Office 365 is a better deal than Office 2013

This time, there is virtually no decision to make. Comparing Office 2013 to Office 365 is an exercise in semantics; Microsoft has significantly stacked the deck to favor over the other.
Microsoft has given Office 365 a clear advantage over Office 2013.

The new Microsoft Office is here. As with the earlier versions, you can get Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more as a locally installed suite of applications or as Office 365, a cloud-based subscription. However, choosing between Office 2013 desktop program and the new Office 365 is a dramatically different decision than historically.

There is a clear distinction between the options. Office 2013 describes only the desktop applications. By contrast, Office 365 is a Web-based platform that pairs the Office applications with cloud storage. Historically, though, the Office 365 versions of the program had limited features and capabilities compared to the full desktop versions, and in case you didn’t have a Net connection you didn’t have Office.

With the new versions of the productivity suite, though, Office 2013 vs. Office 365 is a smoke-and-mirrors debate. Office 2013 is more costly than Office 365, and the license is only lovely for machine. In case you only need the core applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) you can get Office 2013 Home & Student for $140. Throw in Outlook, and you get Office 2013 Home & Business for $220. Office 2013 Pro adds Access and Publisher, all for $400.

Office 365 comes in flavors: Office 365 Home Premium for $100 per year and Office 365 Small Business Premium for $150 per year. Both come with the full Office 2013 Pro program for your PC, but there's key differences. Up to people can use Office 365 Home Premium on up to devices, with each user getting an Office experience custom-made to their own Microsoft ID.

Office 365 Small Business Premium also comes with licenses, but billed per user per year. Each user can install and use Office on up to PCs, but the licenses can’t be shared with other users. Office 365 Small Business Premium also includes a managed Microsoft Back Office surroundings including Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync.

The only scenario that truly makes sense for Office 2013 is in case you only need the program in Office 2013 Home & Student, and only on a single PC. In that case, you can spend the $140 and be completed. One time you throw in a second PC, though, or in case you need the additional tools like Outlook, Access, or Publisher, the math is heavily skewed in favor of the Office 365 subscription.

Depending on how plenty of computers and devices you need to put in Office 2013 on through Office 365, and which version of Office 2013 you’re comparing to, it will take somewhere between and a half to twenty years ($400 multiplied by to put in Office 2013 Pro on machines comes to $2000 or twenty years of Office 365) for Office 2013 to become the more affordable choice.

But, even for other platforms or mobile devices there's Web-based versions of the Office applications, and as long as you store your files in SkyDrive you can access them seamlessly from virtually any Web-connected device. The world does’t finish if your laptop computer is stolen or destroyed, and you can still edit a vital client presentation even in case you does’t have your PC with you.

The beauty of Office 365 is that you get over Office 2013 for your moneyit also comes with benefits that Office 2013 lacks. It comes with an additional 20GB of SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes per month of international Skype calls. Office 365 also has a brand spanking new feature called Office on Demand that lets you stream virtualized versions of the full desktop program to any Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC.

Even in case you only need the applications in Office 2013 Home & Student, it would cost $700 to put that program on machines, and it would take seven years to break even on the cost of the Office 365 subscription. By that time, there will be a brand spanking new version of Office (or, perhaps). In case you buy Office 2013 Home & Student, you’ll still have it in the year 2020. But, in case you subscribe to Office 365 you will always have the most current version of Office available.

Microsoft has set things up so that the decision is already made. You are free to buy Office 2013, but Office 365 has clear advantages, and it makes more sense financially in every scenario.