Introduction To Office 365

What is Office 365?

Before we begin I want to give a little bit of history about Microsoft Office in the past Microsoft was always sold as box software so when you bought your new computer you had the option of buying Office whether it’s Office2010 2013  2016 you could pay 3,4 or $500 depending on the version you were getting and you would get the software on your machine and then you would have in perpetuity.

So you would pay once upfront and then you would never pay again for the software and that’s how Microsoft sold Office for a very long time now in the last several year’s many companies have started switching over to a subscription model of selling software so if you look at Adobe like things like photoshop you can’t just buy Photoshop outright anymore. You purchase the subscription and as part of that subscription, you always get the latest and greatest version of Adobe Photoshop and any other programs that you decide to subscribe to from Adobe. 

Microsoft Office To Office 365 Upgrade.

Microsoft used to sell box software. How has that changed and as full disclosure, as we jump into this described by one of the Microsoft employees in a YouTube video he says the best way to answer what is Office 365 is to simply pull up a website Office.com. Office .com will tell you exactly what Office 365 is, what is the difference between Office 365 and Office 2019, and what the different options are available in Office 365.

Office 365 applications.

Office 365 is a suite or a collection of different apps.  With Office 365 you get apps like Microsoft Outlook, you get OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and so on and so forth. This means you get a lot of different apps that are part of Office 356.

Updates.

Because Office 365 is a subscription you always get the most up to date version. This means as Microsoft makes updates to the software you get those latest updates and then it’s also available on all your devices so whether you are on the web, whether you are on your windows pc or your mac machine or whether you are on a phone that you have access to the Office apps.

Cloud Backup.

One of the nice things is as you are working on the content, so let us say you are working on a document or let us say you are working on a spreadsheet that’s automatically saved in the cloud so you could access that anywhere and it’s backed up and secure. Also if you want to collaborate with others you can all collaborate on that version in the cloud.

How To Get Office 365.

So on the Office.com website click on the option called Get Office. Go ahead and click on that and now you will see the different offerings that are out there. Office 365 family is a version of the subscriptions that gets you all those benefits we just called out and the good thing is you can use it with up to six people total including yourself and that’s about $99.99 a year. So you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint all those different apps and you can share that with five other people. So if you take a hundred dollars a year and you divide by six it’s actually no that expensive on a per-person basis.

Office 365 Personal.

There’s also another option it’s a little bit cheaper about thirty dollars less and that’s something called an Office 356 Personal. This is intended for just one person so you get all the same benefits that you get with the home option but you can only use it with one person.

Office 365 OneDrive Space.

Some of the other benefits that you get as well are you get all the different apps. You also get services included like OneDrive and Skype. With OneDrive for the Office 365 Family plan, you get one terabyte of OneDrive space per user. That means you have six users that you could use. So you get a total of six terabytes, one terabyte per user. With the Office 365 Personal plan, you get one terabyte for one user only.

Office 365 Skype Minutes.

With both Office 365 Family and Personal plan you also get Skype minutes included. You get 60 minutes of Skype calling per month this is something that’s nice especially if you are traveling to some other country let’s just say Europe and you want to make a phone call to someone back home to a phone number using let’s say your phone and you have Skype on it you can then make a call using skype and that will go against those sixty minutes.

Other Option Is Office 2019.

There is another option though if you do not like subscriptions and we know a lot of people don’t like getting a subscription. You can also just pay for Office one time and that Office Home & Student for $149.99 you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Office Home & Business for $249.99 you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. You do not get any OneDrive storage also you don’t and skype minutes you don’t get some of the other apps that you get with an Office 365 subscription. You just get the core apps that you need to get work done.

Conclusion.

That is what Office 365 is. It is just a kind of a subscription plan that gives you access to Office and you get a few services in addition to those different apps. Hopefully, this will make you understand what office 365 is and how it is different from other Office subscriptions.