My friend works for a company which requires her to use Microsoft specific application

So the company needs to provide said friend with all the needed software.

So, what should she do?

She should ask her company to provide the neccessary tools to do the work.

PS: If there is a way to destroy all metadata related to excel sheets, it would be very helpful.

No, it would look like she is hiding something far worse.

It is an insane suggestion to even concider, it is far, far worse to have zero metadata than to have a bit of odd metadata.

If the sheets are tagged as being crested by a pirated version of excel then she could feign ignorance and pretend she has zero idea of what is going on, if the meta data is gone, she would be known as someone with something to hide.

Also, why the fuck is she editing company documents on her personal computer?

That is by far the main problem.

she didn’t really want to switch to Win 11

On which computer? Her own?

Does not the company provide a PC with the tools needed? If yes, she has no right to decide what goes on it, the company does and she should respect that, doing what you want on a company PC can get you in serious trouble, way more serious than finding out you're using a pirated version of Office.

If the company expects her to use her own PC, they should at least provide the needed software licenses, Office365 can be used on the web, no need to install anything and it can be used on Linux no problem.

BUT the serious problem remains of having company data on her own PC, the best thing to do in such a case would be creating a VM, encrypting the file system and keeping all company data contained inside the VM.

Tho in such a case I would change company, no serious company today would expect employees to keep company data freely on whatever personal PC, that could lead to data breaches, I would never want to be involved in case like that, tho I live in EU, we have very strict laws about data integrity and privacy, dunno about other countries.

Maybe ask the company if they can get you an O365-Account, so you can just use the web version of it or install that as webapp.

Sorry to say, but employees cost so much money in salary, those few bucks for software licenses are just minor.

Why isn't the company providing its employees with the required tools to do the work?

She should abide by the company rules, use company provided software and follow company policies if she likes working there.

Otherwise she should move. Bypassing the rules is very unprofessional and can get you in trouble.

Are they not providing the hardware and software for this? If so she should just use what they provide for work.

Can they find out?

No, not really. The Metadata doesn't have a "pirated" flag and something like the product key doesn't get saved. Microsoft themselves probably know due to their telemetry but even they can't be bothered about it. I would bet that even you send a pirated document to the Microsoft CEO, they wouldn't notice or even care enough to look for it.

But as always there is the important rule of "don't fuck with work stuff, ever".

It's already questionable why she is editing company documents on here private PC without either a dedicated and remotely managed work particition + VPN or an O365 online work account. These documents fall under far stricter data safety regulations and the way it is right now, she is personally liable for any data leaks.

Fun fact: MS was onced caught using pirated audio software to create an audio file for (I think) Windows XP

A company should not be pirating software under and circumstances

I’m going to assume that by the way you’re describing it, using an excel alternative is totally out of the question or simply not possible, but just in case it isn’t…

If you haven’t heard of it, check out LibreOffice.

Why isn't the company paying for it? Anyways, you could just export it to a different format and then back to Excel depending on which features you're using. But also, I think this is being paranoid. Microsoft isn't the NSA

Aside from the obvious (company providing all the necessary tools) why not using libreoffice and saving it as M$ excel?

If Office 365 online has enough features for her, maybe just do that. It works just fine on Linux. The web versions are not that feature rich but honestly they have more features than most people use.

Another option is running a Windows VM on Linux with the latest office installed. You probably do not need much RAM.

O365 web

I think she should use company provided software and hardware for company related work.

Pirating stuff when your employer offers you supported way to work is just.. beyond stupid.

She has the option of using the online versions of Excel and Word if the company uses office 365.

There have been many cases where they found out it was made by a pirated version of MS office. Just google it. Sometimes the pirates add some metadata, like the author for example. If she wants to live at peace and not put the business at risk, she should do the right thing and get a licensed copy, whoever pays for it.

If the latest version doesn't work on Windows then get a key for an older version, or sub for the web version.

But under no circumstance use pirated software at a serious business.

To answer your first question : no, there's absolutely no wat to determine if a version of Office is cracked or not by looking at the files made with said version. Tho Microsoft can see if a cracked version sends telemetry but they don't care about it. You can use it freely. And honestly, LibreOffice is 1 to 1 compatible, you just have to install Microsoft's proprietary fonts.

I don't think so, unless the pirate left a calling card. If you want to make sure, just make the same sheet in pirated and non pirated versions, and compare the file. (They are zip archives, so that will let you see the raw XML)

Its actually the first time I hear of this and I work in IT. Still possible it flew over my head but I never imagined this to be the case. Pretty sure a million more people would be in jail if that were the case.

No.

In the interim, as I know jobs are kinda hard to give up at a moment's notice, OnlyOffice ~~OpenOffice~~ has good compatibility with Microsoft file formats, as does Microsoft's online suite of applications.

Can she not use the cloud version? Surely her company provides an account for that, if not it definitely has a free version.