Advice from Middle Aged Female Tech

Hollyecho Montgomery – 812-779-6088

Women’s Computer Consulting

https://Hollyecho.com

I have been in the industry and with my own company since 1994. In the entire time I have worked in this field it has been very few times any two techs ever agree completely. What advice I give here is based on my experiences, testing and what I know that works.

What you “may” not know…..

There is a free version of MS Word, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, Excel, and Sway. It is online, login with your Microsoft based account (Hotmail, outlook.com etc), and start using as if it was on your computer, with the exception that you can only open a saved, or already saved Doc or Docx if it has been saved on OneDrive or Dropbox.

But, if there is something THAT HAS to be done in MS Word, MS Excel, or MS PowerPoint, this is what you can do instead of buying the full package. https://office.live.com/start/default.aspx?WT.mc_id=Office_Products_site

NOW, there are three (3) free versions of OfficeSuites **say that out loud three times, grin** that READ AND SAVE to the MSOffice formats. One and two have a few more functions, like mail merge and advanced excel formula functions.

First is Libreoffice, “ https://www.libreoffice.org/download “ the best *so far* in my opinion because it can read and save in the docx extension which is MSWord’s latest file format.

Second is OpenOffice “ https://www.openoffice.org “the oldest of the full function fee office suites. This was the first and only for many years (that I knew about), and still does an outstanding job. It will read the new docx documents, but will only save in the doc extension.

Third is WPS Office 10, “ http://wps.com/wps-office-personal/ this has a “paid, purchase premium” version that will allow you to do the advanced functions like mail merge, etc, but if you going to have to pay, why not get the MSOffice suite? The free version does a beautiful job on Word, Excel, and Powerpoint with its basic standard functions. It is calling “word” WPS Writer, “PowerPoint” WPS Presentation, and “Excel” WPS Spreadsheets.

That being said, this is just food for thought. I DO not represent any of the companies I have mentioned.

Send me your questions: Montgomery@Hollyecho.com and I will answer.