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My uncle has Office 365 on his PC and he’s due to renew it tomorrow (Tuesday). I’ve looked at the options on ebay, and they all seem to say that they’re already registered to an account so you can’t use them to renew.
What does this realistically mean? Is it a case of uninstalling and reinstalling or can I just change the account?
He’s been quoted about £50 to renew, and that seems a bit steep. If anyone knows how the ebay licences work, or how to renew for a lower price, I’d be grateful ?
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Not sure it he actually needs Office 365 but I’ve been using Google Docs for a while for my modest needs.
Thanks Nolan :)
If it was for home, Google Docs would be fine, but he has work documents from the NHS sent through every day, so can’t risk compatibility issues. It’s a pain but I think he’s stuck with MS for now
Loads of Office 2016 Pro under a fiver like this E-Bay
I’ve bought nothing but these for over a year now.
*thud* *thud* *thud*
That’s the sound of me banging my head against the wall ?
After being assured that he needs Office 365, and his licence has to be renewed tonight it turns out that he’s actually using Office 2010, it’s for Word only, and the expiry notice is for my aunty’s laptop that he rarely uses…
I’m going to buy myself a 360 licence for now and see how straightforward it is with the existing email address they all seem to use, and if it’s easy enough for him, I’ll buy them a licence each. After tonight I’ll keep them on MS because it’s what they already know, and I’m less likely to get another headache ?
Loads of Office 2016 Pro under a fiver like this E-Bay I’ve bought nothing but these for over a year now.
Have you tried the Office 365 versions with the 1TB storage? I don’t mind risking a few quid on it, but if you’ve already heard the horror stories, I’ll avoid them. There’s an example here:
I’ve used a few of the Office 2016 after good advice on here – all AOK. Just bought a 365 “Home” 5 user version but not installed or activated it yet. It sounds too good to be true (5 users, lifetime, 1TB each) but as it was £7 I thought worth a punt. The first account is fixed but you can share it with 4 users using their own MS account.
Its this one and I’ll probably be giving it a go this weekend.
By the way for a few people who just want Word (and don’t like or need full blown Office, ribbon and all) I have installed an older version of AbiWord, which has doen the trick. There is one tweak to set it to save in “doc” format by default but after that it feels like tradional MS word.
I have a business 365 subscription myself but that’s for my business use (not personal) and includes email hosting. i.e. giffordsystems.co.uk email addresses are hosted on Microsoft servers.
For everyone else it’s hard to see the difference between Office 2016 and 365. On 2016 it steers you towards using One Drive to store your documents and log in with a Microsoft Account. Anyone can use the free online versions of Word and Excel with their One Drive. OK the free space is “only” 5GB but if any normal person has 5GB of documents I’ll eat my hat. What people have in bulk is Music, photos and Video and One Drive is not the best place to store that.
Even though I have a 365 subscription I don’t use One Drive (either business or personal). I store my documents in my own “Cloud” i.e. on my Synology NAS via Cloud Station Drive. Synology and Google look after my photos and whilst I normally stream music from the Cloud I have some esoteric stuff saved on the Synology, same with video, and I can stream from there if I want.
The only advantage I can see to personal 365 is rolling updates of major versions, but I don’t think that’s worth the cost.
The business 365 is an other thing entirely and depends on your business model. The collaboration tools can be very powerful but need an administrator. For me a trusted host for my email is worth it. For the cost of that I basically get free Office.
I agree – the only advantage for me (365) is the 1TB OneDrive – an me and mine are heavy OneDrive users.
Thanks both :)
I was thinking of the free storage, but if it’s not suitable for music and videos etc., it’s no good to me.
Thanks both ? I was thinking of the free storage, but if it’s not suitable for music and videos etc., it’s no good to me.
Its suitable but not the slickest – all my Music is on there as are my photos – they are one Flickr and google too. Video I’ve not bothered with videos (aside from my home videos which are on there with photos). Other Videos are kept on an HDD hanging off my router and a media PC (mirrored). If i lost both of those could get them all back and its all no-personal stuff.
I think the max file size on OneDrive is 10GB – big enough for most videos, but my video HDDs are 3TB. It (OneDrive) was unlimited for a short period and then cut back to 1TB.
OneDrive was a lot better with 8.1 than 10 – although they have bought a bit of the functionality back. Its still a very economic way to get 1TB/year for 5 people (if you need 5) – even at full price. Its AOK for music, and personal photos/videos.
Don’t forget for videos you can stick them on YouTube and keep them private, apart from people you share a link with. ?
Don’t forget for videos you can stick them on YouTube and keep them private, apart from people you share a link with. ?
Good shout PM
The problem I have with One Drive is it’s synchronized with a folder on your PC and I don’t want that for massive media files. I want to park those somewhere and look or listen to them from there. That’s why I ended up with the Synology.
I use Cloud Station to synchronize my business documents among my 3 devices (2 PCs and a laptop) and that currently stands at 2GB (3.4GB on the server as that includes it’s recycle bin and 31 stage versioning for each file). I can get to them through any browser or an Android app.
