. That’s because he had a hyphen in the address, between the “Bob” and the “Schwab.” It should read bobschwab@gmail.com (no hyphen). If you see a hyphen printed in a Web or email address, take it out.