Speaker 1: Stop paying the Microsoft Office subscription fee. Every year you just keep paying Microsoft to use Microsoft Office but you really don't need to. Firstly are you even aware that there's another paid for version of Office that doesn't require you to pay every year? So let's start with that and then I'm gonna show you some free options as well. Remember the olden days where you just walked into a shop, you paid for something and you didn't have to enter into this lifelong relationship of a subscription fee? Well Microsoft kind of wants you to forget about those days too as they want you to pay every single year to be part of their Microsoft 365 program but you don't need to. Microsoft actually has an option to buy Office for a once-off fee instead of renting it on a yearly basis. If you just need Word, Excel, PowerPoint and you don't need Outlook and OneNote and Publisher and Access then this is a great option especially if you don't intend on installing Office on multiple computers, phones and tablets. I will have a link to this in the description below. So you can pay a once-off fee rather than renting it on a yearly basis. So that's the paid for version. What about the free options? Well let's start with the obvious one but the one that really isn't being used for some reason. That is office.com which is Microsoft equivalent of Google Docs. Head over to office.com, log in with your Microsoft account and you have access to programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well as a whole bunch of others. All for free and you can even share your docs with others as you can with Google Docs. The nice thing is that this works on mobile too with either a dedicated Office apps or through a regular browser. Now whilst the cloud-based apps are pretty nice and convenient they obviously are a stripped-down version of the full apps. So what if you want the full power of Office for free in an installable app on your computer? Well then you have options. You need to look at free productivity suites like LibreOffice, OpenOffice, WPS and a whole bunch more. But let's address the three biggest misconceptions that are out there. The first misconception is that these apps only run on Linux. The second misconception is that these are free therefore they must be crabbed or at least full of ads. And the third is that there is an issue with Microsoft Office and having compatible files. Only one of these is partially correct the rest are not. So let's start with where you can actually install these. So because these are all free you can try a whole bunch. For example here's LibreOffice.org. Simply click on the download and you can see that it's available on Linux as well as Mac OS and Windows. Click the download follow the installation process. The same applies to OpenOffice.org. We've got WPS.com and click on the download and again now you have a whole bunch of options. So misconception number one it's only available for Linux is clearly busted. Let's move on to the next misconception that it's full of ads and it's pretty crap because it's free. Well you have a look at this and you tell me. Right this is the LibreOffice setup that I have on the left hand side. You're able to create your documents and I'm going to go show you a couple of little features in here. This is LibreWriter. I mean come on tell me this doesn't look exactly like Word. Down to the contextually changing menus in the ribbon. Everything looks and feels exactly as you're accustomed to. Therefore this is a very very easy transition including the ability to personalize and customize your entire environment just like the way that you want it to work. So let's move on to Excel version which is called Calc. And in here you can see again things like that you used to. Right click on the cell. Choose format the cells. Make it into currency. You can run your formulas as you did before. Very very easy to get used to. Same goes for the presentation. If you create lots of presentation well you've got a tool for that here as well. And again it includes all the features. I mean even the fonts and the clip art looks exactly the same as what you're used to on the Microsoft Office equivalent. But this is free and as you can clearly see there are no ads. So I don't know where that little theory came from but if you just use it for two minutes you can clearly see there are no ads. Okay what about compatibility issue? Okay well this one is kind of partially correct. Microsoft uses propriety fonts, images and sometimes even styles that don't really translate well when you open up in something like LibreOffice. Right so this is a resume template that I went and I found using the normal Microsoft Word template. I'm gonna make some changes to this. I don't know like don't forget to subscribe. Hint hint. All right now let's save this little template and then let's open this up in LibreOffice. So open file. There is the docx file. I didn't have to change the extension. Simply open it and voila there it is. The only thing I've noticed is there's a couple of spaces which are different between this document and the original. Look I've never had a case where I couldn't open a file. However I have had cases where the file formatting was a little bit off. So clearly this is something you need to be aware of especially if you're working in teams where you're constantly sharing documents. It isn't really a big deal if all you're doing is creating documents for yourself right. So a pro tip that I've learned in whatever productivity suite you happen to choose. Make sure you set up Calibri font as the default font as that is the font that Office uses. And make sure that you save the default file saving to be Office file format. This way you're not going to have much issue when you share these documents with people. And now that you're exploring the path to free apps what about trying out Linux for free without removing Windows. Or check out this video over here that YouTube thinks you should watch. Hit the head here to subscribe and I'll see you in this video or this video and I'll see you in both. Let's go.