Microsoft Home and Business 2019

[Pelican]

Thank you, Confusion, for your comprehensive and helpful reply. And for putting me right too!!

My trouble is that in one case the person I am co working with has to use to organisation's software and that is Microsoft. In the other case my co worker is not all that computer literate and would find the change to Libra Office a bit complex. I value the work I do with them so I need Office.

It is such a pity that Microsoft only allowed the legacy document formats to be used. Naturally that was to protect their sales of Office.

I will copy and paste your reply so I have it to hand. Thank you.



                                                           

[mike175]

Pelican,

While I share some of your concerns about Microsoft, and about working and storing data online, I have used the free Office Online on occasion without problems. I also normally use LibreOffice but found the odd formatting issue using .docx files which caused some confusion when sharing files with others. Until recently I had a very slow rural broadband which made online working difficult, but even with that it was possible.

I have been using OneDrive for off-site backups for some years, also without problems, although I also use a second hard drive for Windows File History backups. My feeling is that so many business users rely on Microsoft that they cannot afford to have an insecure system, whereas I would be very wary of some of the third party 'cloud' storage providers.

Obviously I have no idea what sort of work you are doing. If you are working with highly sensitive documents, maybe this is not the answer but, bearing in mind the inflexibility of your co-workers I would be inclined to give it a try if possible.

You can set up OneDrive to keep a permanent copy of all files on your PC.

Mike.

[Pelican]

Thanks for your reply, Mike, you have given me something to think about.

However I do not like One Drive, have it on my computer by default and have never used it. I have no need of it anyway, I do not work in other places so have no need to get at my documents elsewhere. Then of course if one keeps all one's documents on One Drive eventually the free version will fill up and I would have to pay forever to keep my documents. I find putting one's tree on Ancestry has the same problem!!

If Office Home and Business had an alternative to keeping my documents online so that I could keep them on my computer it might be a very different matter. I did try Office 365 as well and it felt as though I had been taken over by Microsoft, hated the feeling. It is a pity that 2007 is no longer being supported, I always liked that program. That it is not being supported is probably why it has started to crumble.

[guest189040]

I would never ever use cloud services to store my files.

It took me two days of downloading data from my mates onedrive account and storing the data on his new removable USB hard drive.

He did not know what he was doing and everything he loaded onto his Laptop got put on the onedrive cloud server.

His Laptop developed a fault and it lost his onedrive credentials and that took an age for me to rectify

Use onedrive at your peril.

[mike175]

I use OneDrive as a secondary, off site, backup and as a means of accessing some of my files from my Android 'phone when away from my desk. If it is set up correctly, it stores a permanent copy of the OneDrive files on the PC as well as in the 'cloud' so they are all available offline.

OneDrive is linked to your Microsoft account so the files should be available on any device linked to your account. Of course it is your responsibility to keep a record of your account details and password, but that applies to all such accounts. Unfortunately too many people, understandably, know very little about the technology but expect to be able to use the devices anyway, which is why modern systems try to manage everything for you whether you like it or not 

Mike.

[Pelican]

As I said earlier the version of Office Home and Business 2019 I had would not allow me to store documents on my computer, only on the cloud. No good to me, I want all my documents on my computer. I tried saving back on to my computer but it would not have that either.  So as I said I returned the program. I deleted One Drive too, but it has left its shadow in my documents file, but it is not in use as I have to use my hotmail address to set it up again. Of course I shall not do that.

I had the latest version of Libra Office, but it would not convert to or from docx. So I deleted that and reinstalled it. Now I can I am delighted to say I can!!

So Libra Office it is. It is an excellent program.

As you say Mike, many folk have no knowledge of the technology they are using. People want to be able to open their computer and do what they want as easily as possible. For some that is to be able to get at their documents from anywhere they want. Mostly Microsoft panders to them making sure they themselves are getting the maximum in revenue. It would have been such a small thing to add a save to computer command. Well they are in business and profit drives business. My objection to them was they were looking over my shoulder into what I was doing, that is what it felt like.

The insecurity of having my documents not under my complete control was horrifying. What if the internet connection goes down. Been in shops where they could not get to their bank on their little gadgets so paying by card was not on. What if there was a problem with One Drive like the one Colin describes, or even worse, One Drive stops working for some reason. We are all too reliant on modern technology.

I have been around computers since the early seventies and even taught it at one time. I saw the beginnings of Windows and was delighted to change from the Command Prompt. I saw the beginning of word processing and all the early ones disappear as Microsoft cornered the market with its Office suite. Yet Word Perfect was better than Word in the early stages.

I saw the beginnings of the Linnux and these days have Cinnamon Mint on another computer. Great OS. 

Microsoft is also in the firing line of governments to get at data. So we have two areas of attack to our documents. Google is no better. People do not realise the vast deterioration in privacy laws that is going on. We have friendly governments at the moment....... but....

Thanks everyone for your help.

[mike175]

Glad you got LibreOffice working properly. As you say, it really is an excellent suite of software; I still haven't explored all its features after many years of using it. I have also used Linux Mint and would use it exclusively but, needing to use certain Windows software, have abandoned it for now. But I do use third-party open source software wherever possible.

Mike.

[Pelican]

Yes. Mike, Windows dominates us all. I use Mint as my second computer, very handy when I am doing research, I have them both open!! I do the research on Mint and use my Windows for writing up if it has to go to someone. I have notes on Libra Office on both computers. I much prefer Mint but it does not have access to some programs that are only written for Windows. A lot better than it was though.