Office 2016 has arrived for Windows and the software is big upgrade to the preceding versions of Microsoft’s productivity suite. If you’re craving to use the many features available, they are possible now, but most important, you have to consider which option you will use to acquire the new Office 2016.
Long gone are the agonies of lining up and buying a box of CDs at the store — today, subscriptions are on par, but they’re not the only way to buy. Because of that, you get several ways to get Office 2016, and you’ll be pardoned if you don’t know which one to pick. And if you know Microsoft well, you will know they do not make it easy for you to know the differences between your choices.
To make the outcome a tad-bit easier, this guide will go over three distinct ways to use Office and what you get with each selection.
Option 1: Office.com and Office Mobile apps — Free
Office.com delivers — upaid, but fairly reserved, online variants of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other tools. Since 2010, the website has generally flown under the radar, eclipse by the easily accessible desktop versions of the Office suite. All you need to use it is a free Microsoft account, if you already use any Microsoft product like Skype, OneDrive, Xbox Live — you already have a Microsoft account.
Option 2: Office 365 — Subscription
Office 365 is a monthly or yearly membership subscription that gets you the complete desktop versions of Office, pluscloud storage with One Drive, email with Outlook, and a bunch of other extras.
With Office 2016, the full suite includes new sharing features that lets you work in-sync with others in real-time, integrated with messaging app Skype, a tool that uses the search engine Bing to assist with your research while you’re working and more. The better and alluring reason to get a subscription is that you’ll always get new versions of Office 2016 when they are released by Microsoft.
Option 3: Office 2016 — One-time purchase
The uttermost option is to buy a single copy of Office 2016 outright, with the purchase; you get just Office 2016 for PC or Mac, with whichever features are applicable as of September 22, 2015. If Microsoft releases additional features to Office, the version you get with a one-time purchase will not be updated. The only updates that will be made obtainable with a onetime purchase — are mainly for stability and security purposes. This will ensure your software is protected and keeps working as it should. When a new version of Office is released, you’ll need to pay to upgrade.