RiverRatRuss wrote:Ok Ok I've got to ask this one question... will it run my already created MS Office document files? or will I have to try and save them as this new program or create new files?
where I am at right now, copying my word documents into a PowerPoint presentation and this is where my MS Office systems are locking up... I'd pull my hair out if I had any!!! LOL
Newer versions of Office are backward compatible meaning that they should be able to read files created on previous versions as long as they are not corrupted as danm said.
If you are installing a fresh copy of Office 2007 it has a ton of updates that wants. It came out in 2006 and they stopped supporting it in 2017 so there's about 11 years of updates that it will want to do (security updates as such). Your system might not catch them all right away when you tell it to look for updates, it may take a few days for it to catch them all and some of the updates require a reboot. With that said it should work just fine even without having it completing all of it's updates.
I still use Office 2007 and install it on machines that I inherit to rebuild and donate. Sometimes it takes like 3 days of telling it to check for updates for the system to find all the Office 2007 updates. It still runs and is solid. If you need a fresh copy of Office 2007, drop me a message and I can mail you an install Office 2007 on a thumb drive. It's the Enterprise version that includes just about every Office package: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Picture Manger, Publisher, Access, One Note, and a couple others..
Also as others have said LibreOffice and OpenOffice are rather popular. They are open source software (free) that does most everything MS Office can do. They both can read and save to MS versions along with other formats that can be read by most operating systems including Linux and Mac and by most other software packages. LibreOffice and OpenOffice are pretty similar (they are related) and the user interface looks a lot like MS Office. There is a little bit to get used to like where things are located in the pull down menus but it's not complicated by any means. I've used both but slightly lean toward. LibreOffice.
In LibreOffice it has Writer (word processor like Word), Calc (spreadsheet like Excel), Impress (like PowerPoint), Base (database like Access), Draw (make cards and stuff like Publisher).
I'm not a fan of Office 365 but I have to use it at work. At home I use Office 2007 or LibreOffice.