I bet if you keep MS Office updated, at some point you also will have issues if you try to open old, outdated files...

For general farm use, the free versions will do 99% of what you want.

Lately I tried to open a MS office file that had been edited by many person with different program versions over time, that was the first time I ran into trouble with the older Open Office I had.

Updating it didn't help, but downloading Libre Office did the trick. In so far I would recommend to give Libre Office a serious try. It's free and legal.