Anti-virus phishing etc. if W10 isn’t up to the task

Excel/office type program

Leave the MS inbuilt AV to do its job.

For spreadsheets, just use Google Sheets.

Win 10 is perfectly good at anti virus.
Spreadsheets depends what you want to do, as above google sheets is great but is better online, open/libre office is free and MS has subscriptions for office.

The best excel/office type program is office.

Unless you want something free.

Office is still the best but it has hundreds of features most people never use. Google sheets is good for shared files, especially accessing from an android phone. Libre office is a good alternative to ms office. Not quite as slick but pretty darn good for the money. Built in anti virus is fine, especially if you are sensible about what you click on.

jam bo – Member
The best excel/office type program is office.

Unless you want something free.
Best is subjective.

nickjb – Member 
Libre office is a good alternative to ms office. Not quite as slick but pretty darn good for the money

On a linux system it may be worth a look given no other choice, but on Windows really it’s still slow, clunky, and has a UI stuck in the 90s, and it’s emulating Office from the 90s. Plus it still has no match for Outlook.

Office has moved way on. Plus with Office 365 you get far more of Office than you’d get in the old days with a basic standalone home install, and you get 1TB of OneDrive storage, and a regular home version gets you 5 licences. Or you can get a cheaper individual licence. Okay it’s subscription stuff but you get latest and greatest each year and again, you’ve got that 1TB storage. In fact it’s worth the annual fee for that alone and you can consider Office as a bonus.

If you use Office at work you might be able to buy it for a tenner (it’s called HUP, the Home User Programme).

Failing that, if your lad has a .ac.uk email address you can get it heavily discounted. See http://www.software4students.co.uk/

Our work office 365 licences each come with 5 seats, 1 is used at work and the other 4 you can use as you please… I use one each on a mac and win10 machine at home – could be worth investigating if your place of work do the same sort of thing.

Google sheets is actually very good for simple stuff.

Win10 Antivirus is great, no need for anything else (has been wince Win 7)

Just goes to show..PC World sales person says ‘ youll be needing Norton Anti-virus with that laptop….

Of course. It’s called “value added” and it’s where they get most of their commission from.

I used to work for a large computer retailer back in the 90s, and the amount of shit they used to flog to folk was incredible. Extended warranties naturally, but also boxes of floppy disks for backups (the bundled software was all preinstalled along with media images – to create installation media required fifty floppies), mouse mats, dust covers…

That would be because they must get a nice commission, PC World benefit not only from the sale of the software but also the memory upgrade required as soon as you install it.

Failing that, if your lad has a .ac.uk email address you can get it heavily discounted. See http://www.software4students.co.uk/

Depending on the institution he may be able to get 360 for free, I have a free academic version as part of my OU studies. Need to check how I got that as it’s not part of Imagine (formerly Dreamspark) and it’s been a fair while since I used it.

The best excel/office type program is office.

Unless you want something free

This. Although “niche” always likes to be “niche”