At Home With Office 365

Writing about Microsoft Office isn't like reviewing a product; it's more than like writing a school scientific discipline paper on "The Air Around The states." Role is then ubiquitous and and so dominant in its category that, every bit with Google for search or Adobe Photoshop for image editing, the suite's Excel, PowerPoint, and Discussion have become shorthand for spreadsheet, presentation, and discussion processing apps.

As far as corporate offices get, a product manager for a would-be rival (Lotus SmartSuite, now long gone) once told me, competing with Part isn't similar trying to compete with Xerox or Konica Minolta copiers. It felt more like trying to compete with copier paper.

The metaphors aren't exact, however. While there are no substitutes for air or copier paper, domicile office workers can choose from several alternatives to Office, with features ingenious plenty to merit a look or go along Microsoft on its toes. I'll be surveying them, focusing on Windows rather than Mac or handheld apps, in a four-part series to run every other week in this space. But I'll begin today with Microsoft's monster, specifically, with the confusing truth that there are more means to go Office than in that location are websites to book a hotel room.

Role Rental

Yous tin buy Office 2022 the way most of united states of america used to buy our own loads of software: as a ane-fourth dimension purchase you install on one PC and receive support and bug fixes, with no upgrades to hereafter versions. Spend $149.99 for Office Dwelling & Student 2022 and you become Excel, PowerPoint, Give-and-take, and the OneNote digital annotation-taking and gratis-form content collecting and searching program. Function Home & Concern 2022 ($229.99) adds the Outlook email, calendar, and contacts manager, while Function Professional 2022 ($399.99) throws in Microsoft's Publisher desktop publishing and Access database apps.

However, today's preferred way to get the Office 2022 apps is via a subscription service called Office 365, which promises you'll always have the freshest upgrades and features plus storage space on Microsoft's servers and a license for the handheld Office versions such as Part Mobile for Role 365 Subscribers. Office 365 Personal ($half dozen.99 per month or $69.99 per year) combines licenses for 1 PC or Mac, one tablet, and one telephone with 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage.

The most popular choice for users who accept both a laptop and a desktop, or a home function colleague or two, is Microsoft Function 365 Home, which ups the dues to v PCs or Macs, five tablets, five phones, and 1TB of storage per user.

Both versions also give you access to the free, browser-based Role Online apps if you need to make some quick edits from another system.

Officially, if you're running a small-scale- to mid-size business (SMB) with several employees, the product for you is Function 365 Business ($8.25 per user per month). Or, if you're not satisfied with your internet access provider'south or spider web host's email, you lot should cull Office 365 Business Premium, which adds email with a 50GB mailbox and Hard disk videoconferencing back up for $12.50 per user per calendar month. Personally, if if well-nigh of the work is done in a home office rather than an office building, and so it's best to take advantage of Office 365 Home's superior value.

Share and Share a Lot
o, with all of those options now properly listed, what does Part accept to offer to the use? Two things: some state-of-the-art, securely powerful apps and equally every bit impressive capabilities for team collaboration. The latter may non exist a priority for solo home office workers, just it is a good example of Microsoft'south multiple-choice approach: You can share a file or folder with read-only or edit rights via email or a cutting-and-paste link from OneDrive, via a link generated in an Outlook message, or gear up up multi-user editing with version tracking. Yous can even Skype audio or video conversation between collaborators within Office. Civilian OneDrive shades into Business accounts' OneDrive for Business, and in turn, the premium spec organisation shades into the enterprise-ready SharePoint.

Editing with 1 person using Office Online and some other using desktop Office proved painfully dull. And, at one point, I was not-plussed when, afterwards prompting me to outset the sharing process by saving a local file to OneDrive, Word exited altogether. Yet, Microsoft has clearly made teamwork a top priority.

Ditto for finding information within and around Part. A Bing-based Smart Lookup feature pops up Wikipedia and lexicon definitions of words or phrases, while a "Tell me what you want to do" line above the user interface (UI) ribbon suggests program features as you type queries (though the latter isn't psychic; I stumped it with "put a box around a paragraph" when I should have typed "put a edge").

All-Star Apps

As for the components of the suite, they range from invaluable, undisputed champions of their categories to apps that few users bother to have any concern for. Access and Publisher autumn into the latter category, and not simply because they're unavailable for Mac.

I have a soft spot for Microsoft's page layout program, which has changed fiddling since Office 2022, because information technology's relatively like shooting fish in a barrel to use and I one time relied on it to create newsletters. But today's professionals ignore it in favor of the much more capable Adobe InDesign. Access remains a powerful, if unintuitive, way to create heavyweight relational database apps (Full disclosure: I'm not sure there is such a matter as an intuitive style to create relational database apps.)

A step higher on the desirability ladder are two freeware tools. Sway is a simple, presentation/webpage maker that lets you lot arrange files, images, links, media, and text. Information technology's also got a Remix button, which artistically re-arranges the objects into a scrolling or step-by-footstep storyboard stored in the cloud.

OneNote provides squad-friendly notebooks divided into sections containing typed (or tablet-scribbled, sound or video-recorded, or web-clipped) snippets. Like its archrival Evernote, it'southward handy for taking notes during a class or the minutes of a meeting or just organizing your to-do items and random thoughts. Windows x users, even so, volition be puzzled to find two versions of the app on their systems, dubbed OneNote 2022 and just OneNote. The sometime has more than features; the latter is gaining new features every month; the overlap is baffling.

That leaves the large iii, or 3 and a half counting Outlook, which remains a strong if sort of heart-of-the-road email, tasks, contacts, and calendar manager—although the new list of recently used files that appears when you click to add an zipper is handy. PowerPoint arguably trails Apple's Keynote by one-half a step in the race to make the snazziest slideshows, but information technology'southward notwithstanding a presentation powerhouse. It contains plenty of means to organize your slides and notes, employ transitions and animations, and add together charts, images, or multimedia. It'due south also surprisingly easy to use.

Similarly, Corel WordPerfect dice-hards insist that their favorite programme tops Word 2022 for ultra-precise control of formatting and some specialized certificate types such as legal pleadings. But Microsoft'due south give-and-take processor is a super-powered standard; it shines at using styles and themes for quick, consequent formatting of text and at treatment footnotes and references (in a choice of APA, Chicago, MLA, and other styles). My only gripe about it is that some functions are inevitably cached several menus deep (the File Options carte du jour is especially encyclopedic) despite the interface ribbon and its hover tips.

Finally, there's Excel, the most dominant app in a ascendant suite, which is simply the only spreadsheet that matters. Its charts are both handsome and useful, such as the new visual forecasts that project the futurity based on existing information or specialties such as sunburst or Pareto charts. Its dialog boxes guide you through in one case-arcane operations such equally creating pivot tables, while an arsenal of add together-ons, plug-ins, and business analytics and reporting dashboards link information technology to everything from Google Analytics to MailChimp.

Whether you call it Office 365 or Part 2022, Microsoft's suite sets a formidable instance for other productivity solutions. It's hard not to call it the first $100 that should go into your dwelling house office's annual budget, but we'll see how some alternatives stack up in the residual of this series.

What'southward your favorite office of Office? What drives you lot crazy about it? Have you tried any of its challengers such as Google Drive or LibreOffice? Let me know in the comments or at homeoffice.eric@gmail.com.