There are several ways to buy Office. The offer can be confusing, which is why Microsoft is working on the purchase options. For example, the Office 365 subscription will be replaced by Microsoft 365 from April 21. What do you need to know about this?
The prices of the subscriptions do not change. That means that as a current subscriber you will not notice a difference in your wallet, but you will soon receive some new functions. More about that further on.
Office 365 Personal becomes Microsoft 365 Personal
Office 365 Personal is the cheapest plan. It consists of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access. You also get 1 TB of cloud storage with OneDrive and 60 ‘free’ Skype calling minutes every month.
Office 365 Personal will soon be called Microsoft 365 Personal and costs 69 euros per year / 7 euros per month.
Office 365 Home becomes Office 365 Family
If you want to install the Office on multiple PCs, there is Office 365 Home. It gives you access to the same Office software, but it can be used on six different devices. An additional advantage is that the 1 TB cloud storage applies per person. In total, you can park 6 TB of files in Microsoft’s cloud.
Office 365 Home will soon be called Microsoft 365 Family and costs 99 euros per year / 10 euros per month, with a 1-month trial period.
The business subscriptions are also given a name change. Office 365 Business Premium becomes Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Office 365 Business Essentials becomes Microsoft 365 Business Basic. This includes additional programs such as the meeting software Teams and access to Exchange.
Family Safety and AI in Office
Microsoft is also announcing a lot of new features for Microsoft 365 subscribers. For example, Family Safety is an app that allows parents to monitor and possibly limit the screen time of their children. This is tracked on all devices with a connected Microsoft account, providing a more complete picture.
You can also see which programs have been used and where someone is located. This way you can keep an eye on things when your child leaves school, for example.
In Word, the Editor function is expanded. This helps you write better with the help of artificial intelligence. This includes looking at sentence structure and word repetition. PowerPoint not only helps you create presentations, but also gives them. Read your slides aloud (in your microphone) and AI analyzes whether your voice is not too monotonous or whether you are dropping a lot of ‘uuhs’. Microsoft calls this the Presentation Coach.
Finally, Excel lets you make a link with your bank, in order to load your transactions much easier. There are quite a few legal snags in such a position. Therefore, this feature is initially available only to US Office 365 subscribers.
Purchase Office 2019 once
If you prefer not to have a subscription, Office 2019 will also continue to be sold separately. You then pay one-time 149 euros for only Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which you can install on one PC. This variant of the software is not further updated with the latest functions and improvements. Hopefully you now have enough information to make the right choice!
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