Office 365

[Tippon]

Hi all 🙂

My uncle’s about to buy a new laptop (http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/asus-vivobook-a540-15-6-laptop-red-10153700-pdt.html) and wants Office to go with it. Before he buys the package on the Currys page (£60 for Office and McAfee :negative: ), does anyone know of any decent deals for Office please?

I’ve had a quick look on Ebay, but the deals look too good to be true, like a lifetime subscription for £8.50 as part of someone else’s business package  :wacko:

Also, if anyone knows of any better laptop deals, and could point me to them before he goes shopping tomorrow, I’d be grateful 🙂

[Robin Long]

Dave buys Office keys from Ebay all the time I believe, personally I would avoid Office 365, missing features from most of the software not that the normal user would notice.

 

Cheers Knight,

RIP Spike09 Your Missed
If I'm not here, I'm there.

Finally joined Twitter! longr79

[Jason]

Missing features? Office 365 is the full suite but paid per month (or year) instead of in one hit, continually updated and with 1 TB of OneDrive thrown in (per user). It’s a good deal.

[Dave Rice]

I agree 365 is a good deal and I’m not aware of anything missing. I use the Business Premium myself on 4 devices. I needed a reliable email host for my custom domain having had big issues with the freebie hosts. A professional email host will cost you nearly what MS do so Office was almost free.

Personally I don’t use One Drive much as I have Cloud Station via my own Synology server but the ability to get to everything via a browser is handy. It’s also useful for me to be up to date with the latest versions.

But if you don’t need all these things Robin is correct, I have been buying “ORIGINAL OFFICE PROFESSIONAL PLUS 2016 LICENSE KEY GENUIN 32 / 64BIT SCRAP PC” for £5.40 http://tinyurl.com/hr9m5v8 and no issues so far.

You get a key and a link to the official MS download site where you put the key in to get the correct version. Once installed you still need to authorize it with the key. I make sure I pay with PayPal.

[Drezha]

Does Onedrive support custom domains then? I wasn’t aware of that. I’m looking at perhaps needing to purchase Office as I’m about to leave my firm where I’ve been able to use one of my installs of my Office 365 work install on my home machine but that will obviously come to pass soon and if it supports custom domains, I may look into moving away from Fastmail where I currently host.

 

The Onedrive storage could come in handy for Synology Cloud backup as well.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

You need the business version http://tinyurl.com/jcdovyb

[Robin Long]

I was under the impression that certain features of access and excel were unavailable and access was missing from 365 if I’m wrong I’m happy to be corrected.  I suspect I was thinking about another MS office product.

 

 

Cheers Knight,

RIP Spike09 Your Missed
If I'm not here, I'm there.

Finally joined Twitter! longr79

[The Duke]

Office online, the free version of office 365has bits missing, but 365 is the full hit.

[Drezha]

Dave Rice wrote:

You need the business version http://tinyurl.com/jcdovyb

Ah OK – that’ll be why I haven’t seen it.

Looks cheaper to buy an Office license via your link and continue with Fastmail then – that’s $40 a year for my current (now unavailable) plan.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

I bought my giffordsystems.co.uk domain through a mate who has a reseller account with freeparking.

Unfortunately their webmail hosting had issues with incorrectly identifying legitimate incoming mail as spam and no user controls. They had also got their servers marked as spam by Virgin. Nobody is interested in solving these things for cheap / free services so it was almost useless for business as I was missing emails from suppliers as they were going straight to spam.

All I had to do was change the MX (and some other) records to point at the Microsoft servers and it was problem solved. Microsoft is a trusted source, their spam filters work and are under my control. The annual cost of £94 is just another business expense like insurance and the accountant. Indeed it’s the cheapest of them!

For me it’s worth it for the hosted Exchange account alone. The Outlook client for Android is very good too, certainly enough for my needs.

[Jason]

Just fired up Access. It’s there. I think you were thinking of the free web suite, as mentioned above. 365 is just a different way of paying (with other stuff thrown in); it’s not a different product.

[blacklion1725]

I look at Office 365 as an Office suite thrown in with 5 x 1TB cloud storage Accounts. As Dave says if you use OneDrive it is great value – if you don’t and don’t need the five users, I’d probably have a punt on one of the £5 – £8 Office 2016 licences on ebay – shot to nothing really at that price.

On 365 – not sure if it still works, but you used to be able to get 365 personal, “stack” extra years on it (very cheap codes on ebay) then upgrade to “Home Premium” – the 5 user one – for one month at £7.99 – and it upgraded all your stacked years too. I did that and am half way through 4 years Home Premium for almost nowt

Even if not you can normally stick another year on much cheaper than the money MS want – Tesco ebay often have a year Home Premium year code for £50. When you think that is 5 1TB cloud accounts and full Office it is very good value.

Oh and by the way, Ubit Menu work fine with 365/2016 if like me the Ribbon makes you want to top yourself.

[Tippon]

Thanks for the tips guys, and the link Dave 🙂

The dozy bugger went out and bought the laptop this morning before he spoke to me though! He was supposed to ring me to let me know when he was going as the staff in Currys tried to con him into buying Windows 10 yesterday  :wacko:

Never mind. For what he needs it’s still a decent deal, and I may end up getting Office just for the storage, so it’s all good:D

[Jason]

A lesson learned, perhaps. When people ask for computing advice, more often than not they ignore it. And then make poor decisions they later (secretly) regret. There must be a reason why they ask for advice in the first place, but I’ve not figured out what that reason is. I avoid giving advice if possible, if only because it’s often wasted time and effort.

[Drezha]

Jason wrote:

I avoid giving advice if possible, if only because it’s often wasted time and effort.

Unless paid for it by a (now defunct) weekly computer magazine? 😉

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Jason]

Lol. Yes. I meant friends and relatives who aren’t much interested in tech.

[Author]

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