Microsoft Office 365 yes or no?

angelpositivity · ‎11-21-2013

Read this article to help you decide

http://www.macworld.com/article/2139960/office-365-to-subscribe-or-not-to-subscribe.html

VaBelle35 · ‎03-10-2010

I looked at it when building my next laptop and it's a "no" for me. I have an 8 year old laptop with MSOffice, I think it's MSOffice personal. And it still works fine. I move stuff between my work MS Office Professional (which is much newer than what I use) and the documents all work fine in both places.

I don't need the latest and greatest every year, so there is no need for me to "rent" MSOffice.

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QVC Shopper - 1993

# IAMTEAMWEN

Wen_Woman · ‎11-20-2013

I use open office. Its free and it works just as well as office, and is completely compatible.

Try openoffice.org.

Sandygb · ‎03-10-2010

I agree with the posters above. My current laptop came with a license for MS Office, but I know the software is now available through annual subscription pricing. If I lost my current full license, I would not pay to "rent" MS Office. Open Office is nearly identical, it's free, and files created by MS Office can be opened and edited by Open Office, and vice versa.

Campion · ‎10-21-2011

Sad to say, most software is going to the subscription model.

Photoshop and the related Adobe products, Norton Antivirus are basically subscriptions. If you buy Norton (and don't tell me to buy AVG or Macafee because our firm requires us to use Norton to be able to use home access) you get it for a year then have to buy it again. And sometimes it's on sale when I run out--and sometimes not. It's very annoying.

Office is going that way. I use Open Office at home, but it's not as good as the full suite of MS Office.

One reason for subscriptions is not only does the software firm assure they get sufficient sales of new versions, but they assure that they won't be supporting out of date versions on out of date computers. Before I semi-retired and changed careers (went from science/engineering to finance) I was a software product manager and worked with teams about supporting out of date platforms. It was a nightmare. You'd have to update it for the operating system, you'd have to support the old ones, you'd need to add new features to satisfy the users, you had the security holes in the operating system that had to be dealt with when they updated the OS, and it was a lot of expensive work and you ran the risk of breaking something anytime you fixed it.

So subscription based upgrading really helps the software maker. It's just annoying. You thought "I bought that software" and no, you didn't. You just rented it!