Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium

• Pros

  Designed from the ground up for cloud-based storage and collaboration. Clear, up-to-date interface. Subtle improvements throughout. Unmatched power for editing, viewing, sharing. Single license allows use on five machines, including Macs (which get Office 2011 for the Mac).

• Cons Clumsy to use on a touch screen.
• Bottom Line

  A subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium lets you install a full copy of Office 2013 on up to five devices and also lets any Windows 7 or 8 machine temporarily download Word, Excel, or the other Office apps for use on other machines. Office 2013 looks better than Office 2010 and includes new convenience features, with a minimal learning curve for existing users.

By Edward Mendelson

The title above says Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium, which is Microsoft's name for one of its many varieties of Office 2013?the subscription-based variety that you download from the cloud and use on your disk in exactly the same way you've used earlier versions of Office. The difference is that the new Office is designed to make it as easy to store documents in the cloud as it is on your disk, and Microsoft is pushing the idea that with Office 365, you can now edit Office documents anywhere?on any Windows-based desktop or tablet, on a Windows phone, in a Web browser, and even on your Mac, because your Office 365 subscription lets you have Office installed on five devices at any one time. This means you get Office 2013 on your Windows machines and Office 2011 for the Mac on your OS X machines. Office 2013 is an impressive upgrade to the world's most powerful office application suite, with new features so smoothly built in that it requires almost no new learning or training. Office 365 is the best argument I've seen for moving documents into the cloud without any compromise in features and flexibility compared to desktop-only applications.

Versions
Starting today, home users can buy Office 365 Home Premium for a $99.99 annual subscription, which installs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, OneNote, and Access on Windows 7 or 8 machines (but not on Vista or XP) and the full Office 2011 suite on Macs. College students, faculty, and staff can get a similar Office 365 University subscription for a single payment of $79.99 for a full four years, usable on two devices?twenty bucks per year, cheaper than any other Office pricing I can remember. Both services come with 27 GB of cloud-based storage on Microsoft's SkyDrive service?20 GB added to the 7 GB that anyone can get for free. Office 365 versions for business are due on February 27.

Office Forever
Starting today, you can also buy what Microsoft calls "perpetual" versions of Office 2013, meaning the traditional kind that are licensed forever but are only licensed to one machine. What you won't be able to do is buy Office 2013 on a DVD as you could with earlier versions. If you buy the "perpetual" Office 2013 in a box, what you get is a 25-character code that you can use after downloading the installer; if you want a DVD, you'll have to buy one in one of the "developing countries" where Microsoft still sells them.

Traditional retail versions of Office 2013 comes in Microsoft's typically confusing array of versions: Home & Student, Home & Business, Professional, and, for volume-license customers only, Professional Plus. And don't forget Office 2013 Home & Student RT, a reduced version of Office that only ships preloaded on ARM-based Windows 8 RT tablets, and which we plan to review when the current "preview" version gets updated to the final version at some unspecified future date.

One minor detail that won't affect the way you work but very slightly reduces clutter on the desktop and start menu. The names of the Office apps used to be Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, etc. Now they're Word, Excel, etc.

Office in the Cloud
Microsoft has dabbled in cloud-based application services before, using the same Office 365 service name, but with this new version, Microsoft has shifted Office's focus from the desktop to the cloud, more or less the same way Windows 8 shifts Microsoft's focus from the desktop to the tablet. If you want to save your documents to your desktop by default, instead of the cloud-based SkyDrive linked to your Microsoft account, you have to dig into the Options menu and check a box next to "Save to Computer by default." Office 365 works in different ways depending on the device you're using. When you run it on a desktop or an Intel-based tablet like Microsoft's Surface Pro (due to ship in February), a complete set of full-featured, no-compromise Office apps are installed on your disk, so that Word, Excel, Outlook, and the rest are all exactly the same as the versions you get from the traditional one-machine-only versions of Office 2013.

I asked Microsoft if we could expect versions of Office for Android or the iPad and iPhone. Microsoft's answer was that they were "not announcing" Office versions for non-Windows platforms at this time. It's pretty easy to guess that they might announce something in the future, but I can't guess when. Just as Windows 8 is Microsoft's answer to Apple in the tablet market, the latest Office 365 is Microsoft's answer to the cloud-based competition from Google Docs (which runs on every device you can think of) and Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote apps, which run in different versions on OS X and iOS. Google Docs has big one advantage for home users?it's free. But business users and universities have to pay to get Google Docs, and Microsoft is offering a far more powerful product, with all the advanced features that Microsoft has been building into Office for the past twenty years.

Other Microsoft Productivity

By Edward Mendelson

Edward Mendelson has been a contributing editor at PC Magazine since 1988, and writes extensively on Windows and Mac software, especially about office, internet, and utility applications.

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