Office 365 Yearly Cost Uk

There is a newer version of this page as Microsoft have renamed Office 365 to Microsoft 365.

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Should I buy Office 365 or the standard one-time purchase of Microsoft Office?

Office 365 is the subscription version of Office. This normally means that you buy a licence for a year at a time, although you can choose to pay monthly. You automatically purchase the current version of Office when you first subscribe and then you can choose to upgrade to the latest version (or not) whenever it is released. Otherwise in practical terms it is no different from the standard one-time Office. So basically you can just think of it as an alternative way of paying for Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Access, or whichever applications you normally use.

• Thank you for being an Office 365 subscriber. Office 365 is now Microsoft 365. Renew your subscription by choosing one of the options below. Your subscription will be extended from your current subscription end date. 1 Have you already purchased Microsoft 365? Renew with a product key.
• There is a newer version of this page as Microsoft have renamed Office 365 to Microsoft 365. Should I buy Office 365 or the standard one-time purchase of Microsoft Office? Office 365 is the subscription version of Office. This normally means that you buy a licence for a year at a time, although you can choose to pay monthly.
• It costs £59.99 a year for personal use for one user, but for £79.99 a year, you can get Office 365 Home which lets you have six different log-ins - a better deal for a family. With both options.

Note that both 365 and one-time purchase are sold in various 'plans', which contain assorted combinations of the Office applications and allow use for different purposes. Essentially before you think about whether you want 365 or one-time, you need to decide which applications you want to be able to use (for example some plans do not include Access), and the purpose for which you want them (e.g. the student version is cheaper). Confusingly, the combinations available are not the same for 365 and one-time purchase, and neither is the naming!

But if you are a standard, desktop user of Microsoft Office wanting to upgrade or purchase Office for a new P.C. then you can base your decision on the price you can find for 365 vs one-time in whichever plan you need and factor this against the expected life of your device, perhaps, as well as cash flow. Animal crossing coming soon. Read on to make things more complicated if you want to.

We've never seen anything like this; buy Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium and McAfee Total Protection security suite together and pay only £39.99 at Argos for a one-year subscription.

Below is a summary table using actual prices and typical version requirements. Please see bottom of this page for a more detailed table.

*Business use not permitted

All prices include VAT. Prices correct as at January 2017. The table above is simply a guide, using the best prices found from reputable suppliers.

Firstly, you could consider whether you need to buy Office at all. Did you know about Office Online, which is the free version of Office that you can use in your web browser? You can read more about it here. You can't use Access this way, and the versions are not the full versions, but they may be sufficient for you.

Another consideration might be the value you place on always having the most up-to-date release version of Office - e.g. Office 2016. For some people this is a real bonus of 365 since, if you always want to have the latest version, you would otherwise have to purchase Office all over again. Microsoft are keen to emphasise this advantage, but it isn't all good..

Office 365 Cost

In the business world it is often not a good thing to have users upgrading to the latest version spontaneously. This is particularly true with users of Access where you will find that many systems do not work when shared across a pool of users with difference versions of Office - e.g. a mixture of Office 2013 and Office 2016. An automatic upgrade is also unwelcome if you are someone providing IT support as it is often helpful to be able to keep your own installation of Office at the same version as your clients'. Unfortunately Microsoft are very keen on you making the most of your subscription and upgrading your Office 365 as soon as possible, so they provide an annoying and unwanted bar across the top of every application which you have either to ignore or to close every time you open something if you don't want to upgrade. This can be particularly irritating when looking at something that would normally fit the height of your screen but is pushed off the bottom by the extra strip added at the top.

If you do decide to purchase Office 365, do think about whether you want it to auto-renew or not. Naturally, Microsoft will encourage you to switch this option on so that they take the money automatically when your subscription is about to expire. Our own experience is that it is much cheaper to shop around and purchase a new Office 365 subscription from elsewhere. Note that there is no problem applying a fresh purchase of Office 365 to your existing subscription.

