Cheap options for MS Office?

[Carson Dyle]

I'm looking at inexpensive notebooks for my sister. She wants something for web browsing, paying bills and for remote access to her office. Her target is about $400.

She says wants Office on the computer. How do you do that on a $400 computer? I see about $150 to $180 as the cost of Office from the likes of Dell and HP.

 

[paperwastage]

She says wants Office on the computer. How do you do that on a $400 computer? I see about $150 to $180 as the cost of Office from the likes of Dell and HP.

Go look at the sub-11" laptops/netbooks (get a $100 24" monitor to dock with)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2900...will-be-free-for-screens-under-10-inches.html

(article says <10", but some larger devices get free office too... eg: Asus T100 11" line)

source: me (I own a T100)
http://www.amazon.com/product-revie...Keyword=office&search-alias=community-reviews

 

[Carson Dyle]

Thanks, but she wants a 15" screen on the laptop. Yeah, cutting $150 or so off the cost of the computer makes the budget more doable, but installing a $150 piece of software on a $250 computer seems even more out of whack than on a $400 one.

 

[Ketchup]

Look at it this way - you can have the fastest i7 or Xeon on the market, but it is useless without an OS/ usable software.

I personally can't imagine doing my job with a knock-down version of office, and a lot of home activities would be a real pain.

If your sister goes to school or works at a place that uses office, have her look into options for a discounted rate.

Another option is office 365, for $9.99 a month.
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store...e+365&ef_id=Vl5ZqwAAAM6rQFk6:20151207211453:s

 

[ArisVer]

LibreOffice is a free alternative.

 

[OlyAR15]

Another option might be Softmaker office. Free trial available.

 

[K7SN]

I was going in the a rehab facility (Broke Arm) for a couple week physical therapy once my arm was mended enough to rehab (Medicare). I have never had a laptop but wanted one for the two weeks when I was in that facility; bought a used but guaranteed one on eBay for $136 with Windows 7 and Microsoft office except Access. Had Wi-Fi, regular internet connection and such.

.
Did a quick search; http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-D630-2...094615?hash=item2ca56005d7:g:bdUAAOSw9NxTwW02

found a DELL D630 2.0GHZ DUO CORE 80GB 2GB RAM DVD-RW MS OFFICE 2007 WINDOWS 7 PRO WIFI for under $110 with free shipping;

Take your time and you can find good deals in a gently used few year old good quality laptop.

 

[Mushkins]

Depends on what version your looking for.

That being said, why not just go the Office 365 route? It's what, the price of a cheeseburger per month for home users and you can install on up to five devices.

Buying standalone Office licenses is intentionally very expensive now.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I don't get that fractured logic. $10 per month quickly eclipses the retail price.

 

[lxskllr]

LibreOffice is a free alternative.

It's worth a try. She wants what she wants, but it's an option she may not be aware of.

 

[Charlie98]

Buying standalone Office licenses is intentionally very expensive now.

Yes... it is. I know MS is pushing the subscription model... so by the time my Office'10 suite is EOL, I'll be on something else. Already rolled over to Thunderbird for my mail client.

She says wants Office on the computer. How do you do that on a $400 computer? I see about $150 to $180 as the cost of Office from the likes of Dell and HP.

If she really needs it, then, just like the cost of the OS, that's the price of admission. Her choice... she gets a $250 computer with $150 of software.

 

[bbhaag]

Office live maybe? It's not perfect but it's free. Something to consider anyway.

 

[sbpromania]

You have 3 good and free alternatives:

1. LibreOffice - it's the best alternative to MS Office (I'm using it a lot, so I'm talking from experience)
2. Google Docs (I'm also using Google Docs, am I must say that I'm impressed)
3. Office Online

 

[destrekor]

Depends on what version your looking for.

That being said, why not just go the Office 365 route? It's what, the price of a cheeseburger per month for home users and you can install on up to five devices.

Buying standalone Office licenses is intentionally very expensive now.

It is not intentionally higher, lol. The pricing model for standard Office suites has not changed.



OP... have your sister check out microsofthup.com. She should see if her work happens to use a licensing package with Microsoft that provides employees with discounted Office to use at home.

Office 2016 Pro Plus for $10... even if you are a fan of FOSS alternatives, if you are eligible for that, to turn that down would be insane. Why take an alternative that is far less compatible with the working world, when you can have what 99.9% of the world uses for the price of two fancy lattes.

