I use MS Office 2007 in a Windows XP virtual machine (VirtualBox) on Linux since many years. Zero complaints. There have been technically meaningless changes since 2007 for the OpenXML extended document suite of formats.
Recently I checked the additional benefits of Office versions above 2007.
2010 gives a Protected View sandboxing feature against macros, and decluttering Ribbon with a Backstage extra menu page to save/share documents.
2013 brought a new landing page, a comment markup tool to highlight edited portions and integrating OneDrive.
2016 brought a quick search like tool for doing many complex tasks easily, somewhat like Excel’s formula finder. It also has a handwriting feature for formulaic and polynomial equations.
2019 brought a feature to improve the OneDrive/365 integration by highlighting users who edited a collaboration document. LaTeX was also integrated for math symbols and equations. It brought Dark Mode as well.
2021 brought mostly further improvements to OneDrive/365 co-authoring and collaboration stuff.
Apart from the LaTeX part, most of it is cosmetic or collaboration features meaningless to me, so I find 2007 pretty great. This also highlights Office was practically feature complete back in 2007, and they are just going to make Office 365 Online their whole business besides Azure Cloud in the future from now on.
BINGO!
I use MS Office 2007 in a Windows XP virtual machine (VirtualBox) on Linux since many years. Zero complaints. There have been technically meaningless changes since 2007 for the OpenXML extended document suite of formats.
Recently I checked the additional benefits of Office versions above 2007.
2010 gives a Protected View sandboxing feature against macros, and decluttering Ribbon with a Backstage extra menu page to save/share documents.
2013 brought a new landing page, a comment markup tool to highlight edited portions and integrating OneDrive.
2016 brought a quick search like tool for doing many complex tasks easily, somewhat like Excel’s formula finder. It also has a handwriting feature for formulaic and polynomial equations.
2019 brought a feature to improve the OneDrive/365 integration by highlighting users who edited a collaboration document. LaTeX was also integrated for math symbols and equations. It brought Dark Mode as well.
2021 brought mostly further improvements to OneDrive/365 co-authoring and collaboration stuff.
Apart from the LaTeX part, most of it is cosmetic or collaboration features meaningless to me, so I find 2007 pretty great. This also highlights Office was practically feature complete back in 2007, and they are just going to make Office 365 Online their whole business besides Azure Cloud in the future from now on.