Office 365 Home - a pretty good deal

I recently took advantage of an MS Holiday offer and purchased Office 365 Home for my family for $89 for 1 year. 

 For years and years I relied on my TechNet subscription (which I still truly miss) to allow me to install MS Operating Systems and Applications on my various test and home machines.  

 I wanted to keep my families systems current and wanted to get them to Office 2016 - which I had been running various evaluation builds up until it's release this October.  But I knew the evaluation periods were running out and I needed to address this..

 To me I think this bundle is one of the best values that MS has.  I've stated many times that versus going out and buying 5 copies of MS Office at some $400 / copy - the Office365 Home approach of paying $89 or $99 / year for all 5 PCs, plus all iOS and Android devices and 1TB of OneDrive space per user just cant be beat.  I also like the flexibility of the annual subscription.  If for some reason I want to change I can just stop it..  and from a value perspective - I'd much rather pay $99 / year and always get the latest version than buy a media based edition.  

 The installation process was also extremely painless.  I used the one key best practice that was called out - which was to uninstall any/all previously installed versions of Office and make sure that each user I have in my family had a MS account.   Once that was done I just went to each machine - logged in to the Office365 site - downloaded Office 2016 and was done.  And that's one of the nicest parts of this - you get a full version of Office locally installed..

 As a multi-platform User - who has tried Google Apps, Apple Pages, OfficeLibre, etc, etc - Office to me is still the best in the business.  Maybe it's because of my familiarity since I been using it since the early 90s - but I just think its better.

 My only complaint about the Office365 Home bundle is that there isn't an option to add MS Project & Visio.  Sure I understand these apps are much more business oriented - but I'd like to see that option anyway.

 Also the one thing that seems odd to me - why isn't this available in the Windows Store ?  Office is by far the most installed app that MS has but yet - you have to go to a separate location to buy and manage.  I think MS is missing an opportunity here.. 

 So if your planning on upgrading to Windows 10 and want your Office version to be updated as well - Office365 Home is a great value - I highly recommend it.


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