Replies

True; for years I had to login to Novell networks separately. But I’m still not sure what I gain by switching to an MS account login.

What you gain is subject to interpretation, some people may see it as gain, others will see it as disadvantages. The features that you have access to when using an MS account were listed, to my knowledge with good coverage, on my previous post on this thread.

Is Office 365 (rented) the same as Office 2016?

Dick

Office 365 is just a way to buy the latest Office version. What you get to install is the latest Office version which, at the moment, is Office 2016.
To put it in a slightly different way you subscribe to Office365 and get Office 2016 to install. Your office version will be automatically upgraded whenever there is a new Office version, as long as your subscription is active. When the subscription expires, Office will work in read only mode – you lose the ability to create new documents and, of course, there will be no more Office upgrades.

It’s so difficult to sort out reality from marketing hype. The impression I got from reading about the advantages of Office365 were that cloud storage was part and parcel of the package. That it was somehow connected to the net in the same way that OneNote2016 was.

No difficulty at all, when you use the actual product (let’s not muddle the analysis with free products, there isn’t a free Office offering for local installation, other than an individual application, that I know of – there are no free, locally installable versions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint).

Also, it wouldn’t be acceptable to impose mandatory cloud storage to paid customers. It would be nothing but suicidal. Offering it as an optional feature, though, makes total sense. Depending on your use cases, cooperative access to documents can be really interesting.

Also, Office365 is just the name of the “mechanism” you use to buy Office – and you get some additional benefits other than Office itself, like 1TB OneDrive storage and Skype free minutes. You still get an Office version to install that is the same as before: previously Office 2013, now Office 2016, in a near future, surely something similar. So, we are still talking about Office features, not Office365 features.

Yes, Office 2016 allows cooperative editing of Word and Excel documents and OneDrive storage, but the old local storage based features are still present. Again, OneNote is / was different from the other Office apps right from the beginning. In terms of cooperative features, all other Office apps have been playing catchup. I really don’t want to launch additional confusion, but you could share OneNote documents between computers in local network since 2005 (started using OneNote back then) and it already kept a copy of the document locally, even when the original document was on another networked computer. So that behavior is tied to the cooperative nature of OneNote (for obvious performance reasons) and not to the fact that OneNote does that when the document is stored in OneDrive – in fact, such behavior is an extension of an existing behavior that was present even when there wasn’t yet a SkyDrive, the precursor to OneDrive.

I have been unable to get the notes smaller than around 3 inches wide.

If it’s anything like the OneNote 2016 I looked into, you have a working copy of the document locally plus the cloud copy that’s updated from the local version.

This is incorrect in what applies to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. What you described is correct regarding OneNote, but that is how OneNote works by default, in the free version, where you need to keep your OneNote documents in the cloud. For OneNote from a subscribed Office version, you can create OneNote documents that are located on your computer, with no cloud storage at all.

For Word, Excel and Powerpoint, you can have all your documents local. In such a case, they will all be local and OneDrive won’t be involved at all. I do not login to OneDrive on my Windows 10 machines, which means the OneDrive app does not touch my documents. I backup to OneDrive when I want to, through a 3rd party app, which keeps me free from all the hassle of the OneDrive app, which I hate with a vengeance – I can still have my OneNote documents stored in my OneDrive, even with the OneDrive app virtually disabled.

Office 2007 already uses the ribbon, so in that sense, she shouldn’t find that many differences if she resorts to use Office 2016.

With Office 2016 you can do everything you did with Office 2007. That means that you can save all your files locally, as you did before. You can also save them online, in OneDrive, if you prefer, but you don’t need to change if you don’t want to – I save most my stuff locally, as I always did, the only exception being OneNote, to make it easier to access my notes from everywhere, including my phone.

My wife used Office 2007 up to a couple months ago and I used to help her with a thing or two, mainly on Word and Excel (and Outlook, at times). I am sure there are differences, but from a regular usage perspective, jumping from Office 2016 to her Office 2007 wasn’t really “noticeable”. The Outlook UI probably the one that has more differences between the versions, but the 2016 UI is definitely better, IMO.

HTH.

Sorry, we cannot provide help for non legitimate Windows versions.

