Microsoft Office 365 Home

Microsoft's Office 365 is more than a set of productivity apps. Yes it does include the full downloadable Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher applications that run on your desktop or laptop, as well as mobile versions for tablets and phones. It is, however, more like an online subscription-based ecosystem in which you run apps, access remote data, collaborate on files, and exchange information. If you get confused trying to sort out exactly how it works and what it does, you're not alone. In this review, I've tried to sort out the answers in a way that lets you get the most out of Office 365, because there's a strong chance that Office 365 is in your future, even if you aren't using it now.

Microsoft still lets you buy standalone versions of Microsoft Office in the way everyone used to buy standalone versions of major apps, but the company has priced and packaged Office 365 to make it more attractive than the standalone versions. For example, the standalone Home and Student version of Office 2016 sells for $149.99 (though it's often on sale); the Home and Business version is $229.99; and the Professional version costs $399.99. But a one-year subscription to Office 365 Home, at just $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, lets you install the full desktop version of Office on five PCs, which can be any mixture of Windows and Mac machines, plus five tablets and five phones, which can be iOS, Android, or Windows Phone devices.

If you just need one installation of each device type, you can get Office 365 Personal for $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. Subscriptions get you 1TB of cloud storage for each user and full copies of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. They also include 60 minutes of Skype calling to mobile phones and landlines for each user.

If you're buying for yourself and your family, or if you use both a desktop and a laptop, or a different desktop at work and at home, then the Home version is a better bargain. Business-oriented subscriptions are priced per subscriber, ranging from a minimal Business Essentials plan for $5 per user per month, through the Business plan at $8.25 per user per month, on to Business Premium (which includes features like videoconferencing) at $12.50 per user per month.

Office 365 subscribers can also view and edit their files from any Web browser using online versions of the Office apps. Office 365 versions of the desktop-and-laptop-based Office apps are updated monthly with new features, while the standalone versions only get bug-fixes and security updates. And when Office 2016 is updated to the next major version—as Office 2013 was updated to Office 2016—subscribers get the new version as part of their subscription. But you're not required to update to the new version; an option on the Office 365 installation webpage lets you install Office 2013 instead of the 2016 model.

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One obvious question is: Why bother with Office 365 when you can get Google Docs (part of Google Drive) for nothing and use it in any browser—together with Google Sheets for worksheets and Google Slides for presentations. The answer is that, if your requirements are minimal enough, and you'll always have online access to your documents, there's no reason to pay for Office. The browser-based versions of Google Docs let you create and edit simple documents and worksheets, using features from spacious toolbars and menus.

Even with a fast connection, however—and I often use it with a direct gigabit-ethernet connection to the Internet—Google Docs in a browser is notably slower than desktop-based Office apps, but fast enough for simple jobs, and its interface rivals Office's browser interface in feature depth and ease of use. However, Office's mobile apps easily outshine Google's mobile apps in ease and elegance, and if you often work on a phone or tablet, I think you'll be happier with Office's apps, though Google's certainly let you get the basic jobs done.

Until recently, whenever I needed to share a document with co-workers who would input their own data into it, I created the document in Office and uploaded it to Google Docs for sharing. But now that Microsoft has given Office an elegant and effortless online interface, I simply drag the Office document into the OneDrive folder on my desktop, and send out sharing invitations to coworkers who can open the document in their browser or tablet. The browser-based Office interface includes an Open in Excel (or Word or PowerPoint) button that lets me or my collaborators work in a fast desktop Office app and save the document back to online Office.