“HOW do I get this fixed without paying ransom to MS?”
Here is your path to freedom and happiness:
I having been using this product with great satisfaction for five years. It runs on Windows, too.
Another vote for LibreOffice.
It reads and writes Office docs pretty well. It also has the advantage of being included with Linux Mint, which is the closest Linux OS to Windows that I’ve found. If you ever decide to “dump the big ‘M’” like you said, that’s probably going to be the Office-style program that loads up on the alternative OS.
I’ve heard some rumbling about Google Docs ( https://www.google.com/docs/about/ ), but I’ve never really kicked the tires on it, and I think it’s cloud-based anyway.