Office 365 Home Premium Review
For the past several months, I’ve been using a pre-release version of Office 365 Home Premium, Microsoft’s new cloud service for consumers. Today, the product is available for trial and purchase in final form, and I can report that Office 365 Home Premium represents an amazing value, especially for families, thanks to Microsoft’s newly friendly licensing terms.
Folks, Office 365 Home Premium is pretty much a no-brainer for any family with multiple PCs. But let’s talk money right up front so you can see how this works.
In the past, a family’s best option was most likely Office Home & Student, which in previous versions provide three licenses for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for about $150. That uses what’s called a perpetual license, meaning you buy it once and use it as long as you want. Most Office customers tend to skip Office versions, so you might use this product for up to 5-6 years, the amount of time between, say, Office 2007 and Office 2013.
Office 365 costs $99.99 a year. So this product will of course cost a lot more than Office Home & Student over 5-6 years. But you also get more. It includes the equivalent of Office Professional 2013, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, but also Outlook, Publisher, and Access. That product costs $400, so a family of 5 would pay $2000 to use five of these installs over five years.