If you use Win 7 or 8.1, Surface or Surface 2 or a number of other products both hardware and software, Microsoft have stopped answering support questions and in July this Year 2018 are going to stop tracking a lot of this in their forums.
To read more about these changes read this article at
WIll they also turn off the online information as they have with other old products?
From my reading this may very well be the case, they are removing quite a lot of the old information or locking it so no new info can be provided I have found when I have to search for answers regarding older but not yet defunct software. I assume this is a move to both streamline their support for only newer products and cut down on the huge data capacity it must currently take to support/service this older tech.
I also found that no furthur support would be provided to Microsoft Office 2016 and I was encouraged to purchase Microsoft 365 by an annual subscription. I guess thats the way things are going.
I still use Office 2007. That edition had more than enough bloatware features, let alone even more in each later edition. I have mentally committed that once 2007 has a problem that affects me I will migrate fully to Libreoffice rather than continue Microsoft’s game of making their products bigger, more cumbersome, more in control over the user, and ever more expensive for the home consumer.
We tried Libreoffice but after persisting with if for a while, we changed to free version of WPS Office. The main reason we changed to WPS was some of the funcationality we enjoyed in MS Office didn’t exist or was very clunky to use (e.g. creating and editing tables for example). The toolbar also looks more like earlier versions of MS office…where as WPS has more functionality and looks closer to current versions. The only downside is if on uses the free version, you get popup advertisements in the Windows Notification area from time to time and a 5 second advertisement on loading on of its applications. Apart from that, it has been good to use. The paid version subscription is also not terribly expensive (US29.99/18 months or US79.99 for lifetime at the moment)
