Are these offers really legitimate?

Hi Folks, Just joined Tenforums but have been a member of Sevenforums for a while.

I have an old copy of Office 2000 which I managed to install successfully under W7 but when I tried to install it on my new laptop running W10 Home I got multiple errors during the install and it wouldn't launch.

Consequently I started looking at buying a newer version but Microsoft prices are just ridiculous. However I did find a couple of UK sites offering downloads of what they claim to be genuine retail versions of Office 2016 with a lifetime licence at very low prices - around £40 - £50.

I'm very suspicious of this, it looks too good to be true and I'd be interested to hear member's views on the legitimacy of it.

Hi there
probably are dubious if they really are low.

What you might find though could be some really cheap versions of Office 2010 (still gets updates and will not be discontinued until late 2020) as a lot of these were issued as retail, student, and OEM and the keys have never been used.

Like anything else though it's "Caveat Emptor" or essentially AYOR.

If you need Office without OUTLOOK there are some perfectly acceptable pretty compatible versions out there -- my favourite on this is WPS office -- and it's FREE. This works really well and unless you are a really super doper power excel user with loads of macros etc you won't notice the difference between it and EXCEL !!!

https://www.wps.com/

For an email client thunderbird is OK and Free as well.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi Jimbo, thanks for responding.

At the moment I have Open Office installed which does pretty much everything that I need and I do already use Thunderbird as my email client. It's just that I like to have MS Office available in case I need to open anything I've been sent that Open Office can't cope with. It's also useful to check that files I've created with Open Office are compatible with MS Office before I send them out.

Regards,
Gwaihir

Hi there
@Gwaihir

Another easy way to check is to access Ms Office apps on Android (assuming you aren't one of those I-thingey fan people) . Simply send you open office document to phone and see if Excel on phone or word or whatever can read it.

the Ms apps are Free. That will then show you quickly whether the Ms Office stuff will handle documents OK.

I still think though wps office is streets arhead of open office although both show what can be done without having to pay Ms a slodge of money.

Cheers
jimbo

Hmmm . . . . I'm not that keen on Chinese stuff, especially government-funded Chinese stuff, even if it is free.

I think I'll stick with Open Office, even with it's eccentricities. I'm using Apache Open Office and generally only need the wordprocessor which so far has shown good compatibility with my old version of Word.

"

It's also useful to check that files I've created with Open Office are compatible with MS Office before I send them out."

If that's all you want to do, you can open them in Onedrive on a web browser.

I got office 2010 on E Bay for 3 installs for $ 50.00 installed and activated just fine