office 365

steelman99

Hi


Thinking of subscribing to office 365 home premium , On the Microsoft website its showing £79.99 per year .


Was in USA last week, and I noticed its $99.99 per year , now to my maths that's about £62-50 per year


Don't mind paying for things , but to be ripped off because of where I live gets to me.


Anyone know if I change my location on the MS website to USA , and pay in US $ for the subscription , if I will encounter any problems in the future


Have e-mailed MS , but got some airy Fairy reply about market forces ect ect

neilwoods

little thing called UK tax & VAT. So blame the uk gov

paddyrg

The difference is VAT plus rounding. US prices are usually quoted ex sales tax (different in different States) so many Americans aren't getting that price either.

Weird_Nev

I've looked into this as well. I'm using the free months trial of 365, partly to see if it's any cop, and partly to be a cheapskate and delay my purchase of Office 2013.

Unless you're actually going to use it across the 5 devices, plus skydrive, plus access and publisher, I don't think it's worth the subscription. After all, you can get MS Offiec Home for less, and you can use that for as long as you want. I've had 6 years use out of Office 2007, plus I got 2 addtional liceces that my sisters used.

Not a fan of the subscription model for every day programs, and I don't think that MS offer enough added value. I can access MS office files via dropbox on my Android phone anyway.

neilwoods

Libre Office is FREE and compatible with MS office

Weird_Nev

neilwoods wrote: »

Libre Office is FREE and compatible with MS office

Not that compatble.

It's fine for basic stuff, but if you're dealing with complex office templates that people expect to have back in the format they were sent to you, or involved spreadsheet work, Libreoffice (or Openoffice) become a right royal PITA.

Mr_Toad

Weird_Nev wrote: »

Not that compatble.

It's fine for basic stuff, but if you're dealing with complex office templates that people expect to have back in the format they were sent to you, or involved spreadsheet work, Libreoffice (or Openoffice) become a right royal PITA.

Agreed.

I use both an iMac and Linux and love the open source model, however, LibreOffice, while an excellent bit of software is a royal pain for anything with specialised or complicated formats/formulas etc.

If it weren't large companies wouldn't be paying a small fortune to MS for Office licences and as much of a Linux/*nix fan that I am it has to be said that MS Office is one hell of a good product.

They do a Mac version, which I use, if only they'd release a Linux version.

danthemoneysavingman

is this better than just buying office 2010 / 2007?

paddyrg

danthemoneysavingman wrote: »

is this better than just buying office 2010 / 2007?

Yes, it's cheaper upfront, and always the latest version.

MS Office is actually pretty impressive when you're using the advanced features, and they do keep on developing more features. OO is great for general being a spreadsheet and word processor (great price point too), but is still many years behind in many ways.

A long time ago now, but earlier versions of OO benchmarked something close to 10x slower than Excel for some setups. OO also IIRC requires you to have Java on your machine, one if the biggest current security risks (32 patches last week, 31 of those remotely exploitable and critical - the worst kind of flaws). MS used to (fairly) attract ask the security flak, but sorted their game out and improved massively. Now Adobe and Oracle create the biggest risk vectors on a PC.

With the 365 programme you get pretty much all of office, it's not a bad deal.

giraffe69

steelman99 wrote: »

Hi


Thinking of subscribing to office 365 home premium , On the Microsoft website its showing £79.99 per year .


£68.25 on Amazon

Weird_Nev

danthemoneysavingman wrote: »

is this better than just buying office 2010 / 2007?

I'll provide the counterpoint: For the vast majority of users, I don't think it is.

It's a subscription model: Stop paying and you lose access to the program, plus your 'cloud' storage.

If you have one PC at home, and primarily use Word, Excel, and a bit of Powerpoint, then I thinka one off purchase of Office 2013 Home Student (Current version), is probably the best bet. It costs about the same as one year subscription to Office 365, but you get to keep the programs for as long as you want to. I've had 6 years use out of my copies of Office 2007.

If you will actually USE Access and Publisher, Plus the Cloud storage, plus use Office across multiple devives regularly, then 365 might make sense for you. But many users will be paying for functionality they don't need or use. Ok, Cloud Storage is nice, but I've got 20Gb on Ubuntu One, and 30Gb on Dropbox already. Skydrive can go hang! I can access Ubuntu One and Dropbox from my Phone and my other Linux PC's, so I'm not going to complicate matters trying to use skydrive as well. And I can count the times I've needed Access at home - it's Never. Same for onenote and Publisher.

Had MS had the subscription model back when I bought Office 2007 for £70, I would have paid about £480 for my use of it up until now. So like any subscription service, you want to make sure that you will be getting FULL use of it before you sign on the dotted line.