There are more factors to consider, coming soon (watch this space by bookmarking this page!).

Meanwhile, in summary, if you are a small business then the likelihood is that your decision will come down to price and price alone. If you are a larger company then one-time purchase is perhaps more likely to be your route.

*Business use not permitted

**counting multiple users on the same PC/Mac as 1 user

All prices include VAT. Prices correct as at January 2017. The table above is simply a guide, using the best prices found from reputable suppliers.

If you enjoyed this article or found it useful, why not tell others about it?

Software-Matters is a UK software development team based in Gillingham, Dorset, and close to the counties of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Nearby cities include Southampton, Bournemouth, Poole, Salisbury, Bristol and Bath.

Yesterday, Microsoft formally launched the consumer version of its Office 2013 suite, which it first revealed last July. As usual with a new version of Office, there are little tweaks all over the place, many of which have to do with making the software more webby (you can easily save documents to SkyDrive online storage, so they're available from any computer, phone or tablet) and touch-friendly (the interface has been slightly rejiggered to work better with touchscreen PCs, such as many Windows 8 machines).

But one of the biggest new twists in Office 2013 involves how you might end up paying for it. Microsoft is now offering a consumer version of its Office 365 service, which turns the suite from a shrinkwrapped product you pay for in one lump sum into a subscription service. And as you'll see if you visit Office.com, it's emphasizing this new Office-as-a-service over the conventional versions. (They remain available, although Microsoft has done away with previous versions that entitled you to install the suite on more than one computer.) It wants subscription Office to be the default Office.

Software companies certainly like the idea of turning their wares into services with ongoing fees: It's a way of ensuring that customers don't buy something once and then hold onto it, spurning upgrades indefinitely. (There are people who paid for Windows XP back in 2001 and have never given Microsoft another dime.)

But do you want to subscribe to Office? There's no one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but I'm going to try to point you in the right direction.

Screen shot with pc. One question I'm not going to answer in this piece. though it deserves further examination: Do you need Office at all, given that the consumer versions of Google's equivalent web-based apps are free? (Briefly, Google's services are a workable alternative in a lot of cases, but Office is still a vastly richer, more capable collection of productivity software.)

With the new consumer version of Office 365, Microsoft has resisted its usual instinctive urge to offer a product in a multiplicity of versions that vary in subtle ways. Despite its name — Office 365 Home Premium — there's just one version of Office 365 for home users. It costs either $99.99 a year or $9.99 a month, which covers up to five computers in a household. They can include Windows PCs and/or Macs; Microsoft isn't releasing a new OS X version of Office just now, but Office 2011, the current Mac version, is part of the package.

Your money gets you…well, pretty much everything in Office you're likely to want to use for personal stuff:

What Does Office 365 Cost

• All the major Office apps (which, for Windows, include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher) in downloadable form, with access to upgrades as they become available;
• 20GB of additional SkyDrive space, beyond the 7GB Microsoft offers for free;
• Office on Demand, a service that lets you stream full-blown Office to Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs that don't have the suite installed;
• An hour of Skype calls (to landlines) each month.

Office 365 Costs Home

Media server pc. If you're trying to do the math on the deal, start by considering how many computers you plan to use Office with:

• For one PC, Office 365 is $100 per year
• Two PCs: $50 per PC per year
• Three PCs: $33 per PC year
• Four PCs: $25 per PC per year
• Five PCs: $20 per PC year

Then think about your particular situation:

'I have a bunch of computers and they all need Office.'

Office 365 delivers impressive bang for the buck. Even if you bought Office Home & Student — a basic version that includes fewer apps than Office 365 — paying for five copies of the the suite would cost you $700. You could use Office 365 on those five machines through 2019 for that price, and you'd be entitled to all the upgrades that came along. And if you bought five shrinkwrapped copies of Office Professional — the version most comparable to Office 365 Home Premium — you'd owe Microsoft $2,000, which is enough to pay for twenty years' worth of Office 365.

