Getting a legit Office 2016? How to ensure digital download versions are genuine?

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So 'd like to get Office 2016 Home/Student on some machines. I can see loads of sites offering a key and digital download, but I'm concerned how genuine these are. ie: In X months finding out the key is invalid and hitting issues.

Any advice on this matter?
 
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OP
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As tempting as some of these £20-40 download offers are, I wouldn't want to face any hassle X months down the line with keys being declared invalid...
 
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Do you actually need Office? A combination of LibreOffice (free) and say Google Docs (free; web-based) may do all you need.
It's a good question.

I'll need it at least on two machines for my kids. ie: To ensure they can do all their stuff with fully M$ compatible applications.

Then I have two PCs which I've had/have Outlook 2003 used on them. If I can explort those .PST files (only emails/contacts) to say Thunderbird instead, that would be very useful. I might give that a go TBH, if only so Outlook out is out of the puzzle.


BUT, once you get to the fact two accounts need M$ applications on, the 365 five license offer sorts all of the above out. ie: You get Outlook to carry on using, so can carry on using the PST files.
 

Pho

Pho

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LibreOffice / Google will both open and work with Microsoft formats, but they may not be able to match exactly how Office would show them so it sounds like Office is your best bet, and like you say, as you need two licenses 365 probably makes more sense. Plus, if they release Office 2018 you just get it for free rather than having to buy it again at £119.99 each.

Nothing beats Outlook on the desktop to be fair.

It's probably worth it just for all the cloud storage to be fair if you want to backup photos and things.
 
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I bought one of the 2012 Case C‑128/11 of the ECJ compliant resale copies of Office 2016 Professional from an Amazon marketplace seller for a whopping £8, working well so far. So far as I can understand it, once Microsoft originally sold it, they handed over its rights of sale to the new owner - so, provided the new owner deleted their copy before selling the licence on - Microsoft can't stop me using my £8 copy.

I suppose the difficult part is proving that the previous owner deleted their copy if Microsoft states afterwards that they didn't.
 
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Somebody mentioned Office Home above. You should only be paying somewhere around the £65/year range - the official MS site sells the subscription at £79/year, but you should be able to buy boxed products for a lot less from legitimate retailers.
Turn off automatic renewal and just buy a new box each time subscription comes to an end. I took advantage of a Rainforest sale last year and I'm loaded for the next 3 years on my subscription.

Home gets you the ability to use the full Office 2016 package on up to 5 machines and once a new version of Office is released you'll be entitled to that. I share a subscription with my mum - so we each pay a little over £30/year and her machine, my wife's machine and our couple of laptop's are all covered.
 
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Another option would be Office 365 home. It's £79.99/year and includes licenses for 5 users, and you get 1TB of OneDrive storage (presumably per user?) which works out far cheaper than buying several copies outright.

https://products.office.com/en-gb/compare-all-microsoft-office-products?tab=1

It being cheaper assumes you and your family will all die in less than?5? Years (less considering most people will not use all 5)... You planning the authorities should know about?
 
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There are some impressive discounts to students so if you have family it is easy to take advantage of this. As for the OP if I was to cut to the chase, gambling on £20 for the key is the risk you take its the same for games and other software you buy online. Its not hard to compare the maths as long as it worked for ~4 months then that year is around the subscription fee, I have heard these keys are working as long as its not stupidly cheap that somethings fishy. But it sounds like you could qualify for student, always check out the college/university website - it used to be needing an educational email address but its been a while for me..
 
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our work is one of the partners/whatever the term is that got a legit offer of Office 2016 for £9.99. i took them up on it for Word, but kinda wished i'd never bothered - it's d/l only so i don't have a back-up ISO, and Word 2016 is not pleasant compared to Word 2000 that i'm still using; far too overbloated for what i actually need. it also seems to install some hogger of an updates-checker too.
 
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our work is one of the partners/whatever the term is that got a legit offer of Office 2016 for £9.99. i took them up on it for Word, but kinda wished i'd never bothered - it's d/l only so i don't have a back-up ISO, and Word 2016 is not pleasant compared to Word 2000 that i'm still using; far too overbloated for what i actually need. it also seems to install some hogger of an updates-checker too.

I have just taken the offer of 'Office Professional Plus 2016' and 'Visio Professional 2016' at £9.95 each on the Home Use Program offer from work. I suppose I can get an .iso file online and just use the supplied product keys (and I could have bought an iso with the offer for a similar additional cost).

IMO it is worth it to keep current with upgrades, my previous office was version 2007. My interim solution after the install was to clone the installations anyway.
 
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