Avoiding jumping out of the Microsoft frying pan into the Google fire.

Moderator please move to any, more suitable, forum category
Asking for advice on the basis that one or more PM user has already faced, and already solved, the situation that I next describe.
I am a private individual with none of the usual PM business problems.

I currently have :-
a) Two eight year old Windows laptops, purchased second hand, running Windows 7 and Office 2007.
Both running 14 hours every day, one used permanently offline for virus avoidance.
Both worked to death under my ownership, a few faulty keys, not worth repairing, value
negligible.
I have created documents with MS Notepad for years in preference to MS Word.
Office 2007 support stops in three days time.
I only have c400 MS Word and c30 Excel legacy documents.
I do not now use these Laptops for emails (Outlook issues).
b) One six year old Windows tablet, purchased second hand, running Windows 8 and Office
2007.
Neither this tablet, or the laptops in a) were top of the range when new.
Not used very much, mainly for MS Access.
c) One three year old Android tablet with phone capability (Samsung) bought second hand,
top of the range when new, running Android 6.
Used increasingly, for Web browsing due to its greater speed.
Used for all emails.
Disgusted with the restrictions Samsung/Google apply to the Android software. I use
Amazon sourced Android software wherever possible.
d) One three year old Android phone (LG) bought second hand, top of the range when new,
running Android 5.
Also used for browsing and emails.
e) Two older, cheaper, Android phones, micro SD slots used for backups. Mainly used to
phone the other phones when I forget where I put them! All phones on PAYG, no
contracts.

I would like to have one, future-proof, plan of action, whilst not convinced that one exists.
I wish to avoid using Microsoft, or any other, subscription based products.
I do not intend to use any cloud based software from any source.
I would prefer to have the option of using more than one OS.
I prefer not to use Apple products.

I see my options as :-

#1 Move to other, allegedly Office compatible Windows software, eg OfficeLibre or whatever it's now called.

#2 Use my existing Microsoft Office 2007 when unsupported and wait for Windows 2007 to stop functioning. Meanwhile preparing to move my existing files to Android or ?

#3 Move all possible files to PDF which is, or claims to be, dual Windows/Android compatible.

#4 Buy another used Windows laptop with Office 2010, or later, already installed and delay the decision making for a few years.

#5 Whatever I have forgotten or am ignorant of.

Thanks in advance for already assisting in my education and for any comments/suggestions. All of which will receive my careful attention.
Rich

i use Libreoffice and it works ok. i wouldnt be worried about it, it is annoying they have different versions of Excel and other documents that older versions of software might not be able to open. but thats the software business.

OfficeLibre or whatever it's now called.

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I have that on a W10 machine and it seems OK so far for excel and Word docs.

I discovered that most of Office 2000 runs on W10 even though MS says it doesn't, at least Word and Excel does. Office 2000 licensing is less draconian than 2007 though.

I found conversion utilites to read later Office documents into Word 2000 right from MS, they are probably available for most versions and directions.

What is the problem with loosing office 2007 support? XP support ended some time ago but I still use it for some of my PCs and a much older version of Office so old I don't remember the version.

I use Libre Office mostly as I am too cheap to buy MS Office for all my PCs. It works ok, kinda like MS better but I'm ok with it and I can use it with Linux.

I have been using Ubuntu Linux for many years now for nearly all of my work - main exception being one bit of proprietary software that only comes in Windows flavor, but I run that in a Windows 7 virtual machine under Linux.

There is a lot of "religious zealotry" for and against Linux, including a prolific poster here who loves to demonstrate his immense knowledge by way of insisting that Linux is not an operating system, and true *nix users will use BSD. Whatever ... all I know is, I have been using Ubuntu for years, with great reliability and satisfaction, and after my parents got completely frustrated with Windows 10, I converted them to Ubuntu, and they are MUCH happier with it, finding it much easier to accomplish the tasks they do (mostly email, internet, and word processing).

YMMV, of course, and different strokes for different folks, and so on - but if it helps to get a witness, here is one user who finds LibreOffice to be far easier to use than the awful ribbon-interface MS Office products of recent years. There is one major caveat - while LO can read and write MS Office documents, it does some things in a fairly different way. For most users with straightforward documents, there will be no problems. But if you use more sophisticated formatting or tools (e.g., Styles), you will likely run into some issues where the documents will not transfer to and from MS Office formats without some issues.

Thank you all for your informative responses.
Rich

Apache OpenOffice, free open source MS Office Suite replacement. Will do anything MS Office will.

Apache OpenOffice - Official Site - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

Manic - the software won't self-destruct in thirty seconds after Mickey quits "supporting" it. If you are happy wit whatcha got now, just keep it. Forever, like me.

The killer, of course, is the browser. An older browser flat won't work with a lot of websites now. In their quest to control the "community" even the open sores browsers also refuse to support older operating systems. But nowadays even that is pretty simple.

Buy one of those peecee-onna-card thingies and install whatever crap operating system you need, to support whatever crap browser is current. Save that entire disk to a file somewhere.

