Word software do you have to purchase every year

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Sorry Im not very teccy, bought a laptop last year uploaded the microsoft word, excel etc now its expired, do I have to rebuy it???

Is it a standard cost to renew?

You can either buy an office 365 subscription which you can pay monthly or yearly, or pay for a standalone retail version (you may be able to get free or discounted through a company, school or NHS etc).

Or, you can use a free alternative such as OpenOffice or even Googles apps.

It's a rip-off. I highly recommend LibreOffice, free software. I've used it for years.

Another free alternative is LibreOffice. I regularly use their equivalent of Word and Excel and find them just as good. I can still open my old MS files in it.

I bought office 2016 for £17. Bargain!

Ah ok...I wonder if my work have a multi licence user account because I need it for my laptop for work

Another option for free MS Office is to only use the online apps. You logon with a Microsoft account, and can run the online versions and/or iPhone / android apps

An office 365/microsoft 365 subscription gives you online and full ‘desktop’ applications at £5.99 a month, £59.99 per year or £7.99 per month, £79.99 per year depending on personal or family

The one off purchase price is about £250. That means no upgrades, but you don’t have to pay again until you end up so out of date that you need to upgrade

As you require it for work the company should provide it. I have my work account on my work laptop, and I also have my personal account on my own laptop & phone. I used to buy it cheap on a one off basis due to the HUP home user programme discount via work. But our HUP changed to the subscription and my personal ‘full price’ subsection covers my needs better than the ‘discounted’ subscription due to what it included

If work won’t cover it, and if you just need general compatibility then free alternatives can fit the bill - taking note that free alternatives may exclude use for work purposes in their licence, and also can have compatibility problems

www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/cart?country=GB&culture=en-gb&rtc=1

www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products-b

Microsoft 365 is subscription. Office 2021 or whatever year is perpetual license.

WPS is great. It is free and is compatible with Microsoft office. I have used it for years!

@SortCode

Ah ok...I wonder if my work have a multi licence user account because I need it for my laptop for work

Do they use office 365? Then you can just sign in with those credentials

Is it possible to get this free if you have primary school age children and they need it for homework / online learning etc? I find it incredibly frustrating that we don’t have it for upper KS2 kids but I refuse to pay that much

I’m lucky that I’ve worked in universities for the last decade so I have access to their free downloads.

However I’ve used Google Docs for free and it’s actually pretty good; I did a lot of uni work on it when I had a chromebook (which couldn’t access the full version of Word).

Yep - if you've got M365 with work, you can download on up to 5 devices.

I had to pay for M365 because I couldn't open any MS Documents or create them anymore.
Really annoying because I don't use it as much as I used to but had to have access quickly.
I couldn't circumvent it either with google docs etc on my MacBook Air.

Wowcher have a lifetime download of office 2019 for£37 at the mo; I ought it on sun and works fine. you can also get older versions cheaper, have a google.

Get a gmail account

They have word excel etc all free