'I want as much Office as possible.'

We've never seen anything like this; buy Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium and McAfee Total Protection security suite together and pay only £39.99 at Argos for a one-year subscription.

Below is a summary table using actual prices and typical version requirements. Please see bottom of this page for a more detailed table.

*Business use not permitted

All prices include VAT. Prices correct as at January 2017. The table above is simply a guide, using the best prices found from reputable suppliers.

Firstly, you could consider whether you need to buy Office at all. Did you know about Office Online, which is the free version of Office that you can use in your web browser? You can read more about it here. You can't use Access this way, and the versions are not the full versions, but they may be sufficient for you.

Another consideration might be the value you place on always having the most up-to-date release version of Office - e.g. Office 2016. For some people this is a real bonus of 365 since, if you always want to have the latest version, you would otherwise have to purchase Office all over again. Microsoft are keen to emphasise this advantage, but it isn't all good..

Office 365 Cost

In the business world it is often not a good thing to have users upgrading to the latest version spontaneously. This is particularly true with users of Access where you will find that many systems do not work when shared across a pool of users with difference versions of Office - e.g. a mixture of Office 2013 and Office 2016. An automatic upgrade is also unwelcome if you are someone providing IT support as it is often helpful to be able to keep your own installation of Office at the same version as your clients'. Unfortunately Microsoft are very keen on you making the most of your subscription and upgrading your Office 365 as soon as possible, so they provide an annoying and unwanted bar across the top of every application which you have either to ignore or to close every time you open something if you don't want to upgrade. This can be particularly irritating when looking at something that would normally fit the height of your screen but is pushed off the bottom by the extra strip added at the top.

If you do decide to purchase Office 365, do think about whether you want it to auto-renew or not. Naturally, Microsoft will encourage you to switch this option on so that they take the money automatically when your subscription is about to expire. Our own experience is that it is much cheaper to shop around and purchase a new Office 365 subscription from elsewhere. Note that there is no problem applying a fresh purchase of Office 365 to your existing subscription.

There are more factors to consider, coming soon (watch this space by bookmarking this page!).

Meanwhile, in summary, if you are a small business then the likelihood is that your decision will come down to price and price alone. If you are a larger company then one-time purchase is perhaps more likely to be your route.

*Business use not permitted

**counting multiple users on the same PC/Mac as 1 user

All prices include VAT. Prices correct as at January 2017. The table above is simply a guide, using the best prices found from reputable suppliers.

If you enjoyed this article or found it useful, why not tell others about it?

Software-Matters is a UK software development team based in Gillingham, Dorset, and close to the counties of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Nearby cities include Southampton, Bournemouth, Poole, Salisbury, Bristol and Bath.

Yesterday, Microsoft formally launched the consumer version of its Office 2013 suite, which it first revealed last July. As usual with a new version of Office, there are little tweaks all over the place, many of which have to do with making the software more webby (you can easily save documents to SkyDrive online storage, so they're available from any computer, phone or tablet) and touch-friendly (the interface has been slightly rejiggered to work better with touchscreen PCs, such as many Windows 8 machines).

But one of the biggest new twists in Office 2013 involves how you might end up paying for it. Microsoft is now offering a consumer version of its Office 365 service, which turns the suite from a shrinkwrapped product you pay for in one lump sum into a subscription service. And as you'll see if you visit Office.com, it's emphasizing this new Office-as-a-service over the conventional versions. (They remain available, although Microsoft has done away with previous versions that entitled you to install the suite on more than one computer.) It wants subscription Office to be the default Office.

Software companies certainly like the idea of turning their wares into services with ongoing fees: It's a way of ensuring that customers don't buy something once and then hold onto it, spurning upgrades indefinitely. (There are people who paid for Windows XP back in 2001 and have never given Microsoft another dime.)

But do you want to subscribe to Office? There's no one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but I'm going to try to point you in the right direction.

