I had a Microsoft Office subscription and it expired. You won’t believe what happened next! Joking aside, what are your options when you cancel your Office subscription? Can you access files still?
I gave up Microsoft Office a long time ago for various reasons and it was not because there was anything wrong with Word, Excel and the other Office applications. In fact, they are excellent. The reason is that most of my writing these days is for the web and for that I just need plain text.
Office applications like Word and Excel have a huge range of features and functions and I just wasn’t using most of them. That’s just me though and you may be different.
A lot of people rely on the powerful features in Office and would find it a struggle to manage without it. If you let your subscription lapse, you may be left with a lot of important Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and other files that you absolutely need access to, but how do you do this?
Fortunately, the Word file format is a universally understood one and while an alternative might not have all the features of Word, it can certainly load your documents. Support for Excel documents is good too, although not every function and feature is supported by alternative apps.
Cancel your Microsoft Office subscription
When I cancelled my own subscription, I had Microsoft Office installed on my PC and it did not immediately stop working. It displayed a warning that my office subscription was no longer active, but after dismissing the message, Word and Excel would work fine.
Office applications continued to work for at least a year after cancelling. Was this a bug? An oversight? Something special about my case? I don’t know. They worked for a long time, but not anymore. They can be used to open and view documents but no editing is allowed.
Has anyone cancelled their subscription recently? Did Word and Excel immediately stop working or did they continue for a short time afterwards? It would be mean to block access to your Office documents the minute your subscription expires. However, you probably will not get the year or more I got.
If Office stops working, these alternatives can be used instead.
Office web apps
Office web apps are simpler versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others and they run in a web browser. They are free of charge and anyone can use them.
To access your Office files, put them in the OneDrive folder on your PC and the OneDrive/Documents folder is a good place to store them.
Then go to onedrive.com in a web browser and just click those files. One click on a Word document and it opens in the Word web app. At first sight, it looks a lot like Word on the PC, but if you explore the ribbon tools, features and options, there are fewer of them.
Office web apps do not support every feature of Office PC apps. However, many people do not use all the advanced features in Word and Excel anyway. The web apps may be sufficient for your needs.
They are certainly good enough for me and this article is being written in the Word web app running in Chrome browser. It is fast, responsive and has the features I need (I don’t need many).
WordPad
WordPad tends to be forgotten, perhaps because it is buried so deep on the Start menu, but it is a useful word processor. On Windows 10 go to Start > Windows Accessories > WordPad.
It can load Microsoft Word files, but because it does not support all of Word’s features, it might not display the document in exactly the same way.
The results of loading a Word document will vary depending on its complexity. Simple ones look very similar to the original but complex ones will not. It is worth trying.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is probably the best known free and open source alternative to Microsoft Office and it contains a whole suite of applications, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, database, drawing, and math formula.
The interface for the Writer word processor module looks like Microsoft Word before the ribbon was added. It is like running a classic version of Word from the early 2000s.
After using Word’s ribbon interface for years, it may seem strange switching to LibreOffice but it works well. It has excellent support for Office document import and it copes easily with simple and even moderately complex documents.
Most people will find that they can continue working in LibreOffice Writer with the same documents they used in Microsoft Word. An interesting feature of the Word web app at the OneDrive website is that if you click the gear icon to go to the settings, there is an option for Word and Excel to use the OpenDocument format used by LibreOffice as the default. That should make switching between Word web app and LibreOffice on the PC even easier.
Importing complex spreadsheets tends to break them, but with some tweaking and configuring, they can be made to work again. Simple spreadsheets are fine though.
LibreOffice is excellent.
Google Docs
Google Docs is part of Drive and it offers file storage and office applications. Docs, Sheets and Slides all work in a web browser at the drive.google.com website and they are able to convert from and to Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. (There are several more tools too.)
Google has designed Docs for business use and the applications contain all of the most commonly used features and functions of an office suite. It is strong on collaboration and several people can edit the same document, share documents, export them as PDFs and ebooks and much more.
I used it almost exclusively for a couple of years to create hundreds of documents, all stored on Drive, and it is excellent. The apps are fast, responsive and very reliable. It saves as you type, so even if you lose the internet connection, you never lose any work.
Google Docs is a great alternative to Microsoft Office.
Best of the rest
Apple does not want to be left behind by Microsoft and Google and has its own web-based online office suite at iCloud.com. Pages is the word processor, Numbers is the spreadsheet and Keynote is presentations. There are several more web apps, but they are best used if you have an Apple Mac.
You don’t need to be a Mac user and Windows PC users can simply sign up at the website and use the office apps.
Apple tends to do things its own way and the web apps are powerful, but unlike Word, Excel and PowerPoint. They can import Office files quite well and provided the document is not too complex, they are fine.
WPS Office is available in several different versions and this includes free. It is supported by ads, but I didn’t see too many when using it.
The interface of the word processor looks very similar to Word and it has a ribbon toolbar with similar tools and buttons. At first glance, you would think you were using Word.
Documents are opened in tabs, which makes switching between them easy. It does a good job of importing Office files and simple to moderately complex Word documents look fine.
Office mobile apps
If you have an iPad or Android tablet, the free Microsoft Office mobile apps are a way to continue to use Office without paying for it. They can be used on phones, but the screen and keyboard are just too small for anything but occasional use. A tablet is much easier to use and has a large screen and keyboard that you can easily get used to.
The mobile apps are quite good and offer a good range of features for working with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. The files must be on OneDrive, but that is free.
Be the first to comment