Now rdp into that from your userland Windows (has to be Server 2003 or newer, or XP or newer, getting win2k to work with rdp/terminal services is a bit of a project.) Viola, you're set. You are using whatever Windows you like on your desktop, it is running the browser on the hardware thingy but displaying on your desktop. But it isn't actually running on the desktop so it can't fubar anything but itself.

As long as you don't keep anything important on your hardware-browser, who cares about their bloody ignorant "updates" and "security fixes" ? Turn that garbage off. All it can do is fuck itself up, and you can re-install from your backup in ten minutes.

This works with Loonix also, if you want to go that way. Or the BSD's. Or a real Unix. But not Apple because they have their heads up their ass. Even VNC doesn't work properly with Apple.

SeaMoss said:

Even VNC doesn't work properly with Apple.

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How so? I use VNC all the time on OSX. I've never experienced any abnormal behaviour with it, nor should I - OS X is Posix certified.

OP, given the criteria in your post you're only really left with Linux or FreeBSD. MS Access is likely to be the real hurdle, no particularly good open source alternatives exist that I know of. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty with SQL then no big deal.

I know you don't want to use Apple, but Filemaker on OS X is an excellent alternative to Access. Much better than Access itself, let alone anything that exists for Linux.

In any case migration might be difficult depending on the complexity of your databases. You might find that Access has you pretty well anchored to Windows.

gregormarwick said:

MS Access is likely to be the real hurdle, no particularly good open source alternatives exist that I know of. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty with SQL then no big deal.

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Apache OpenOffice Base

Now you do know one.

Rewt said:

Apache OpenOffice Base

Now you do know one.

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I'm aware of it actually.

I misspoke in my previous post - because last time I was looking I was actually looking for something that would adequately replace filemaker, not access, I only recalled that I couldn't find what I was looking for. My mistake.

I detest the idea of subscription software, but recently got a new Win10 machine and Office subscription. I have to say it all works beautifully, updates in the background on its own and I'd do it again without hesitation. Probably not for a big buck CAD program that my work depended on, but there are several alternatives if I couldn't stick with Office, so the data's always available.

Conrad Hoffman said:

I detest the idea of subscription software, but recently got a new Win10 machine and Office subscription. I have to say it all works beautifully, updates in the background on its own and I'd do it again without hesitation..

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The issue I have is maybe more based on principle than function in that it creates the software perpetual motion machine. It was awhile ago that excel and word hit the wall on being at all worth upgrading, there just is no incremental benefit. So if you are microslop this subscription stuff is the ultimate answer to the question "how are we going to get the dumb schmucks to keep shelling out when the software is not getting any better"

At work we're shifting to one of the office clone offerings, I've had enough of it. Not delivering value, you don't get my money

gregormarwick said:

How so? I use VNC all the time on OSX. I've never experienced any abnormal behaviour with it, nor should I - OS X is Posix certified.

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Using OS X as the server, trying to connect from AIX with tightvnc, first there were a ton of problems getting it to authenticate then I think I got around that somehow but it wouldn't display in anything more than eight-bit color ? I just kinda gave up. A lot of OS X after 10.7 or so got very snotty about anything non-Apple. And their whole file-handling paradigm went to hell. It just drives me batty now so I leave it for the Assistant to use.

Looks pretty, though.

I wish the Open Office people would split out the word processor and the spreadsheet from the rest. I really don't want the rest of that worthless crap on my computer ... but something that could read Excel would be handy for when people send you a list on MS graph paper

Your problems with Android are probably mostly related to the tablet maker. My wife has a Google Android tablet and loves it. No bloatware or restrictions. That said, I would recommend W10 as the most universal platform - you will have more software options in the future with W10. I would also seriously consider Google's Docs package. Free and very good. I also use Google drive for cloud storage. Also quite good and free up to 15GB. I pay for 100GB, but $3/month so not so bad.

Not sure if MS Office Online meets your requirements. But its free, and while browser based, it is actually real MS Word and Excel.

https://products.office.com/en-us/office-online/documents-spreadsheets-presentations-office-online

In regard to OS choices, Elementary OS is quite nice. It is Ubuntu without the hassles of Ubuntu (big Ubuntu fan, but in the interest of ease of use Elementary is great for linux newbies).

A fast and open replacement for Windows and macOS ⋅ elementary OS

car2 said:

I don't trust Google for online applications, since their main business is data-mining, not selling products.

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agreed. I used google drive and dropbox, and dropbox is quite a bit better. Two big reasons 1) if you ever want to move the location on the local box, google can't handle it and you have to start from scratch, re-download everything rather than move from one local directory to another. Secondly, google gets confused and you end up with endless duplicates of files, makes a real mess of things especially cad projects. Neither of those has been a problem with dropbox

Open office works great both in Linux and in all Windows versions. I am using it for some 14 years. It is free and, in my opinion, works better than MS office when it comes to different languages.

Thank you for the additional responses.
Lots of reading and free application downloading and testing to do before I am informed enough to make an informed decision.

I have made one decision already, I will do the work on a tablet.
Down the pub.

Thanks again.
Rich

Been ubuntu here since windows xp, was libre office even before then, hell would freeze over before i would go back to Microsoft anything.