Screen shot with pc. One question I'm not going to answer in this piece. though it deserves further examination: Do you need Office at all, given that the consumer versions of Google's equivalent web-based apps are free? (Briefly, Google's services are a workable alternative in a lot of cases, but Office is still a vastly richer, more capable collection of productivity software.)

With the new consumer version of Office 365, Microsoft has resisted its usual instinctive urge to offer a product in a multiplicity of versions that vary in subtle ways. Despite its name — Office 365 Home Premium — there's just one version of Office 365 for home users. It costs either $99.99 a year or $9.99 a month, which covers up to five computers in a household. They can include Windows PCs and/or Macs; Microsoft isn't releasing a new OS X version of Office just now, but Office 2011, the current Mac version, is part of the package.

Your money gets you…well, pretty much everything in Office you're likely to want to use for personal stuff:

What Does Office 365 Cost

• All the major Office apps (which, for Windows, include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher) in downloadable form, with access to upgrades as they become available;
• 20GB of additional SkyDrive space, beyond the 7GB Microsoft offers for free;
• Office on Demand, a service that lets you stream full-blown Office to Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs that don't have the suite installed;
• An hour of Skype calls (to landlines) each month.

Office 365 Costs Home

Media server pc. If you're trying to do the math on the deal, start by considering how many computers you plan to use Office with:

• For one PC, Office 365 is $100 per year
• Two PCs: $50 per PC per year
• Three PCs: $33 per PC year
• Four PCs: $25 per PC per year
• Five PCs: $20 per PC year

Then think about your particular situation:

'I have a bunch of computers and they all need Office.'

Office 365 delivers impressive bang for the buck. Even if you bought Office Home & Student — a basic version that includes fewer apps than Office 365 — paying for five copies of the the suite would cost you $700. You could use Office 365 on those five machines through 2019 for that price, and you'd be entitled to all the upgrades that came along. And if you bought five shrinkwrapped copies of Office Professional — the version most comparable to Office 365 Home Premium — you'd owe Microsoft $2,000, which is enough to pay for twenty years' worth of Office 365.

'I want as much Office as possible.'

Until now, Microsoft has catered to price-conscious home users with stripped-down versions of Office. But Office 365 has Outlook, Publisher and Access. And depending on the number of PCs you have and your propensity to upgrade, it might still cost you less over time than a more basic shrinkwrapped edition.

'I want the latest features as fast as possible.'

The core of Office 365 is still a suite of great big conventional PC apps that require updating, not web-based services that always sport the newest features. But Microsoft says it's going to release new stuff for Office 365 on an ongoing basis, giving subscribers additional capabilities without making them wait three years or so for a conventional upgrade.

'I'm upgrade-adverse.'

If you plan to buy Office and then run it into the ground, Office 365 and its free upgrades lose much of their appeal. Note, though, that you aren't required to install new versions as they come along: You could stick with the old ones until you were ready to make the leap.

'You know, I basically need Word and Excel for one computer.'

A $139.99 copy of Office Home & Student will probably do you fine.

'I'm worried what will happen to my stuff if I stop subscribing.'

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has written a good post on this topic. It's true that you should only subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium if you're comfortable with the idea of paying Microsoft $100 a year for productivity software indefinitely. But if you cancel your subscription, you won't lose the documents you created — just access to the full-blown Office apps. You'll still be able to open your files in a boxed copy of Office, Microsoft's Office Web Apps or an Office-compatible competitor such as Google Docs.

The bottom line: Depending on how many PCs you've got and how many Office apps you need, Office 365 Home Premium is anywhere from a respectable deal to an aggressively excellent one. If you're happy with whatever version of Office you're using now — or happy using something that isn't Office — there's no need to feel guilty if you don't feel like considering Microsoft's latest upgrade right now. But I think a lot of people who are ready to move to Office 2013 are going to decide that Microsoft has made the Office 365 proposition irresistible.