With Office 365 Microsoft offers the possibility to rent the programs instead of buying them. With “Office 365 Personal” you get access to the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook from around 39 Euro per year or 7 Euro per month. The applications can be installed simultaneously on a PC or Mac, the mobile versions on a tablet and a smartphone. To increase the incentive, Microsoft also adds 1 terabyte of online storage for OneDrive and 60 free minutes per month for Skype calls.
If you are willing to spend 10 Euro per month or at least 60 Euro for an annual license, you can install and use the applications on five different devices at the same time. In households with several people, this quickly pays off. In contrast to the classic purchase version of Office, Microsoft promises to regularly add new functions here. Prerequisites for using the rental version are at least Windows 7, Mac OS 10.6 or Android 4.4.
Office: Free alternatives
Even if the competition has it hard in view of the superiority of Microsoft Office: There are alternatives and in many cases they are even free. With Open-, LibreOffice & Co. the free alternatives don’t even have to hide from the Microsoft office package. Although the free derivatives of Word, Excel and PowerPoint do not offer the same range of functions as the Microsoft originals, for the majority of users, however, the offered is sufficient. Because as versatile as Microsoft may equip its programs, many of the functions private users never get to see.
And with the exception of Outlook, most freeware collections have all the tools needed in everyday office life to create texts, edit tables and create presentations. Thunderbird is also a free e-mail program that competes with Outlook in many areas. The following overview shows what else the market of free office alternatives has to offer:
Office work in the browser
The installation of extensive program packages is no longer even necessary with online tools. The best-known representative among the online offices comes from Google. The programs are called Docs, Tables, Presentations and Forms. With Office Online, Microsoft also has a comparable offering at the start. The only requirement for using the applications is an account with the respective provider. LibreOffice has also announced that it will bring its office suite online by 2016.
The advantages of the web applications are obvious: You do not have to install the programs, they are available everywhere where there is Internet. And the documents created end up in the corresponding online storage, so they are always at hand. Although the range of functions does not reach that of the local Office installations, the most important basic functions also support the web versions.
However, there are some limitations in the area of data protection. After all, all your data ends up on the provider’s servers instead of your hard drive. Although Google, Microsoft & Co. To protect your data, but in the end you only have left to believe the promises.
Microsoft Office 2019 with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Co. buy instead of rent
Whether on Windows or Apple devices: Microsoft’s Office package is one of the most frequently used office applications and has become an indispensable part of everyday working life. With Office 2019, for the first time in more than three years, a purchase version is being offered which, unlike Office 365, does not entail any monthly fees. We’ll show you what innovations you can expect.
Microsoft Office 2019 with lifelong license
On the software market, the classic purchase option has been increasingly replaced by rental models in recent years: instead of paying for the product once and being able to use it permanently without an Internet connection (offline), some companies have to resort to cloud-based subscription services.
Microsoft, for example, has been selling the popular office suite under the name Office 365 for some time now, primarily as a one-year license, which can be extended after expiration by means of a new key. In return, the user always receives the latest version, feature updates and extras such as a terabyte of cloud memory.
In Office 2019, Microsoft has now bundled all the functions of the past three years that have appeared since the last purchase version (Office 2016) exclusively for the subscription service. The two packages “Home & Student 2019” with the programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote as well as “Home & Business 2019”, which also contains the e-mail software Outlook, are currently available for selection.
Access and Publisher are unfortunately searched in vain in both cases; for the time being, these are reserved for Office 365 subscribers.
However, those who can do without it will save money with the purchase versions: the acquisition costs of the permanent Office license will pay for themselves after a few years for a single user. If one would like to use the software however on several devices parallel and/or share with other persons, see more related articles here for more favorable solution.
