Since I received quite a few thanks on the Phone Apps series I ran several weeks ago I have come up with another series to help most of you. The “most of you” would be Windows 10 users. According to Net Applications, as of a month ago, Windows 10 is on almost 61% of all computers in use at that time. So, it would seem to me that the majority of us, like me, use Windows 10 for our computer operating systems.
This column will start us on a series of the most commonly asked questions I get regarding Windows 10.
The first one is “Hey Ron, how can I get the Microsoft Office Suite for less?” I have answered this one previously; however, since I get it often I will give a quick review here. Office 365 runs from about $50 to $100 per year depending on what you get with it. Over time that can be quite an expense. But you can also get most of the suite for free. At this point as well as for the past several years you get the basics of Office; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. It will not cost you anything and you get 5GB of free storage with OneDrive. By-the-way, just to run some simple numbers that means that I can store every column I have written from 2002 to today for the next 2,250 years there. That is for approximately 1,200 simple Word Documents and some Excel Workbooks; however, photo storage would be significantly less.
If you do not already have one, go create an account at Outlook.com or Live.com (they are identical). Once you have a free account set up and logged in, you get Office Online as mentioned above.
Two other excellent free options available are Google Drive (drive.google.com) and LibreOffice.org. Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Gmail, Google Drive (which offers you 15 GB of free storage) and many more superior features. By-the-way,
I will be talking about many of these in my free Google Training that will be starting on October 16…in a couple of weeks. Register at DoubleClicksLive.com to be able to see them and learn free of charge.
LibreOffice is the option you should use if you do not want to work in the cloud and want everything contained on your local computer. It is similar to Microsoft Office without the cost. All of them integrate with Office formats and even Office Online and Google allow you to store your files locally. Keep in mind that MS Office has more functionality than the others but the huge majority of us will never need it.
Now, the above info is really not directly Windows 10 related but it is Microsoft. But this one is all Windows 10. Storage Sense is a feature in W10 (my abbreviation from here on out) that is not on by default. To set it up click on the W10 start button in the left corner of your Taskbar. Then type, “storage sense” you will see several responses come up but you need to click on, “Turn on Storage Sense.” Once there click the toggle button to on. From that point on It will automatically delete unneeded “Temp” files from your computer when your space gets low on your hard drive. However, you may also click “Configure Storage Sense or run it now” and set it to perform the way you want.
Not that it is good for you but on that page, I set the top three dropdowns to “Every week,” “1 day” and “14 days.”
Let me know what you think I should write about dealing with W10 and if you try any of the above options let me know about those also.