 

[lxskllr]

Office 2016 Pro Plus for $10... even if you are a fan of FOSS alternatives, if you are eligible for that, to turn that down would be insane. Why take an alternative that is far less compatible with the working world, when you can have what 99.9% of the world uses for the price of two fancy lattes.

Because it isn't libre. Money is a triviality. I wouldn't use MS Office at zero cost.

 

[sweenish]

That must be nice for you.

Plenty of other people don't have a real choice in the matter.

Libre Office is my last resort software. It's nice enough for what it is.

 

[Mushkins]

I don't get that fractured logic. $10 per month quickly eclipses the retail price.

Take the time to do the math and you'll see how O365 easily eclipses the value of a retail license, especially in the OPs case.

A retail copy of Office 2016 Home and Business is $230 + tax. It can be installed on a single PC at a time, and is transferable.

An Office 365 Home plan costs $10 a month, you get Access and Publisher, 1TB of Onedrive storage, and some Skype minutes thrown in. You can install it on five PCs, get access to the mobile version of Office (which would be a separate purchase otherwise), have software assurance for a free upgrade to the latest version if it is released during your subscription, and it doesn't matter if you use Windows, Mac, or a combination of the two.

At $10 a month, the break even point is the 23rd month. I don't think two years qualifies as "quickly eclipsing" anything.

If you have two or more PCs that need Office, you're comparing $230 per device to a flat $230 to cover five devices.

Installing Office on five devices retail has an upfront cost of $1150. Again, compared to $10 a month. The break even point on the full five devices is nine and a half years. That's ignoring the software assurance, if you ever upgrade to a new version of Office in that 9.5 years on those PCs, you just added another 9.5 years to the break even point.

So according to the math, anyone with more than one PC is throwing money down the drain by buying retail Office licenses instead of O365. (There's also a cheaper O365 Home plan we could do the math on, it's like $6 a month but only has one PC license. O365 still works out to be the better value by a long shot as the break even point on $6 is 3.2 years).

Now we get back to the OP, who is specifically struggling with keeping the cost of the PC *with office* below $400. Eating an upfront $230 for the license is totally out of the question, but $10 a month is quite a bit more palatable for someone on a budget.

 

[Mushkins]

Because it isn't libre. Money is a triviality. I wouldn't use MS Office at zero cost.

I don't want to get into the libre vs corporate argument again, we've both had that conversation way too many times over the years

But software compatibility is something with value in and of itself. To put the blinders on and ignore the fact that virtually every business in the world is using Microsoft Office and that libre alternatives are not fully compatible is a little foolhardy.

A perfect example, a good friend of mine sent me her resume just last week that was made in libre office. I opened it up with Word 2016 and it looked like someone vomited spaghetti all over the page. The formatting was totally ruined, there were those lovely box symbols all over the place because of a font/markup mismatch, font sizes were jacked up. I've seen fourth grade book reports with better formatting than this document.

But it looked great in Libre Office!

If she sent it out with job applications like that, it would have gone right in the trash every single time. I ended up redoing the whole thing and giving her a "word safe" version to send out, and a PDF version to send out. Supporting FOSS is great and all if that's your thing, but if it's *actively* preventing you from interfacing with the corporate world and you wouldn't even know, there's nothing wrong with admitting it might not always be the right tool for the job at hand.

 

[lxskllr]

I don't want to get into the libre vs corporate argument again, we've both had that conversation way too many times over the years

But software compatibility is something with value in and of itself. To put the blinders on and ignore the fact that virtually every business in the world is using Microsoft Office and that libre alternatives are not fully compatible is a little foolhardy.

A perfect example, a good friend of mine sent me her resume just last week that was made in libre office. I opened it up with Word 2016 and it looked like someone vomited spaghetti all over the page. The formatting was totally ruined, there were those lovely box symbols all over the place because of a font/markup mismatch, font sizes were jacked up. I've seen fourth grade book reports with better formatting than this document.

But it looked great in Libre Office!

If she sent it out with job applications like that, it would have gone right in the trash every single time. I ended up redoing the whole thing and giving her a "word safe" version to send out, and a PDF version to send out. Supporting FOSS is great and all if that's your thing, but if it's *actively* preventing you from interfacing with the corporate world and you wouldn't even know, there's nothing wrong with admitting it might not always be the right tool for the job at hand.

It should have been a pdf, or if absolute compatibility is required, nothing beats ascii. I don't know what format she sent, but if it were original, it should have been odt. If that looked wrong, it means MS dicked up their implementation cause they're supposed to support it.

