Buying Microsoft Office 2024 but not from Microsoft

[paulb203]

TL;DR Summary

Office 2024 for £29.99 from Shop Win & Office; is this legit?

I'm thinking for buying Office 2024. It's around £120 from Microsoft and places like Curry's. But I see there are other companies selling it for nearer £30. Are these legit? If so, how can they manage to sell it for a quarter of the price?
One offer I'm looking at is the £29.99 one from Shop Win & Office. They have a good rating and good reviews on Trustpilot, but I don't know how much to trust that.
What actually happens when you but the product? Do you simply get a product key, a long alphanumeric number, and then..?

 

[phinds]

Are these legit?

No. How could they be at that price?

 

[paulb203]

Thanks, phinds.
Yeah, I'm wary, hence the post.
This is what Msoft said;

"Upon checking here, I can't confirm nor deny the legitimacy of the website being a retailer of Microsoft Products, However We do not discourage you from purchasing from this merchant, yet we want to set your expectation that any transaction that are done with other merchant/retailer are out of Microsoft's liability."

 

[FactChecker]

If this is for your personal, casual use, you might consider LibreOffice. It is free. I have been using it for years with no complaints. It's not an exact MS Office clone, but it is reasonably compatible.

 

[jedishrfu]

The one major issue I had with LibreOffice and that was some years ago was in trading documents between multiple parties.

I wrote a design spec in LibreOffice and several people commented on my document using MS Office and trying to merge things back became a nightmare of weird formatting errors that I just couldn't overcome.

I eventually had to copy the text into a simple text editor file to filter out all the formatting, paste it into a new document using MS Office this time around, and manually reformat things before I got it cleaned up.

 

[FactChecker]

The one major issue I had with LibreOffice and that was some years ago was in trading documents between multiple parties.

I wrote a design spec in LibreOffice and several people commented on my document using MS Office and trying to merge things back became a nightmare of weird formatting errors that I just couldn't overcome.

I eventually had to copy the text into a simple text editor file to filter out all the formatting, paste it into a new document using MS Office this time around, and manually reformat things before I got it cleaned up.

This brings back PTSD nightmares I had when compiling documents in MS Word. I think that is a characteristic of Word more than anything else. I also had to put the pieces into a simple text editor before I merged them into the main document. A special evil of MS Word was that a format change on page 248 could change formatting on page 25. So simple cut and paste required reading through the entire document to make sure that nothing was messed up. IMHO, straight cut and paste from multiple MS Word documents is not possible unless none of the suppliers did any advanced formatting.

 

[jedishrfu]

Sadly, some coworkers will do nasty things to make you look bad or waste the time you need to complete a project.

 

[paulb203]

If this is for your personal, casual use, you might consider LibreOffice. It is free. I have been using it for years with no complaints. It's not an exact MS Office clone, but it is reasonably compatible.

Thanks, but although it is for personal use, it's more than just casual. I've had it for I-don't-know-how-long but the license has expired (or whatever it is that happens when you need to buy again).
It's either buy Office, or subscribe to 365 Personal.

 

[FactChecker]

Thanks, but although it is for personal use, it's more than just casual. I've had it for I-don't-know-how-long but the license has expired (or whatever it is that happens when you need to buy again).
It's either buy Office, or subscribe to 365 Personal.

Maybe "casual" was the wrong word. I have used it on documents of a variety of sizes. IMO, it is safe to download it and see what your documents look like in it. I tend to save documents in Open Document Text (ODT) format. I'm not sure if I can use ODT back in Word once the document has been converted but I think I could always read it back into LibreOffice Writer and save it in Word formats.

 

[jtbell]

I'm thinking for buying Office 2024. It's around £120 from Microsoft and places like Curry's. But I see there are other companies selling it for nearer £30. Are these legit? If so, how can they manage to sell it for a quarter of the price?

They probably sell activation codes generated from institutional / enterprise bulk licenses. Companies and other institutions (such as the college where I formerly taught) use them to distribute Office apps to their employees.

Some legitimate sites like ZDnet sell them, so it appears that Microsoft tolerates this, at least in some cases.

I pay for a Microsoft 365 personal subscription because I can afford it. I like the seamless updates on my Macs via Apple's App Store (no Microsoft Autoupdater needed). I can also install it on all my devices because it's a per-person license tied to my Microsoft account, not a per-device license as is the case with Office.

 

[paulb203]

They probably sell activation codes generated from institutional / enterprise bulk licenses. Companies and other institutions (such as the college where I formerly taught) use them to distribute Office apps to their employees.

Some legitimate sites like ZDnet sell them, so it appears that Microsoft tolerates this, at least in some cases.

I pay for a Microsoft 365 personal subscription because I can afford it. I like the seamless updates on my Macs via Apple's App Store (no Microsoft Autoupdater needed). I can also install it on all my devices because it's a per-person license tied to my Microsoft account, not a per-device license as is the case with Office.

I'm actually thinking about going for the 365 Personal subscription. 1 TB OneDrive sounds good, and 100 GB ad-free Outlook too. They kept offering me a month's free trial but when I went to sign up I found out that was only for 365 Family. But now I've discovered you can effectively get a month's free trial with Personal due to their, 'Cancel within the first 30 days...' for a full refund.