Vocal Voices

I use Word and Excel 2010 a fair bit for my own purposes and I'm getting the pop-up that says Microsoft are ending support of this free software from this coming October. All the usual blah about no future security protection, upgrade to (the allegedly inferior) Office 2019 or a subscription model, etc.

Given that I don't import any spreadsheets into Excel, anything put into Word from the internet is usually done by copy / paste, and I run Avast Anti-Virus, I presume I'm at minimal risk and can just happily soldier on with the 2010 version?
Or would you guys recommend I bite the bullet and start paying the evil company …..

Ossie, just carry on. You are more at risk of a velociraptor attack in Aldi than you are using MS 2010.

And when you really do need to move there are plenty of free and secure alternatives - Apache Office, Libre, SoftOffice.

Thanks, Frank, that's good to know.

You probably know that the newer document formats for Word and Excel are docx and xlsx and 2010 works with them, and if the files are for your own use who cares. It might only ever be an issue if you do a lot of collaboration online.

Any incoming stuff from, say, email could be in any format, but that has always been the case. There are free viewers and converters out there should you get stuck. One thing to say about incoming files is that you should do an AV scan on them before opening, but again, that has always been so.

Just to reiterate what WM says, your biggest threat there is Outlook and a good AV program will deal with that.

Mr S uses (and likes), Ms works. She specifically likes the dBase which is really a smart list maker. It was updated for W95 and uses Word2000 as the word processor.

She also has Office installed and it is 2010. It is the largest number of keys I have, I just gave a copy to my Son too.

As with all things, it depends on you. If you don't open files in your email without verifying that they are safe first then you are at very little risk.

Your very largest risk is a website that attempts to download and run a file with macro enabled content. Firstly a quality A/V and firewall suite will defeat this and secondly you can go into the Office security centre and turn off macro launch on open. Once you have done that, I'd suggest WM's analogy is about right.

I have a business Office 365 account so I have 5 licenses for the Office 365 apps. I have it on my Laptop and it updates regularly. I don't really see that much difference except in email setup, which advanced in 2013 and fairly dramatically in the later versions. I no longer need to manually set up my Yahoo account although I do need to set up a specific secure password first.

As WM says, there are tons of services out there, but I am finding the Microsoft 365 plans hard to beat. If you find yourself needing to pay for something, then these plans are good value. Personal is £60 a year with mail, online storage and full office apps that upgrade to the latest version. Family is better value if you need multiple accounts at £80 per year for 6 people.

My parents use one of my brothers 6 accounts on his family plan.

I use business because most companies still haven't worked out how to grant access only to their specific account, allowing me to access and use my services from within a firewall.

Just so you can see the options available. Plenty of free stuff out there. But, as they say about Linux, it is free so long as your time is worth nothing. Because that is the cost, time.

Many thanks, both!