Years ago it was known as MS Office. Wasn't too difficult to figure out what you needed and what the product provided and what the cost would be. Buy the program, install it and off you went.

Not so easy to figure out what MS Office (in general) package you need now, or I should say with this which package you can use with your system and your needs.

We are a young growing company and have been using OpenOffice for the past couple of years which was good enough for us until now. Many of our customers use Excel and we find there are issues that are created transforming spreadsheets from OOffice to Excel and back again. Long story.

We have 5 stand alone systems. All running a version of Windows 10 (some Home and some Pro).

Our biggest need is Excell. The other add ons such as Word, Powerpoint, Publisher etc are a bonus but not really needed at this time. "Access" would be good as I have experience in the past with some SQL and using Crystal Report Writer (almost 15 years ago) and I am usually charged with creating reports for sales, inventory etc.

We do not have an I.T. department and we do not have our systems connected using any networking capability. Any information we share is done using GDocs up in the cloud.

We all have Dell PCs or laptops and one HP laptop.

With all the MS Office products to choose from it is difficult to figure out what we want to spend our money on.

The boss would like something on the "cloud" so we can all share/edit/print etc spreadsheets. It does not have to be cloud based depending on the cost and the limitations of sharing information. Are there limitations of using a cloud based MS Office product?

If we buy a package to install on our individual PCs/laptops do you have to purchase per users licenses. How does that work.

I would like to have the ability to work with Access. Many of our other programs are cloud based and I can download CSV files and set up data tables, link them together and create reports in Access as I did with Crystal. I may have to get information from two or three different one of our cloud based programs to download to CSV and then work with them in Access to create the reports that the boss wants.

We have to keep in mind that we need to be flexible in the way of data storage in the future so if we advance to an in house IT department we have to be able to transition.

With all the MS Office packages available which would be suggested for our needs. I have read for hours and still can't figure out which would be best for our needs. Dollar for Dollar is hard to figure also.

My boss said something about a "Life Subscription" being available.

Any suggestions would be appreciated very much.

Thanks!!