There has been no change at all. Same issue in the same handful of frequently used webpages, NONE of which is any problem on my own desktop PC.

I think you should download Chrome or Firefox and use one of them instead of IE or Edge. I suspect the ride will be much smoother once you do.
As things stand, if one program does not do what you need and a free alternative is better, there is no real reason to keep using the worse app, IMO.

I’m being unfair to Dell by complaining about a product that you suggest might be awful and consignable to the dust-bin? Meanwhile I wasted $300? I don’t think I’ll apologize to Dell.

A brand, per se, doesn’t ensure anything. If a PC is offered by $300, you really need to look at the specs, because there are no miracles. When my friend bought the 32 GB tablet I did warn that 32 GB was on the barely acceptable limit to run Windows. I must confess I would hardly buy one myself.

Also, from your description, this seems a Windows 10 upgrade, that now will occur through Windows Upgrade, so it’s not surprising that some space is required. I think free disk requirements are between 10 GB and 12 GB, so it’s not surprising that a 32 GB model can barely make it.

Sorry if this looks blunt, and I understand your disappointment, but it was a risky purchase, regardless of brand. I understand that Microsoft had to make an effort to even make sure that 32GB devices were upgradable. Probably Microsoft is more to blame than Dell, but you do need to be aware of what you are buying…

My opinion is that even a 64GB device, with around 20GB or so devoted to Windows, may not be adequate, depending on the use you want to make of it. So, I would probably say any device with a disk with less than 64GB should be bought only with an understanding that hoping it will behave like a regular device with a regular disk may be a bit too much. So, it’s not a matter of apologizing to Dell, which you obviously don’t have to, but it’s more of having realistic expectations on what $300 of hardware to run Windows can get you.

The problem is not the specific model, but it is the fact that the disk is 32 GB.

I helped someone upgrading one to Windows 10 and using a SD flash drive allowed the upgrade to proceed without any issues. So, in order to upgrade, better be sure what space you have and, as batcher suggested, if not enough space is available, make it so. Using Disk Cleanup can help. It did in the case of the upgrade I helped with.

I just watched a podcast by Paul Thurrott and this came up. He said that the version updates (1511, 1607) are really complete installs that upgrade the existing version to the new version. So, this is similar to the Win7/8 to Win10 upgrade. It’s not a service patch (as I thought it might be).

It was also mentioned that when speaking of Windows version, it might be simpler to just refer to the version number itself. I’m running Win1511 and the AU is really Win1607. If you really want to get fussy then you can refer to the build number, but that would get confusing really fast since there isn’t a direct numerical correlation between version number and build number.

Confirms the impression given by the upgrade process, with the files and folders created and the whole installation process (also on mobile, an update performed this morning and it went through all the steps of a full system upgrade).

Thank you Rui. Your answers really help my daughter, who is also grateful for your help.

Blessings,
Dick

You’re welcome, Dick :).

There are several apps that claim to provide the key. The first reply to the post below lists several, so you may try them to see if it helps:

how to find product key for Office 2007

I think Belarc and Nirsoft’s are the most frequently mentioned here on the Lounge.

HTH

Do you have a valid Office key? If so, you can download Office 2007 from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/office?culture=en-US&ref=o12

For the avoidance of doubt:-
1. I gave no technical opinion of Android, I merely expressed my opinion that I prefer it over other platforms.
2.I never suggested market share should be a factor in user choice.
3.On a Thread about phones, I pointed out that you had previously said you have no experience of Android phones.
Your posts are aggressive and full of bluster and I have no more time for this nonsense.

A few noteworthy aspects of this discussion:

1. You justify opinions with market share. Brilliant

2. You imply Android on a tablet has nothing to do with Android on a phone. Obviously, the same versions of Android will perform better, by some technological miracle, on phones than on tablets, even though the latter will usually be more powerful and where battery life will be of less relevance. Right. Must be a consequence of market share then.

3. Your opinion is freer than mine, since you can express it and should not be subject to criticism but me, the adopter of the platform with less market share, must not express my own with equal freedom.

Did you say nonsense?! How apt is that?! That conclusion should have come so much sooner!