Going into my experiences of Dell customer 'support' would be somewhat off-topic, but I'll just say that I should have heard warning bells when I contacted them before purchasing the laptop to check that it would come pre-installed with Office Starter:Īgent: "I understand your requirement but our outlet laptops doesn't come with MS office, it comes with Windows 10" Maybe I am not allowing long enough for them to respond, especially in the current situation, but then again Microsoft can hardly be short of resources, and I'd imagine that they would still be dealing with consumer enquiries whether from an office or working from home.
So, can someone tell me definitively whether or not my laptop should have Starter pre-installed, so I can or cannot contact Dell again to insist on them installing it? I submitted the question to Microsoft Support on Tuesday, but have not received a reply, just an acknowledgement of my query. Eventually, he told me that Office Starter is being replaced with Office 365, a response I could not make sense of for one thing, why is the Office Starter page still up, and with nothing about it being phased out?. I'm not sure I was successful in explaining the difference between Office Starter reduced functionality Word & Excel only, ad-funded and free and Office 365 fully fledged Office suite, has to be paid for after initial 30-day trial even though I sent him the above link. This was during a live chat with a Tech Support guy who had been remotely fixing issues on the laptop, so perhaps this was an area in which he was unfamiliar, although in that case he should have just admitted it and referred me to a department that could tell me. I recently queried this with Dell a bit late, I know, who denied that the laptop should have come with Office Starter.
"Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is a simplified, ad-funded version of Microsoft Office 2010 that comes pre-loaded and ready to use on your computer." I had assumed, on the basis of the following page, that it would come with Office Starter my Windows 7 laptop, purchased in 2014, again from Dell UK, was supplied with it:
refurbished Windows 10 laptop 64-bit from Dell UK last October. First of all, sorry if this question is in the wrong place I couldn't find what seemed like a suitable category, so please move it if necessary.