Ask Paul: August 2 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and greetings from Hilversum, The Netherlands. This will be the last Ask Paul before we fly home next Thursday. Have a great weekend.

Where is the Microsoft Store version of Office 365 Home?

DAN1986IST asks:

So, what is up with the Windows Store version of Office, and is there a way to re-download and install that version not the click to run one? Has Microsoft discontinued the store version hence the redirection to the click-to-run version on the Office website?

This one was from the forums, not Ask Paul. But I thought it was important enough that maybe we should address it here. I asked Microsoft and they told me that this change was revealed in May and that they didn’t have anything additional to share beyond this quote:

“People will continue to be able to find Office in the Store. If the Office image isn’t already preinstalled, they will be directed to account.microsoft.com to install it.”

The thing is, I don’t recall this. But I am seeing the same behavior: You can search for and find Office 365 Home and Personal in the Store. But when you select the Install button, a web browser launches.

I guess the pertinent bits here are:

• If your PC comes with Office preinstalled, you will (probably) get app updates through the Store.
• If not, you can find Office 365 in the Store, but you must install/update it from the web.

This is rather odd, isn’t it? I wonder if this has something to do with the Office Insider program, since you can enroll in the program from the main Office apps by navigating to File > Account > Office Insider.

Intel NUC follow-up

JustMe asks:

Back in November of last year, you did a couple articles on Intel’s NUC (NUC8i7BEH) mini-PC kit. In the last one (at least, the last one I saw anyway) you mentioned wanting to connect the NUC to external graphics and testing it as potential gaming machine. I was wondering if you ever did so and what your impressions were. Apart from gaming, are you still happy with the NUC, and what do you use it for these days?

I never did get an external GPU, so I’ve not tested that yet, sorry. (I still expect to get an eGPU at some point.  It’s kind of curious that’s not happened yet.)

I do still use the NUC regularly, but because it’s much louder than I like—and much louder than its predecessor—it’s never evolved into being my daily-use PC, as I had expected. So I use it mostly for the book: It’s the PC I take all the screenshots on.

As I think you saw, there are some good reader responses in the original forum post. I will just add that I have used the NUC with an HP Thunderbolt dock and that that seems to work well. I’ve not ever tried to daisy-chain Thunderbolt devices, but based on what some readers are saying, that doesn’t work.

Home swaps

yoshi asks:

Hi Paul, my wife and I were thinking about getting involved in home swaps. I was curious to find out how we would go about doing this. Is there a home swap program you’re involved with? Or do you just swap with people you happen to know? I love all the pictures you post on Instagram, it looks like it’s a great experience.

Thanks! We use a service called Intervac, which I wrote about way back in 2016. But nothing has really changed since then: We signed up with Intervac in 2006 and have used it ever since. We have done three swaps with people we know (the same people, actually), and we are doing so this year, so we didn’t go through Intervac for this particular swap. (I’ve known Steven for almost 20 years.) Of the 15 home swaps we’ve done, 12 of them have been through Intervac.

We’ve always had a great experience doing this. I will write about our experiences this year soon. (We come home on Thursday.)

64-bit vs. 32-bit

Kenneth_Burns asks:

I hope you can answer a question that has been bugging me since about 2009. Say I’m downloading some Windows application or utility, and there are 32- and 64-bit options. I have a 64-bit computer with middling specs. Practically speaking, for a normal home user like me does it really matter which version I choose?

As Jim Champlin noted in the forum post, you should generally choose the 64-bit option if presented with a choice because it will run natively without needing to go through the WOW64 compatibility layer. That said, modern PCs are so fast that you will never experience a performance issue when you choose 32-bit code. And as hrIngrv pointed out, there is one major exception to the rule: Microsoft Office. You should almost certainly always choose the 32-bit version of Office (which is the default if you get it from Office.com) because the 64-bit applications are incompatible with many popular add-ins.

Short version: Except for Microsoft Office, always go 64-bit.

Substantive improvements to Windows?

jimchamplin asks:

The changes coming to Windows that we’re hearing about – Online Restore for one – seem to be the kinds of additions that are not only rather strong investments in the product, but also very much are the kinds of actually useful features that people can use, and not weird things like Paint 3D. Do you think that we’re going to see this kind of progress continue, and will it undo some of those questionable changes made during the contentious “Creators” era?

Based on what my sources tell me, we’re going to see both. There is still a faction within Microsoft that wants Windows releases to be exciting and newsworthy, and based on the mulligan they’re taking with version 19H2, it’s pretty likely that 20H2 will see a lot of new features, both meaningful and superfluous.

The debate over what should be in the OS and what should be separate is cyclical. And to be fair to the current regime, such as it is, we can look back at such things as Windows Live Essentials (which took in-box apps from Vista and made them available separately in Windows 7) as a past example of this kind of back and forth. There will be steps forward and steps back.

And one’s definition of what constitutes a step forward will vary by person. For every Paint 3D hater (or whatever), there’s someone who thinks that was an absolutely fine addition to Windows.

By the way, I’m not sure if you saw/heard the conversations we had about cloud restore on First Ring Daily or Windows Weekly, but this functionality already exists on recent Surface models. I suspect that Microsoft is now simply bringing it to all Windows 10 PCs.