Microsoft office.

crunchman

martinw said:

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.

If that's the one that comes free as part of Windows 10 then it won't import a lot of older email formats.  That's why I ended up going with Thunderbird.

martinw

crunchman said:

martinw said:

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.

If that's the one that comes free as part of Windows 10 then it won't import a lot of older email formats.  That's why I ended up going with Thunderbird.

No it's not. I don't use any of the 'apps' that come with Windows 10.

Windows Live Mail has been around for years and I still have it on my Win7 PC in the workshop.

littlegreenman

Sporky said:

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.

I checked in work today and am eligible, might just get that tomorrow. Well, it is payday.

skunkwerx

Damnit work! They don't even pay us extra on boxing day let alone discounts on goodies haha! 

57Deluxe

...I am fed up with these Ba$tards calling me telling me I have problems with my windows - I don't want double glazing!

digitalscream

Another vote for Thunderbird and Libre Office.

Libre Office solves a lot of the problems (including performance) of Open Office, and it's updated much more often.

Thunderbird is excellent - it's quick, can handle massive mailboxes, has a ton of handy plugins and - best of all - it's cross-platform, so if you decide to go Linux or Mac, you can easily just copy the files across and you're ready to go (no need to muck about configuring the thing).

Steve922

Another vote for OpenOffice/LibreOffice and Thunderbird.

I can't understand why anyone would buy Microsoft Office, let alone rent it!

Sporky

I've not tried Libre Office, but Open Office was pretty awful when I tried it. Lots of things just deliberately different from Office without any particularly good reason. Their version of Excel was particularly awful.

Office is too much money though, and has too much stuff included.

fields5069

For Office I would also vote for LibreOffice. I've never considered it essential to have email software on my home computer though, I just interwebs it.

digitalscream

Sporky said:

I've not tried Libre Office, but Open Office was pretty awful when I tried it. Lots of things just deliberately different from Office without any particularly good reason. Their version of Excel was particularly awful.

Office is too much money though, and has too much stuff included.

Libre Office is much more usable than Open Office - it was forked from the OO code, but it's being run by people who actually know what users want. It reminds me very much of Office 2003, which is the last one I remember before Microsoft ran out of useful features to add and just started adding whatever they thought they could convince people of being a good/flashy idea.

Also, the master document functionality actually works with massive documents without crashing, which is more than you can say for Microsoft Office.

TheBigDipper

axisus said:

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

Understood. Chances are you already do, though. Most software products are not sold to the end user, but they are granted a license to use it in perpetuity. That's why you shouldn't (in theory, although it happens) sell a used copy to someone else - because you don't own it, just have the rights to use it. 

Same applies to purchases of films on the Apple Store. 

digitalscream

TheBigDipper said:

axisus said:

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

Understood. Chances are you already do, though. Most software products are not sold to the end user, but they are granted a license to use it in perpetuity. That's why you shouldn't (in theory, although it happens) sell a used copy to someone else - because you don't own it, just have the rights to use it. 

Same applies to purchases of films on the Apple Store. 

There's a big difference between buying a license and paying for a subscription, though.

Sporky

I might give it a look then - ta.

Personally I think Office 4 pretty much nailed it.

Myranda

Been using free MS Office for ages... students often get access for free... and my OU student email is valid till 2030... 

I don't plan on paying for office till at least then.

monquixote

The thing about MS Office is that it's the defacto standard.

When I was using Libreoffice sometimes you would get a document like a form you needed to fill in and return. 
Inevitably something in the formatting would get changed which the person you sent it back to would complain about. The same applies to GDocs, Pages, etc which is why I usually tell most non geeks to just spring for a copy of Office.

I have 2016 on my Mac which comes from a work subscription. I don't use it much, but it seems pretty good compared to previous versions.

crunchman

@monquixote, if they end up with the charging a monthly fee model as the only way to get Office, then it will stop being the defacto Standard for home use at least.

I bought a copy of the home edition of Office 2007 years ago that gave me 3 licenses for £99.  Over 9 years that works out at £11 per year.  There is no way I'm paying a monthly fee of £7.99 per month as opposed to £11 per year.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.  It's £119 to buy the current version of Office (Home and Student Edition) for one machine.  I'm not spending £357 for the 3 PCs in our house either. The high pricing for buying it properly is obviously trying to force people to sign up to the monthly fee.

As Office 2007 is coming to the end of it's support I might do the deal from work to get the £10 copy, but I might only be entitled to put that on one machine.  That means the other two machines will still be running Office 2007, or I'll switch to Libre Office.  If I want to work from home, I remote into work anyway and use Office on the servers so all I need on my personal PC is something with reasonably basic functionality.  I don't want to spend big money on something that I only use occasionally, and don't need all the features of.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who will move away from Office with their current pricing model.

There is fragmentation in the market now anyway. Some people are switching to things like Libre Office, and I know people who make presentations now on the software that comes with their Macs that won't play nicely with Powerpoint, which was the standard for years.  I'm sure that they can be saved in a Powerpoint compatible format, but as you say these are non-geeks.

monquixote

Where I work I have various development tool licenses that go into the hundreds or thousands of pounds per seat and because we develop iPhone software we have to have Macbooks at approaching £2k a throw so a couple of hundred quid for an Office license is in the noise as I'm sure it is for most companies. 
As it happens we use MS 365 for our email so we get Office as part of the subscription cost. 

A bigger threat for Office is that in my company a few years back our documentation was all Word docs on a file share and now it's all in Confluence. I'd be surprised if I used Word more than about once a month whereas five years ago it would have been every day. I asked one of our devs to do something with word the other day and it turned out he hadn't got around to installing Office because he hadn't needed to use it in the last 3 months since we changed over to 365.

The problem for a private individual is that if you want to apply for a job (for example) and the company gives you a Word doc as an application form which Libre or Pages screws up then you are completely shafted. Anyone non tech savvy who I've installed Libre for or suggested they just use GDocs has almost always come back to me with this sort of problem. 

It's a bit like Linux. I'd happily run a Linux desktop machine, but I wouldn't encourage the same for my mum.

crunchman

I'd agree that most (all?) large businesses will stick with Office for the foreseeable future.  If our company changed, I'd spend the next 6 months doing nothing but re-writing VBA code.  Personally I'd be glad to see the back of VBA as it's horrible but it wouldn't be cost effective for the company.

I do see a lot of home users moving away from it though.