I've been happily using Office 2010 on Windows 7 for many years. Alas, my laptop is showing signs of age, those versions are no longer supported, yada yada. I have now ordered a new laptop with Windows 10. Since I still have the Office 2010 installation files (x64) I suppose I could install 2010 on my new laptop (?) and not worry too much about the lack of security patches. Generally speaking I'm more concerned with using an unsupported OS.

But supposing I cave in and buy a new license... Can I tweak Office 2021 to make it look and feel fairly similar to 2010? What are the biggest or most annoying changes that you can't get around? Word and Excel are what matters to me, the rest I couldn't care less about. I don't want a subscription. I don't need any of the 365 nonsense, cloud storage, Teams integration or what have you.

Or are there a well-liked inbetween version (2013, 2016, 2019) that is closer to 2010 and less likely to annoy me? Though I realize support for these products will be ending soon-ish too, which makes me wonder if I'm not better off simply sticking to 2010.

I have been using Office 2016 desktop with Windows 10 for everything except Outlook for years despite the fact at work we upgraded to Microsoft 365. I just never got used to the web-based versions of Word and Excel. I guess I could use them if I have to--which is the case with Outlook because we share calendars--but I still prefer the old desktop version.

If I were you I would install 2010 and see how well it works.

I think I'll probably do that, thanks.

One question that occurred to me: While Microsoft no longer provides updates for Office 2010, can I still use Windows Update to get all the patches that were released before it was discontinued? My installer is from 2016, and presumably there have been some updates between then and now that one would want. There was a security update in early 2021 IIRC, for example.