New Laptop...

[Ringel05]

Forget MS Office Mr H. Go with Open Office. It's free and compatible with everything MS.

Apache OpenOffice - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

Unfortunately OO is way behind the curve, not to say Apache hasn't finally started to do some serious work on it. LibreOffice has been working on MS Office compatibility for years while OO lingered in virtual limbo. I have OO on my older machines and LO on all my new ones.
H, with either one you can save your work in M$ Office format, no need to do conversions, though LibreOffice is well ahead of OpenOffice in the compatibility arena.

Is that right? Maybe I need to switch to Libre, then, because Apache's Base and Impress do not convert well to Excel and Powerpoint.

Apparently compatibility with Excel is very good though with Powerpoint is okay but still has a little way to go. That's based on old information I have (at least a year). It's highly probable much of that has been fixed. I don't use either so I don't know from personal experience.