Office Use for Retirees Out of the Loop

There have been no upgrade versions of Office since Office 2007, all later versions are full versions.

For Word & Excel there is Office Home& Student

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compare-all-microsoft-365-products?activetab=tab:primaryr1

And of course the free Office type apps that can read/create MS Office docs https://www.libreoffice.org/

A few options.

One is to ask around your circle of friends and family to find out if anyone has an unused "share" on their MS 365 Family subscription. Each subscriber can "share" with up to 5 other people. Or maybe you could create a new "share" group of people.

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If you have 2013 or newer, you can continue to use it (or re-install it) for a few more years.  2010 reaches it's "end of life" in October this year, so if you don't have it installed, it may not be worth installing.

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If you are talking about only Word documents, simple ones, you could give WordPad a try. It is part of Windows (hence FREE). It does simple formatting.

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There are multiple free, or low cost "alternatives" to Office made by other companies. They are similar, but not identical to Office.

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This article goes into more detail on these options.

The article got too long for the forum, so I moved it to a Word document and uploaded it to OneDrive.  You can view or download it from here:

https://1drv.ms/w/s!Am8lVyUzjKfpoGos7ovI66isqzKN?e=kqK1Qj

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Short form, you have several basic options:

.  #1 Office Online, free, but not fully functional

.  #2 Office 365 Family, "free", if you can get a "share" from someone who has paid, on up to 5 computers

.  #3 Office 2019 Home and Student, buy with US$150 1-time payment, 1 computer

.  #4 Office 365 Personal, rent / pay-forever US$70/year, 1 user, up to 5 computers

.  #5 Office 365 Family, rent / pay for-ever US$100/year, up to 6 users, each on up to 5 computers

.  #6 Non-MS alternatives to Office, not exactly identical, but free or cheap

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Unfortunately, "buying" Office has become a big decision tree.

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You can take the easy way out and rent Office 365 forever from MS, at full retail price, (whether you really NEED the "extra" features you are paying for) or you can take some time to investigate all of the options to find the best deal for you.

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If you meet the right conditions, you really can get Office for FREE or much cheaper than everyone else who is paying the full retail price.

Check out the wiki I go into more detail outlining these options:

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You will have to decide for yourself. You can to trade off long term cost and features If your needs are very simple, you won’t need to spend much or work with one of the free options. But if you are a more “advanced” user, using multiple Office applications and sharing documents/files with others you will have to pay for one of the “Microsoft” (Office) 365 / Office 2019 bundles.