The popular Microsoft Office 2010 is soon going to reach its end of support. To avoid security risks, it's time to upgrade to a newer version of Office. The good news is that your library can get the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 for your administrative PCs from Microsoft Academic, or you can get donated on-premises Microsoft Office Standard 2019 from TechSoup. We also have affordable support services for email and data migration and a comprehensive set of training courses called the Microsoft Digital Skills Center for your staff and volunteers.
What Does End of Support Mean?
Microsoft Office 2010 has been a popular version of the application over the last decade. The unfortunate news is that support for it ends this fall — on October 13, 2020, to be exact. This means no more technical support, no more security patches, and no more security updates. Though all of your Office 2010 apps will continue to function, using an unsupported version of any software exposes your computer to serious and potentially harmful security risks.
Microsoft will no longer provide technical support, bug fixes, or security fixes for Office 2010 vulnerabilities that may be subsequently reported or discovered. This includes security updates that help protect your PC from harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.
- You'll no longer receive Office 2010 software updates from Microsoft Update.
- You'll no longer receive phone or chat technical support.
- No further updates to support content will be provided, and most online help content will be retired.
- Another difficulty you may face is incompatibility with some newer programs and file formats.
It's probably a good time to upgrade your version of Microsoft Office.
Upgrade Options
Microsoft Office 365 is available to public libraries at no cost for its A1 cloud-based version and also steeply discounted for more robust versions, including desktop versions of products via the Microsoft Academic Channel. To get started, click Get started for free. Office 365 is a great option for your administrative PCs.
The faculty and staff pricing is what applies to public libraries. Office 365 A1 is the no-cost version. It is a completely free online version of Office with email, video conferencing, and Microsoft Teams. The A1 version includes Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Services include Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Yammer, and many more. A3 and A5 versions, available at a discount, also include desktop versions of products, as well as enhanced security and storage functions.
Microsoft Office Standard 2019 is the latest version of the on-premises version of the office suite, and it is a good option for your public access computers. This version of Office includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Publisher. It is available for a $39 admin fee per license and is available in multiple languages.
For more information on the differences between Office 2019 and Office 365, check out our article Microsoft Office 2019 vs. Office 365.
TechSoup Support Services
No matter what route you take and where you obtained these products, TechSoup has services and resources to help you set up and get the most out of these tools.
For Office 2019, TechSoup offers low-cost installation support.
The TechSoup services team can provide you with the following services for Office 365:
- Email migration help. It can be a complex process to migrate your on-premises email to Outlook and Exchange online. Office 365 has features that help nonprofits dramatically increase their productivity, collaboration, and security. See Joan Tharp's article on how we can help here.
- Data migration help: Data migration transfers your documents and data from either an on-premises or a cloud datacenter to the Microsoft cloud. TechSoup offers experienced consulting and migration services to help you move to Office 365's SharePoint application, which lets you easily back up, share, and co-edit documents and files internally and externally.
- Admin support: The support services team offers phone support for IT admins on configuration, security, email, and Azure — plus monthly reviews, IT planning, and training.
Training Resources
TechSoup has a new collection of powerful online courses for your library that combines great skill-building content from experts at Microsoft and TechSoup called the Microsoft Digital Skills Center.
The Digital Skills Center features beginner and advanced courses on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and also very affordable courses on the new Microsoft Teams app and Power Bl, the powerful data visualization tool. Microsoft applications have long been TechSoup's most popular donated products. Now we bring you the knowledge on how to use them! The courses work well for any version of the product your team may be using.
These courses are self-paced and feature contextualized learning with real use cases in bite-sized segments. Your staff and volunteers don't even need to have a TechSoup account to take the courses.
Some of the most popular course tracks are listed below, with many actually available for free:
- Microsoft Word — four course levels
- Excel — six course levels
- PowerPoint — three course levels
- Office 365 Bootcamp — eight course levels
- Pivoting to Remote Work — a COVID-19 response course track
- Teams for Nonprofits — Collaboration Tools
Discover the Digital Skills Center
If your library is still using Office 2010 — or even if not — we hope that you find all these resources for upgrading helpful!