Video takes up 89GB and Photos 5GB. I have a one way Cloud Sync job set up to synchronize my Google Photos to a folder on the Synology. I then copy over those I want to keep into Photo Station Albums. I use the Photo Station Uploader on a PC to take pictures off the camera. It integrates with File Explorer so you can do this with right clicks. Again there are Android apps available for mobile viewing.
My Synology is also powerful enough to run two 3mpx IP camera as well if I wanted it to. It can run a lot more than that but you’d need to dedicate it to CCTV only (or get a more powerful one).
Everything is backed up to an external 2.5″ HDD with 30 day versioning. I get scheduled health diagnostics and any real time errors emailed to me and I choose to do the same with backup success / failure / abnormalities.
It’s cost me £325 for a DS216se 3TB RAID solution (including the backup HDD) but you could do it for £203 with a single 3TB DS115j
The big plus is it’s all properly backed up. You can even set up a weekly archive to the dirt cheap Amazon Glacier service if you want off site backup too. It cost me a couple of quid a month.
I have a one way Cloud Sync job set up to synchronize my Google Photos to a folder on the Synology. I then copy over those I want to keep into Photo Station Albums. .
I didn’t know Google Photos would sync like that. I’ve just been using DS Photo on my phone to automatically upload the images to the NAS. Mind, I also have them upload to Dropbox and then have my Mac move them into my pictures folder. I went for the slightly pricer DS116 but it performs extremely well. I’ve also got one at my fiancée’s house in Ireland that backs up their computer and photos. I’ve also paid for the Synology storage, so both the one there and mine backup to that.
Third party apps support mean that I use Resilo Sync to sync between devices, rather than the Synology Sync program. Partly because it’s tried and tested by myself and partly because it’s peer to peer, I get speed ups on transferring data when needed with more peers online.
In terms of Onedrive, I have this for work, but use the work Dropbox account instead!
"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett
OneDrive has got a bit better now with Files On Demand. Still not as good as with 8.1 but better than the “all or nothing” that came in with 10.
I don’t use the app at all, just upload files or folders via Chrome browser. Slow and clunky but safe. Its a backup and sharing tool for me and not a sync tool. Its a long way from perfect but very cheap and so far very stable/reliable.
Is one drive supposed to appear somewhere under file explorer? I realise that I have had a one drive set up/account or whatever for a while though never used it for anything. I was a member of a group that did very little with it and then MS closed the group thing anyway. I am not sure if I will ever find it very useful, files are rarely created these days though they are backed up at various times each day anyway.
Richard, it appears on the left between Quick Access and This PC.
Drezha, it’s Cloud Sync you need to be looking at. It talks to all the major Cloud services.
In Google Photos you need to make sure that in Settings: Google Drive – “Show Google Drive photos & videos in your Photos library” is turned on.
On the Synology I have a folder called Photo Sync and in Cloud Sync I have that synchronised with /Google Photos. It’s a one way sync so only changes made in Google Photos are reflected on the Synology. I’ve also set it to not delete any photos in Photo Sync even if they are deleted in Google Photos.
Cloud Sync keeps a database of what’s been synchronised so even when I move the photos into the Photo Station App and delete them from the Photo Sync folder they are not re-synchronised. Neither are they deleted from Google Photos.
All this means is that the Synology only gets new photos from Google Photos and doesn’t affect Google Photos in any way.
You can do this trick with Dropbox folders too.
Dave, thank you, it was not there, perhaps pruned on a previous streamlining attack but it was easy enough to pin back in place once more. I am still not sure what I would use it for but at least it is an easy option once more.
One Drive and it’s kind can be useful for a number of things.
- Spread the copies of files onto multiple machines – a sort of backup.
- Access documents from anywhere you can get on a browser with an internet connection, and these days edit them too.
- Share files with others (but this can be quite crude).
If you can make them work for you they a good solution.
I found that none of them quite did what I wanted, plus they insist you be a member of their club and accept their ideas on workflow and applications. You also have to accept their idea of security (probably OK) and backup (usually none).
I decided to go down the Synology route as it gives me that control. It has a number of apps so you can tailor the sort of personal “Cloud” (I hate that word) you want as well as taking advantage of the public offerings and integrating them into your world. QNAP would allow you to do the same, but SOHO products like Western Digital My Cloud or Seagate Personal Cloud are just too lacking and aren’t much cheaper.
There are also some big advantages using “grown up” applications and the best for me is versioning. Any document in my PCs Cloud Station folder is synchronised with the NAS and it keeps a database of the last 32 versions of the files (as well as a recycle bin). My daily backup does the same for the other files on the system. For both de-duplication keeps the storage requirements down to a minimum. You just can’t do that with public cloud services.
TBH I only use Photo Station because it’s there. I can get Google Photos to do the same job, but if I got run over by a bus tomorrow the family photo’s wouldn’t go with me ?
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