SOLVED MS Office 07 upgrade

[powrus]

After 6 months of daily reminders that my Office 2007 probably needs to be upgraded, I'm prepared to upgrade to something - and it looks like my best bet for personal use might be to buy Office 365 in order to stay current with updates and assistance (if needed). The cost looks to be approx $69/year.

What I failed to see was an option to buy the 365 version for more than one unit. I have my main PC in the office and I carry my laptop when traveling and like to keep both units synchronized as much as possible with my spreadsheets and assorted other documents. Does that mean I need to by two (2) MS 365 subscriptions?

 

[Tim Locke]

My Office subscription is $100CDN ($67 US )a year has 1TB of Onedrive storage and allows 5 installs on any mixture of PCs, tablets, phones and MAC It includes all of Office. I use 3 installs and use Onedrive to synchronize as required. I think it is a great deal although I know many others just object to the whole idea of 'software as a service'

 

[powrus]

Tim - Which version did you upgrade 'from'?

I currently have Office 2007 and have read there might be some issues with that older version's upgrade. I appears that Office 365 will not upgrade Office 2007 as efficiently as it will 2013 or 2016 versions.

 

[Tim Locke]

I did not upgrade. I was using Libre Office before. I just bought and downloaded. Now I did have plenty of old Office 2003 files on a backup all of which opened fine with Office 2016 ( Office 365) I did not have any Office 207 files.

 

[powrus]

I find your comments interesting, because I have been trying to use Libre in place of Office 2007. I thought getting away from Microsoft would allow me more peace of mind.

Things work pretty good with Libre, except that with MS Office loaded in the background (in order to save some of my archived information back to year 2001) there sometimes arises a conflict between my Libre docs and MS Office.

Microsoft is always encroaching. In the end, I guess they win the battle.

 

[Tim Locke]

When I retired I lost my official copy of Office 2003 which is what we were using at work. Also no Windows licence so I used Ubuntu and Open Office then Libre Office. When W7 appeared I bought a licence for that and continue to use Libre for a bit. The ONLY problems I had opening Office 2003 files was formatting sometimes...both Word and Excel. When MS started offering the 5 pack of MS Office 2015 I bought that and then upgraded to Office 2016.

I still have many .odt files which all work fine in Word 2016 but I notice that some .ods files look a bit strange in Excel 2016 and I get a warning about regular expressions...but those files are just old records.


So if you don't need total compatibility you could just save the money and use Libre for everything.

 

[Ian]

Yup, as @Tim Locke mentioned Office 365 Home can be installed on up to 5 devices from a single license :

https://products.office.com/en-gb/office-365-home

Get the installed Office experience on 5 PCs or Macs, 5 tablets and 5 phones (including Windows, Apple®, and Android™ devices).

I use Office 365 and really like it - especially the calendar/e-mail integration that I use across Windows/Android without a hitch. Libre office is great (and free), but you'd miss out on a lot of the online sync stuff.

 

[powrus]

Thanks for your feedback, Ian. It sounds like something I will do in the near future. Still a bit tentative regarding the smooth transition between installing 365 and having it incorporate my '07 docs, however, I'll continue to read and see how others fared.

 

[Tim Locke]

Thanks for your feedback, Ian. It sounds like something I will do in the near future. Still a bit tentative regarding the smooth transition between installing 365 and having it incorporate my '07 docs, however, I'll continue to read and see how others fared.

I think that Office 365 will open your old .doc and .xls files and then close them as .docx and .xlsx with no trouble at all.

 

[powrus]

I just read this from MS Support, "If you have an earlier version of Office installed on your PC and you install Office Home and Student 2013, Office Home and Business 2013, Office Professional 2013, or Office 365 Home, you won't have an option to upgrade over the previous version. Instead, you'll have both the new version of Office and your earlier version installed on the same PC. If you don't want both versions, you should uninstall the earlier version through Programs and Features in Control Panel".

Now, for the cautious at heart, here, what exactly does this mean? If both version 2007 and 365 are installed at the same time, how do my 2007 docs and spreadsheets get transferred to the new 365? I have no issue UNinstalling 2007 once my stuff has been safely transitioned to the new version of Office.

 

[Tim Locke]

I think you are being unnecessarily paranoid about this. Office 2007 and Office 365 are about 90% the same programs inside. But to be sure, install 365. Open and close each important spreadsheet and document with 365 to ensure it is ok then, as MS says, uninstall 2007.

To be total paranoid. If you have documents and spreadsheets that are intertwined, i.e. they call each other and have hot links to update each other via DDE or OLE and these have to be maintained then for sure you will want to do some serious testing and perhaps even redo some parts. In my years of using these products I have never had to deal with such documents so I cant help you there.

 

[powrus]

I think you are being unnecessarily paranoid about this. Office 2007 and Office 365 are about 90% the same programs inside. But to be sure, install 365. Open and close each important spreadsheet and document with 365 to ensure it is ok then, as MS says, uninstall 2007.

To be total paranoid. If you have documents and spreadsheets that are intertwined, i.e. they call each other and have hot links to update each other via DDE or OLE and these have to be maintained then for sure you will want to do some serious testing and perhaps even redo some parts. In my years of using these products I have never had to deal with such documents so I cant help you there.

Sounds like good advice. I'll give it a shot soon. Thanks.