Question Office.com and OneNote

[versionmanager]

I just wiped and reloaded windows 10. I decided to utilize Office.com as opposed to paying for a local copy of Office.
In order to use these MS Office applications, it requires that you upload your docs to their OneDrive storage. I understand that this is convenient but is this risky?

Is there some other way to have everything to save exclusively to your own hard drive? What if web access is down?

Can anyone offer any other feedback about this situation?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Inthrutheoutdoor]

Office.com is an online-only service, as is One Drive... that's why you have to upload everything.... even though you may still be able to save a copy to your local drive or desktop, when you go to open it, you will still be using the online version and any changes you make will be automatically synced to the cloud version...

The one and probably only advantage to this is that you can access your docs from any computer or other device with an internet connection...

If you are creating docs that contain personal, financial, medical or business information (for your work), then YES, it is risky for sure. Just search the net for how many data breaches have occurred in the past year & you may shocked to learn just how much sensitive info the hackers have managed to obtain on sooooo many people & companies, simply due to the lack of safeguards and carelessness of the originators and the company operating the online services.

However if you are just creating everyday docs without any of the aforementioned info, it probably won't matter much....

Personally, I chose several years ago to buy my local copy of office pro and completely remove/disable/disconnect OneDrive on all my rigs, and keep everything, sensitive or otherwise, on an external drive where I know that I am the only person who has access to it. If I have a need to have anything available while at work or just out & about, I copy it to a flash drive and take it with me, making sure to disable one drive on whatever machine I use to access it....

As with most things pc related though, YMMV

 

[USAFRet]

A free alternative to the online office.com would be LibreOffice.
Mostly compatible, all local on your system.

Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft

Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.

www.libreoffice.org

 

[Inthrutheoutdoor]

A free alternative to the online office.com would be LibreOffice.
Mostly compatible, all local on your system.

Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft

Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.

www.libreoffice.org

"Mostly" being the key word here though.... depending on what types of docs the OP is creating & how complicated they are formatting-wise, Libre could great, or not so much.... and also, sometimes certain items will get irreparably distorted or jumbled when converting from Libre to office or vice-versa too.. necessitating a complete recreation from scratch...which could be a royal PITA in some cases 😀

 

[USAFRet]

"Mostly" being the key word here though.... depending on what types of docs the OP is creating & how complicated they are formatting-wise, Libre could great, or not so much.... and also, sometimes certain items will get irreparably distorted or jumbled when converting from Libre to office or vice-versa too.. necessitating a complete recreation from scratch...which could be a royal PITA in some cases 😀

Right...mostly.

One case being the number of allowable columns in Calc.
Not sure what the specific limit is, but it is smaller than Excel.

I ran into that a couple years ago, importing a several year budget from Excel into Calc.
It balked at the number of columns.
OK, fine....cut off the first year, and all was well.

One of the key concepts is....does the user need to go back and forth between Office and LibreOffice, with the same file?
If no, then the theoretical problems are much much smaller.