Microsoft office.

skunkwerx

hey all. 

Ok so last xmas I bought myself a better laptop. My old one was so old that when it was new it came with microsoft office (word, email/outlook etc) fully installed for good! 

Was a bit of an annoyance to be told by the sales guy they no longer come with word and email, and that a yearly rental/subscription would set me back £50. 

So what do you guys do? 
Windows comes free with a stripped down basic email program which is ok, but I have 3 email adresses one for professional images and 2 which over the years have been attached to everything from youtube to microsoft to facebook which I usually just get notifications and account info through.

so I've had the freebie windows program under one of my emails, and I use the full blown microsoft office outlook for my more professional email.
the third one i just never check because its a gmail one used for google accounts, youtube etc so only ever get youtube notifications through. Not that important that one. But if i want to I just go to gmails website to check it.  

Unless there is a way to just use one program with multiple email accounts? Im not computer literate! 

Either way email programs arent the biggest problem, as I can either go online to hotmail or gmail and check them there, or just check one of them which i have set up on my iphone. I just find it clearer to have one email account per program so i dont get too confused!
so for example my virgin email is used with full blown paid for outlook, hotmail is used with the windows free email program and gmail i just check on the website. 

My gripe is word. I dont feel like paying £50 for a years subscription to ms office for all 5 or so programs, when all I really use is word and email (which as said I can check elsewhere but having a full
program is nice).

I'm 28 but going on 82 arent i? Haha. 

I've seen argos are doing office + mcaffee livesafe for £50 all in. Seems ok, as a years livesafe came with the laptop so thats what I've been using for protection. Has a few useful tools built in too. I presume its the full mcafee livesafe anyway that argos are doing... 

Any opinions welcome! 

TTony

skunkwerx said:

Unless there is a way to just use one program with multiple email accounts? Im not computer literate! 

There are various solutions to do that.

I have 10+ email accounts all going into one Outlook instance (on my main PC).  I can send emails from any of the separate accounts from Outlook.  Easy to set-up and operate.

I have my "main" email accounts also available on my iPad.

skunkwerx said:

Was a bit of an annoyance to be told by the sales guy they no longer come with word and email, and that a yearly rental/subscription would set me back £50. 

That's because MS have shifted from a selling-software to a software-subscription model.  It smoothes their revenues, makes them more predictable, helps combat piracy, and hooks people in more effectively.

However, you can still buy previous editions of MS Office, legally, and opt out of MS' new business model for a few years.

Like here;
https://softwaregeeks.co.uk/product/microsoft-office-2010-professional/?gclid=CIjm7bfxydACFQUq0wodDmkAgg

monquixote

Thunderbird is free and will do as many accounts as you want.

Grunfeld

Funnily enough I just downloaded and installed the latest update to Libre Office tonight.
It's free, it's safe, it's Open Source, and it's so similar to MS Office that you can just switch -- including keeping the MS file extensions like doc or docx etc. if you want to.  There are a couple of minor issues which can be irksome... but then I remembered that MS Office wasn't exactly free of irritations either! 

While on the subject... I like to put a shout out for Scrivener.  This is actually the best writing program ever.  If all you're used to is Word and Word-alikes then you don't even know how much better a writing program can be.  It's not free but it's only about £30.  I've used it for creative stuff and academic stuff and just random stuff.  In fact any writing always gets done in Scrivener and only when it's totally finished do I export it to "Word" format or pdf. 

As for email, I'm a confirmed gmail user with all my different emails funnelling into the one gmail account.  But if I wanted a program to do it like outlook I would probably still be using Thunderbird.  But I ain't no power user so maybe there are better things out there now.

skunkwerx

Cheers all, i shall have a look into all that! 

Fretwired

Don't go near Windows 2010 ... it's no longer supported and is not secure.

Here are some free options:

https://www.lifewire.com/top-free-windows-email-programs-1174215

Iamnobody

You might be able to get a copy through your work. Microsoft Home User I believe it's called.

Basically if your Co. is participating and you have a valid work email address you can download a copy for a tenner.

I looked into it and I am entitled but haven't bought it yet. 

maidenfan

Open / Libre Office. Used it for a couple of years, no difficulties, very similar to word.

Sporky

Wordpad is all most people need for word processing.

For email I can recommend Thunderbird and EMclient.

Sporky

Iamnobody said:

You might be able to get a copy through your work. Microsoft Home User I believe it's called.

Basically if your Co. is participating and you have a valid work email address you can download a copy for a tenner.

I looked into it and I am entitled but haven't bought it yet. 

HUP. Home User Programme. I have it. It works. Tenner for most of Office; Project and Visio are an extra tenner each.

axisus

Any company that wants me to rent their software can f*ck the hell off.

monquixote

Sporky said:

Wordpad is all most people need for word processing.

For email I can recommend Thunderbird and EMclient.

We tried to use EM Client at work and had a lot of problems.

TonyR

Another Libre Office user here - very similar to MS Office and is perfect for my needs without me having to give any of my hard-earned to Microsoft!

ThePrettyDamned

axisus said:

Any company that wants me to rent their software can f*ck the hell off.

I currently rent Photoshop and Lightroom because I didn't want to mess with my workflow, but it does grate a bit. 

On the plus side, it gets me extended Photoshop which has some useful features, but I'd far rather just bob them the cost. I'm probably going to swap to Lightroom and something else as I think lr is still available to buy.

Sporky

monquixote said:

Sporky said:

Wordpad is all most people need for word processing.

For email I can recommend Thunderbird and EMclient.

We tried to use EM Client at work and had a lot of problems.

I've just used it on home PCs. Enterprise may be rather different.

monquixote

Sporky said:

monquixote said:

Sporky said:

Wordpad is all most people need for word processing.

For email I can recommend Thunderbird and EMclient.

We tried to use EM Client at work and had a lot of problems.

I've just used it on home PCs. Enterprise may be rather different.

I seem to recall it did some weird non standard stuff with IMAP folders which caused horrible performance problems.

crunchman

I use Thunderbird for my old email account.  Most of the time I just use my Gmail these days though.

Jalapeno

Another OpenOffice/Thunderbird user here.  Outlook is good though.

Will give Scrivener a look.

stickyfiddle

+1 for the work HUP thing. Massive bargain. 

I also have no idea why anyone wants to rent software. It's not cheaper AND means you're buggered if you stop paying.

vasselmeyer

If you ensure that the email systems you're connecting to are using IMAP you can use almost any client manage your email. If I'm using a Windows system then I have been using Thunderbird for years and i connect to at least five different email accounts.

If you're not using massively complicated documents then LibreOffcie is free and it can handle almost all Microsoft Office file formats.

martinw

I use Windows Live Mail, and have 5 email accounts on that.

It's free as part of Windows Essentials, and works really well as far as I can tell. Once you've tidied the visuals up a bit to suit, it's very clear too, without any clutter, so it's quick to see what's going on.

I've lazily subscribed to Microsoft office for the business. It's about a fiver a month, so I suppose I could find something free, but I can't be bothered. I don't generally begrudge paying for software (or music, films etc) and it always makes me smile somewhat when this kind of thing comes up on a musician forum!