Office365HomePremium
Latest
Microsoft releases Bing-powered apps for Office 365 Home Premium
Because no corporate monolith can resist a good play at synergy, Microsoft's leveraging its properties to intro a suite of free Bing-powered apps for Office. If you've signed up for the company's recently released, cloud-based Office 365 Home Premium, you'll now be privy to five distinct Excel and Word applications that rely on the search engine for the insertion of dynamic data. For Excel, users can choose amongst Bing Maps, used to embed location data, and Bing Finance, which allows for the creation of a portfolio table. While Word-oriented Office 365 users will now have the added benefit of dedicated Image and News Search apps, letting them trawl the web and insert relevant info from within a document. There's also a Dictionary app that'll monitor your typing and make suggestion from within a right rail. It's all live in the Office Store now, so head on to the source to start your installs.
Daily Update for January 29, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium brings inexpensive Office power to home Macs (Updated)
Like it or hate it, Microsoft Office is the accepted standard office application suite for many companies. Once employees become accustomed to the holy trinity of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, they often decide to use those apps for home use as well. Microsoft today announced global availability of Office 365 Home Premium for Mac and PC, a cloud-based version of the productivity app suite. Rather than requiring Office to be downloaded to your Mac and then constantly updated with Microsoft's patented blend of security patches and bug fixes, Office 365 Home Premium is accessed from a web browser. Any patches, fixes, or new features are available instantly when you launch one of the apps. One other advantage? Microsoft usually waits three years between new releases of the Office suite; now features and services can be added immediately. The service can be used on up to five devices per household and is available as a subscription for US$99.99 per year. While it won't currently run on iOS devices, persistent rumors point to a release of Office 365 for iPhone and iPad later this year. Unlike Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, which only provides Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, the cloud suite adds OneNote, Publisher and Access. To store your documents, Microsoft provides 20 GB of SkyDrive cloud storage on top of that available with a free SkyDrive account. If you make Skype international calls, Microsoft adds 60 free minutes per month so you can talk to family, friends or business associates. Update: Several TUAW readers pointed out that only the standard Office apps are available to Mac users, meaning that they will pay the same subscription fee as PC users but get only about half of the applications. In addition, the Office on Demand feature that streams the full Office 365 apps to any Internet-connected PC (like a business center PC, for example) isn't available to Mac users as it requires Windows 7 or 8. You don't need to pay up front to try the cloud apps included in Office 365 Home Premium. There's a 30-day trial available for free at Office.com. Of course, if you're allergic to all things from Redmond, you can always use Google Drive's free Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Form and Drawing cloud apps.
Microsoft Office 2013, Office 365 Home Premium available now; 365 for business coming later (updated)
Until now, we've known almost all there is to know about Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365: we got hands-on with the new features last summer, and the company has even confirmed pricing. The only thing we weren't sure of was the exact on-sale date, but even that got leaked when a Canadian retailer put up a pre-order page indicating the two products would ship January 29th. Well, what do you know? Today is January 29th and sure enough, Office 2013 is on sale, along with the subscription service Office 365. To be clear, while every version of the boxed software is now out, 365 is only being offered to consumers; the business version will arrive later, on February 27th. For now, Office 365 Home Premium is priced at $99.99 for an annual subscription, with permission to install the suite on up to five PCs and Macs. There's also a "University" version for college students and faculty, which costs $79.99 for a four-year plan. Either way, the sub includes 20GB of SkyDrive storage on top of whatever plan you already have which is to say if you previously only had 7GB of space, your limit will now get bumped to 20 gigs. (In other words, people grandfathered into 25GB don't get an additional 20 gigabytes.). Of course, you can always deactivate a particular machine through Office.com if you need to free up a license. Naturally, too, as a part of the subscription you'll always have the most recent version. That means Office 2013 for Windows users; Office for Mac 2011 if you're on OS X. That last piece is a bit of a bummer, for sure, but for what it's worth Microsoft has said a new Mac product is in the works, and that subscribers will get it as part of a future software update. If you'd rather buy the software outright, you can do that today too. At the low end, there's Office 2013 Home and Student 2013 ($139), which comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Home and Business adds Outlook for $219, while the top-of-the-line Professional package includes all of the above along with Access and Publisher for $399. Remember, though: these come with only one user license, and you don't get any complimentary cloud storage or upgrades to future versions. It's your money, obviously, but it seems clear to us that Microsoft has gone out of its way to make its Office 365 service the more attractive option. So, you might want to think long and hard about how much owning your software really means to you before going the old-fashioned route. Update: An Office 365 subscription includes 20GB of SkyDrive storage in addition to whatever plan you already have. So, if you were grandfathered into 25 gigs of storage, you'll end up with 45GB in total.
Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium review
It feels like we've been talking about Office 2013 for a while now -- we first previewed the software back in July, and it's been available as a free beta download ever since. Today, though, it's launching in a more formal way: the final version of Office 2013 is now on sale, as is Office 365 Home Premium, which lets you purchase a subscription to Office 2013 and then install it on up to five computers. Though you can still buy the software outright, Microsoft has gone out of its way to make subscribing seem like the more attractive option: buying a one-year subscription costs $100 a year and nets you five installs, while the purchase cost is $139 for a single user. To sweeten the deal, Microsoft is giving Office 365 subscribers 60 Skype minutes per month and 20GB of extra SkyDrive storage. Naturally, too, subscribing to the service means you always get the latest software -- a particularly important point for Apple fans still waiting on a new version of Office for Mac. Either way, though, Office 2013 now has an app store, and you can poke around even if you're not a subscriber. As it is, we've already given you an in-depth walk-through of all the major new features in Office, but we haven't yet gotten to experience it as a subscription, with all our settings following us from one PC to another. But we're still wondering: is it worth shelling out a hundred bones a year for a subscription?
Microsoft announces Office 2013 and 365 pricing, nudges users towards annual subscriptions
While we still don't know exactly when Microsoft will unleash Office 2013 and Office 365 upon the world, we do know how much they'll cost. While standalone versions, licensed for use on a single computer, will still be available, the new strategy makes it more affordable for many homes and business to opt for a subscription package instead. Office Home and Student 2013 (with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) will cost $139, while Home and Business adds Outlook for $219, and the top of the line Professional package includes all of those along with Access and Publisher for $399. Compare those to the two Office 365 packages, which promise customizations that follow their users around, expanded cloud storage, access to all of the apps and automatically receive any future updates that come out for them. Office 365 Home Premium will cost $99 per year, with 20GB of SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype calling per month and access on five computers, along with the ability to change out the devices at any time, and use "full featured apps" temporarily on any PC. It's a single subscription for up to 5 users, and will have a 30 day free trial available. Alternatively, small businesses with 1-10 employees could opt for Office 365 Small Business Premium that also comes with all the apps, but lets each user install it on up to 5 different PCs or Macs, along with 25GB Outlook storage, an organization-wide 10GB cloud drive plus 500MB for each user, online meetings and even website hosting. That also has a free trial, but costs $149 per user, per year. If you can't wait, buying Office 2010 or Office 2011 for Mac as of October 19th entitles users to a free upgrade to Office 2013 or one year of Office 365 free. Clearly, Microsoft would prefer it if users took advantage of the new pay-per-year offerings, but what do you think? Check out all the details from Microsoft's blog and check list linked below (or our preview) as well as a few of their examples after the break, and let us know if you'll be upgrading or switching over to an alternative like Open Office.
