Microsoft is launching Office 365 Home Premium, a subscription-based version of the popular Microsoft Office products. Instead of spending up to $400 for a full suite of Office programs, you purchase a yearly subscription.
According to Microsoft, it is designed for “busy households and people juggling ever-increasing work and family responsibilities.”
Not sure how Office helps with your family responsibilities, but it is handy for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
If you were to purchase Microsoft Office Professional 2013, it would cost you $399.99 and be licensed for one user on one PC. The suite includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. It comes with 7GB of cloud storage. The product would be good for the life of your PC. So if your computer died, you’d need to buy another copy of the program.
An Office 365 Home Premium subscription costs $99 a year and includes the same programs, 27GB of cloud storage and the license is good for your entire household; up to five PCs or Macs and select mobile devices. Upgrades are included, so your programs will always be up-to-date. If one of your computers fails, you can simply remove it from your account and add an additional device if you purchase a new one.
There is a special deal for college students that you can read about by clicking here. The lower initial price and ability to use multiple devices sounds pretty appealing, but it’s still a new program and there will likely be bugs to work out. If you’d like to check it out before buying, you can go to Microsoft.com to download a free 30-day-trial of Office 365 Home Premium.
If a free office productivity suite sounds like an even better deal, check out this post on Open Office. It’s a free download that does many of the same things Microsoft Office can, but with no costs and no restrictions.
- Cynthia
Tags: Cloud Storage, microsoft, microsoft office, MS Excel, MS Word, windows 8
with the Open Source applications that have become available in the last few years it is hard to believe that Microsoft is investing its resources in another MS Office version. Open Office as well as other Open Source applications like LibreOffice do just as good a job for the consumer. Where and who came up with Microsoft’s new licenseing structure? Are we as consumers really supposed to accept these terms? I for one cannot believe that if I purchase a full blown copyof MS Office it is only legal to install it on 1 computer for the life of that computer. This strategy makes no sense for an informed consumer! Does Microsoft expect to sell MS Office to a customer and then if the computer dies in a short amount of time and has to be replaced spend another $399.99 for another copy since the licenseis only for 1 computer until it is no longer in use. One would have to be insane to purchase software with these terms when the Open Source applications are available for no cost and can be installed on whatever computer the consumer cares to install it on.