If every program disappeared from earth, odt could be replicated from the specification, and the documents recovered. Good luck slogging through MS's 7000+ pages of ooxml specs, and hope it isn't one of the older versions that isn't compatible with their spec ;^)

 

[nemesismk2]

LibreOffice is a free alternative.

LibreOffice is a free alternative which i use because it's very good and it being free is an added big bonus.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

At $10 a month, the break even point is the 23rd month. I don't think two years qualifies as "quickly eclipsing" anything.

If you have two or more PCs that need Office, you're comparing $230 per device to a flat $230 to cover five devices.

Just an example, but I only really need MS Office on my main PC. I have no use for the additional 4 licences. Considering I got 10 years out of Office 2K (currently on 2010), that'd work out costing me an additional $970 over a 10 year period, if we use your prices.

In other words, there are cases were retail licences make sense.

 

[Mushkins]

It should have been a pdf, or if absolute compatibility is required, nothing beats ascii. I don't know what format she sent, but if it were original, it should have been odt. If that looked wrong, it means MS dicked up their implementation cause they're supposed to support it.

If every program disappeared from earth, odt could be replicated from the specification, and the documents recovered. Good luck slogging through MS's 7000+ pages of ooxml specs, and hope it isn't one of the older versions that isn't compatible with their spec ;^)

Which is all well and good, but a prospective employer quite frankly doesn't care. They care that it didn't open properly and looks like a mess, then they tossed in the garbage.

We're not talking about an apocalypse situation where we need to rebuild a file based on the documented standard, but an everyday business situation.

 

[Mushkins]

Just an example, but I only really need MS Office on my main PC. I have no use for the additional 4 licences. Considering I got 10 years out of Office 2K (currently on 2010), that'd work out costing me an additional $970 over a 10 year period, if we use your prices.

In other words, there are cases were retail licences make sense.

Then buy the one-PC version of Office 365 for $6 a month instead, the break even point is 3.2 years.

If you're going to buy a new copy of MS Office within 3.2 years, you saved money by going with O365 instead. If you're not going to buy a new copy of MS Office within 3.2 years, put the difference in cash that you didnt spend upfront in an interest bearing investment account of your choice and it will make more money (on average, subject to the markets, blah blah blah) per month than the $6 you're spending on O365. Hooray retirement savings!

If they release a new version of Office within that 3.2 years, you get to upgrade for free, which if you wanted to otherwise upgrade that would be a brand new $230 license (pushing the retail cost up to $460).

Whereas a retail copy is just a flat $230 hole in your pocket, paid up front.

Are there cases where buying a retail copy is the right choice? Sure, but it's maybe 1% of all situations where O365 truly isn't a flat out better choice from both a features and a cost perspective.

Not to mention that more than likely 2016 will be the last retail version of Office they sell, instead going to a full subscription model *only* selling O365.

 

[destrekor]

It should have been a pdf, or if absolute compatibility is required, nothing beats ascii. I don't know what format she sent, but if it were original, it should have been odt. If that looked wrong, it means MS dicked up their implementation cause they're supposed to support it.

If every program disappeared from earth, odt could be replicated from the specification, and the documents recovered. Good luck slogging through MS's 7000+ pages of ooxml specs, and hope it isn't one of the older versions that isn't compatible with their spec ;^)

It all depends on how much you work with other businesses, with documents made to be edited.

If you don't, then use whatever you want.

But good luck telling corporate users that they need to make files within Word something other than the default format just so a few outliers can open the file decently.

And when they open the normal Word doc and make any edits, the formatting will go to hell, and the other employees are going to be rather pissed.


Thankfully, most businesses that have much collaboration are likely to have the type to have the Software Assurance licensing from Microsoft, which includes Home Use Program. $10 gets you a complete retail copy of, as of now, Office 2016 Professional Plus.

If you get that option, and need to work on shared files of any sort, and still resort to using Libre Office out of principal, then you deserve whatever derision comes your way from coworkers.

 

[TheGardener]

LibreOffice is not 100% compatible with MS Office, but it is pretty darn close. Then again the OP's sister may not need 100% compatibility. This open source app is free to use, and there is no teaser 90 day period. There are no built in ads with LibreOffice.

If the business use, which sounds secondary, is not supported by the employer, meaning the employer will not provide a licensed copy of MS Office, then LibreOffice is a darn good alternative to getting hosed by Microsoft. The only downside that I see, is that it does not come with an Outlook solution.