How to Become Dangerous (and more productive)

Surely the first thing to install on a new (Windows) PC would be a good security suite, before you venture anywhere to get anything else?

The next things I install are likely

Unless you are constrained by your employer's IT policies, or use macros programmed in VisualBasic, why spend your money on Microsoft when you can have LibreOffice for free ?
It can do almost everything MS Office does, and has no problem reading and writing your documents in Microsoft's proprietary formats.

Hooray for the shout-out for Allen Wyatt! His pages are, along with yours, some of the web-resources I most value. I am delighted to learn that you and he are acquainted — you have both earned your well-deserved reputations by providing free, solid advice over many years — long may you both continue!

There are other good resources that I trust, but yours and Allen's have in common a sense that your foundations stretch back to an earlier (better?) era of the Internet before the scammers took hold, and there is, for both your sites, a sense that this is the personal project of somebody whose primary motive in setting it up was not personal profit but a generosity of spirit.

I hope and trust that you have both profited from your enterprises. I have always regarded you and Allen in the same good light and am delighted to see you recommend him. I wholeheartedly recommend both your sites to anybody.

Did I miss it or was Outlook even mentioned? That is my primary means for using a PC. Of course, search engines are widely used along with favorite web sites for current news items. I don't work in an office now, so seldom use Word from Office 360.

Dear Bob,
Thanks so much for the info. I had no idea that Allen Wyatt's help sites existed. I have used Microsoft Word for years with great results.

At home I always use OpenOffice. A holdover from the days when open source was all the rage. Any chance there is anyone out there doing the same thing as Allen Wyatt for OpenOffice? There's a wiki for OpenOffice but apparently it only goes up to OpenOffice 3. I'm using 4.1.5.

I was a PC user at work & an Apple user at home. We used Corel Word Perfect & Quatro Pro before Microsoft arrived. Loved Corel! Apple isn't as good. I also miss Palm. I sometimes wonder where those engineers went.

LibreOffice and Notepad++ (like someone else mentioned). Office products are bloated and generate larger files than necessary. Why not go with a free solution?

I must be the odd one out. I have never used nor had the need to use or even let the thought pass through my head to use Excel. In my home I have never had the desire or need to compose a spreadsheet. To be honest I am still a bit hazy on exactly what a spreadsheet actually is.
I worked in an office environment for a 5 year period and while the cooperation had MS-Office installed, the only part of if the employees accessed was Outlook for email.
Any letters or notes or books I have needed to write have always come out clearly on Open Office or Libreoffice or even Microsoft Write.
I propose that the first program used on any new computer is MS Explorer to download a better browser.

It's been imitated by many, but never quite duplicated. It did just that to WordPerfect.

Anybody other than Dan remember AmiPro? IMO, that was head and shoulders above MS-Word. While working in Word Support at Microsoft, I gave a presentation on it and everybody agreed that it was much more intuitive and feature packed than Word. However, thanks to the sales force of MS, it didn't really matter who had the best software program. Companies who had employees who loved whatever they were using -- mainly WordPerfect -- bought into the Office promise of superiority and created all kinds of problems. For a couple of years, the MS Support people had to know about as much about WordPerfect so we could assist those who were forced to switch to Word. One of the least favorite things after answering the phone was, "It was so easy in WordPerfect, but now..."

I haven't worked at MS since 2003 (or anywhere else, for that matter). I stopped updating Word due to the expense and the lack of need to do any heavy word processing. When I needed to read a Word .doc (or .docx) file, I used a compatible program. Currently I use TextMaker from SoftMaker Free Office. It does way more than I need and doesn't cost anything.

For the most part, I try not to use Mostly Sh!tty products. I am guilty of using Hotmail.( I must have felt that MS was the lesser of two evils when I did that. I might switch to Gmail soon. I am signed up.) I have been using Open Office for years. It has done very well. Other than the fact that , after the last upgrade, it doesn't autocorrect spelling. I think that I have read that I can reload it and that problem will be corrected.

Yes: first solitaire, then security, then Firefox.
As for office suites, I used MS Office when it came FREE on a desktop I once used. After that I used OpenOffice for a few years. For the last several years (a lot of them) I've used LibreOffice. No complaints, except maybe it has a lot of "stuff" I've never used (or probably understood).

LibreOffice, yes!

Another vote for Libre Office. MS office is popular as it appears to be the only choice when shopping for a pre-installed office suite.

go to www (dot) libreoffice (dot) org and download it.

Bob - You need to correct your Pre-2007 Excel link. Both pre-2007 links go to Word.

When I was gainfully employed, my employer provided MS Office, from which I used Excel. I provided Word Perfect(ed) and used the word processor. When I retired my son introduced me to Linux, which I now use exclusively. I still have a use for a word processor and spreadsheet. I find that LibreOffice provides me the best of both MS-World and WP-World. I've dabbled with the MS products and put them down for LibreOffice,it does the job my way, especially footnotes.

Thanks so much, Bob. I use Word and Excel extensively, so I will quite enjoy Allen Wyatt's newsletters.

I agree with a couple of previous posts that the first things you install on a new computer are a better browser (I use Google Chrome) and an antivirus program. I've read that Windows Defender has evolved into a good antivirus, but I'd still rather install a separate AV program. I do use MS Office, but I'm still using Office 2010, as the newer versions don't really add anything new, and I refuse to pay a subscription fee. If I didn't already have a paid copy of Office, I'd use Libre Office. I tried it out and it's very similar to MS Office.

For a step up to Excel plus database, try AirTable. It even takes your current spreadsheet and makes it work.