Microsoft Office for Free


Microsoft Office comes in several flavours. You can still buy a license for one PC. However, Microsoft would like you to buy a subscription. 

The single PC license still exits. It lets you use the Office applications on one PC. That's it. If your PC ends it's life so does your license. This is how many people used Office applications at home. They bought a copy of Office, usually at a discount, when they bought a PC. It got to the point where retailers just added in the cost and people assumed that Office applications were part of Windows. That was both good and bad. If consumers kept their PC for 5 years they never paid Microsoft any more cash. They also didn't get any enhancements from later versions. Suddenly they might get an Excel spreadsheet or a Word file with gibberish in the middle. A sign that a later version inserted a new type of data. 

A single PC license would cost quite a bit but it lasted for years. Students got lower prices that hooked them in to Office applications whether they used a PC or a Mac. Office across different devices became a larger business than Windows itself as the PC market declined and mobile devices took centre stage. 

Microsoft would prefer you bought a subscription. The subscription model is now branded Microsoft 365 Family. For a fixed monthly or annual fee you can have Office software for multiple people in your family for multiple devices with a large amount of cloud storage. The price over three or four years across the 6 permitted users and devices is significantly less the old model of upfront cash. You also get continuous upgrades and security updates. If you shop around on websites that highlight deals you can buy at an even cheaper rate. 

However, what if you really don't have much money? What if you rarely need a productivity application suite like Office? There is a way of getting Office for free. It's not all of the Office suite you can pay for but it's free. If you have a Microsoft Account (MSA) then you can go to Office.com and login for the web based version of Office. You may already have a Microsoft Account. Its any email address for outlook.com, hotmail.com, msn.com or any other of the Microsoft services. You get a 15gb Onedrive space to store your documents and web access. Its what Google offer with docs and drive. The difference being you can create and use Office like paying customers. 

Consumers often don't realise there is a free option for Office. There is. For most people it may be all you need. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Powershell Symlink to Onedrive

Image
I have more than one PC. To be precise, and overly pedantic, 3 Windows 10 laptops. All are slightly different and of various ages. One I use with a Windows 10 Insider Build to keep up with the next thing coming down the pipeline. On each, I do a bit of Powershell . Powershell is the latest generation of Windows command line tools. The Linux enthusiast would look down on the Windows command line of whatever generation but Microsoft has always provided command line tools. In the early days MSDOS was a command line OS. It did little but create directories (folders), copy, move or delete files. It ran “command.com” which some said was just a basic file system manager and way of loading programs into memory. It wasn’t difficult to disagree. Developers brought out alternatives to this such as 4DOS , literally “for dos”, by JP Software . They also produced 4NT, which enhance the Windows NT command processor and 4OS2. The latter was for the IBM OS2 Operating System of the late 80s and ea
Read more

Being progressive rather than universal

Image
Microsoft was not short of ambition for its tiled interface and One Windows strategy . Microsoft was doing what no other tech firm had done - uniting mobile to desktop/laptop PCs in one experience. Apple had two OSs available - IOS for phone/tablet and OSX for its desktop/laptop users. They were different and had different interfaces. Google had two OSs - Android for phone/tablet and ChromeOS for its Chromebook devices. Of course, even One Windows doesn't mean exactly the same OS but it does mean components have such similarity that the interface appears the same to users and, with little modification, apps can run on all platforms. Unfortunately, the app platform UWP (Universal Windows Platform) was hobbled from day one. Microsoft had a poor quality application store, ever-changing developer tools and standards and a Store that only worked (on the PC side) for Windows 8 and latterly Windows 10. While people used legacy versions of Windows such as Windows 7 and XP t
Read more

Identity as the new security boundary

 Not so long ago a PC was safe behind a firewall. The idea was that the physical infrastructure of a network would be enough. Anti-virus and anti-malware products sat on PCs to protect users. Then hybrid working came along. Digital nomads who could connect to networks from anywhere. New startups had users connecting to web based applications. People were bringing their own devices, tablets, phones, projectors and so on into the workplace. Security has now started looking at people. Microsoft call this zero-trust. You don’t just trust someone because they can login. You have systems that secure identity itself. There are three steps to identity security.  1.The credentials that give you authorisation. For most people this is an account identity and password. Often the identity is an email address or some public identity. This leaves the account secured by password. The strength and complexity of the password protecting authentication. 2. Authorization is the next step. What you can a
Read more