If you want to buy Office, you can do so in different ways. The offer can be confusing, which is why Microsoft is tinkering with 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. This means that as a current subscriber you will not notice a difference in your wallet, but you will soon receive some new functions. More on which later.
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 per month.
Office 365 Personal will 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 can be used on six different devices. An additional advantage is that the 1 TB cloud storage applies per person. So 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 trial period of 1 month.
The business subscriptions are also getting a name change. Office 365 Business Premium becomes Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Office 365 Business Essentials becomes Microsoft 365 Business Basic. This includes extra 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 lets parents monitor and possibly limit their children's screen time. This is tracked on all devices with a connected Microsoft account, so that a more complete picture is painted.
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 one helps you write better using 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 out loud (into your microphone) and AI analyzes whether your voice is not too monotonous, or whether you drop a lot of 'uuhs'. Microsoft calls this the Presentation Coach.
Finally, Excel lets you create a link with your bank, to make it much easier to load your transactions. There are quite a few legal snags to such a position. Therefore, this feature is initially only available to US Office 365 subscribers.
One-time purchase of Office 2019
If you prefer not to have a subscription, Office 2019 will also remain for sale separately. You then pay a one-time fee of 149 euros for only Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which you can install on one PC. Furthermore, this variant of the software is not kept up to date with the latest features and improvements. Hopefully you now have enough information to make the right choice!
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