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Microsoft Office 2016

edited November 2016 in Writing
No doubt many of you received a Microsoft email today professing the merits of Office 2016 with writers' benefits of added 'research' and 'grammar' tools. Of course improvements to any product are always welcomed, but let us look at the overall picture: is there any merit in purchasing our own CD/download?

I checked prices and available options between purchase and subscription and it seems Microsoft is clearly discouraging our 'ownership'. For instance, on subs (Home version) we can download to 5 devices, whereas with our own copy we can only download to one device. (Unless you're a tech wizard like Mr Robots)

I guess, for £80 per year, it's a reasonable investment, but for those of us who use other writing programs in conjunction with 'Word' I tend to think my reliable Office 2010, or my full blown 2007 Enterprise Edition will suffice. I make my comparisons by virtue of my free subscription, courtesy of an Acer Cloudbook purchase last April.

My next investment should be Scrivener. I have been following relevant threads and discussions for some time now. Maybe I should just bite the bullet -- or might there be a special Christmas offer???

Comments

  • When I got my new desktop with Window 10, it came with a one month trial of Office 365, but it was either a monthly or annual payment after that. :(

    I still had my Office 2007 disc so was able to put that on, and it still gets updates.
  • I have Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my phone and I haven't paid for Microsoft products for...for...erm...ever actually :P You can definitely get them free on phone, so the whole One Computer Only thing shouldn't be a problem.

    To be honest, I can't imagine what the benefits of the improved tools can offer you, they already provide spellcheck, grammar check, thesaurus...what else is needed? Plenty of add-ons and bits of free software can do the same (if not better) job, so unless you want to splash out I'd stick with an older version of Word. Each to their own though :)

    Plus you can get 5GB of OneDrive for free, and how much stuff are you going to be storing online, really?! It's mostly for backups, right?
  • Yep right. And those of us with mainly text-based projects would get nowhere near 5GB. My brevity wouldn't even touch 5MB!!
  • We have the package because I'd never find a way of putting it on our 5 computers without having it... it does do some things better. I've been quite impressed.
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