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Are you trying to decide if you should buy Office for Mac as part of an Office 365 subscription or as a stand-alone product? While cost is one important consideration it is not the only one. I’d like to point out a few other considerations that I think you should keep in mind as you make your decision. It is important to know that regardless of whether you buy Office as a stand-alone product or as part of Office 365, you get the ability to download and install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc on your Mac. Microsoft offers a web-based version of these applications.The online versions are only available if you have an Office 365 subscription. The online versions are cleverly named Word Online, Excel Online, etc. Frankly, I don’t believe I’ve ever used them so I can’t comment on how similar or dissimilar they are from the full desktop versions. Office 365 subscribers get access to new versions of Office when they are released, which is typically about every 3 or 4 years. For example, Microsoft made the following Mac versions of Office: Office 2011, Office 2016 and they released Office 2019 in September 2018.

• What Microsoft Office Should I Buy For Mac Free
• Which Microsoft Office Should I Buy For Mac
• What Is The Best Microsoft Office To Buy For Mac

Don’t buy anything yet. Try Apple’s solutions. They may be anything you need. If after a month, you feel you really need more, get LibreOffice. Its free and the closest thing to Microsoft Office you can not buy! (It’s free!) Finally, if you have.

Home and Student vs Home and Business

First you need to determine if you want to buy the Home and Student version or the Home and Business version. While these names may be slightly confusing, the primary difference for Mac users is that the Home and Business version includes Microsoft’s email application, Outlook. If you’re a business customer or if you use Outlook then you should buy the Home and Business version. Both versions include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Office on iPad or iPhone

Do you want to use Office apps on your iPhone or iPad to edit documents? Microsoft lets you download and install Word, Excel and Powerpoint, for free, on your iOS device. However, this free version only lets you open and view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. If you want to edit files then you need to have an Office 365 subscription.

OneDrive

Do you use Microsoft’s OneDrive to store and/or share documents with others? If so, it probably makes more sense to get an Office 365 subscription since Microsoft provides 1TB of storage space per user as part of the subscription. Microsoft does offer stand-alone OneDrive accounts. As of the end of 2018, a free OneDrive account comes with 5 GB of storage and a paid account comes with 50 GB of storage space.

Price

Prices vary over time. I plan to update the prices in this article from time to time, but please always check exact prices in case the prices listed below aren’t current.

If you want to buy Office outright, you can get competitive pricing from Amazon for Office for Mac. When you purchase from Amazon make sure you buy one of the digital download versions which let you download the installer from Microsoft’s web site (which requires you to use a Microsoft account or create one.) For example, current prices for the Home and Student version of Office 2019 for Mac is about $120. This lets you install it on one Mac. It’s not currently possible to buy a multi-user license, such as the 3-packs that Microsoft previously offered.

If you want an Office 365 subscription, buy it directly from Microsoft’s web site. For home use, you will likely pick between Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home. The Personal plan currently costs $70 per year and lets you install Office on 1 Mac or PC. The Home plan costs $100 per year and lets you install Office on up to 6 Macs or PC.

Currently, Microsoft offers 3 plans for small business customers.

Office 365 Business Essentials for $5/user/month. This plan only provides email accounts for your business. It does not include Word, Excel or Powerpoint.

Office 365 Business for $8.25/user/month. This is the most commonly purchased plan. It includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Office 365 Business Premium for $12.50/user/month. This plan includes Word, Excel and Powerpoint as well as email hosting for your business.

Office 365 subscriptions also include Microsoft’s Intelligent Services

In general, I think that if you need more than 3 licenses for your home or business and you look at the cost of ownership over about 5-6 years then it typically more affordable to buy Office 365 subscriptions.

A new version of Microsoft Office may be ready for the Mac soon. Is it as important as it used to be?

Rumor has it that Microsoft is on the cusp of releasing a new version of Office for Mac. It's been more than three years since the last version of Office came out. Things have changed a lot. Is Microsoft Office still important?

Since Office's last major release on the Mac, Apple made a major strategic move to trump Microsoft: It began to include productivity apps as part of the standard suite of software applications included on all new Macs and iOS devices. You used to have to buy iWork apps — Pages, Keynote and Numbers — separately, but now you get them for free.

Those three apps fill in the gaps for some users who need word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software capabilities. There are certainly some benefits, too, such as iCloud support and binary compatibility for documents, making it simple to edit files on your Mac and use them on your iPad, or vice versa.

Other options have emerged, too. Free software alternatives to Office like LibreOffice may still raise eyebrows, but Google has normalized many people to using Google Docs for their productivity software and collaboration needs, for example.

iWork is good, but it's not that good. As I said back in February, 'Almost' isn't good enough. Despite the advances that Apple has made, Microsoft Office still reigns supreme in corporate environments and elsewhere. Many businesses and institutions continue to rely on Office as their standard.

Like most alternative productivity suites, iWork apps try to be good corporate citizens, offering Office file compatibility for import and export, but there's a difference between file compatibility and native file support, and many users of iWork apps and other tools have run into issues with documents just not looking right when they're translated into Office formats.

As I said at the outset, Apple has changed, but so has Microsoft. Much of their focus has been to make Office a subscription-based service rather than a monolithic software suite that gets updated once every few years.

You can still buy Office in a single user version. But Microsoft is following Adobe's Creative Cloud lead, offering an annual subscription with the promise of regular updates, along with other benefits, such as the ability to share one subscription with multiple devices, a free OneDrive cloud service account with 20 GB of storage, free Skype world minutes and more.

Of course, a new version of Office for Mac is only one tantalizing piece of the puzzle. The other is a version of Office that will run on iPads. Microsoft expert Mary Jo Foley suggested in February that an iPad version is coming sooner than people think, perhaps some time in the first half of 2014. A well-integrated Mac and iPad Microsoft Office ecosystem would certainly be fierce competition for Apple, which is still in a rebuilding year after gutting the iWork apps to get them to work more seamlessly across iOS and OS X.

Another piece of the puzzle: Microsoft may bring OneNote to the Mac in the next few weeks. Microsoft's note-taking app is a decade old, but it's not available in Mac native form, leaving the market wide open for competitors like Evernote to dominate.

Office remains one of the best selling software packages for the Mac. Lots of Mac users depend on Office to get their work done, and that's unlikely to change. Office is still front and center for many in the corporate and institutional worlds.

What Microsoft Office Should I Buy For Mac Free

The combination of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac, Office for iPad and OneNote for Mac suggests that Microsoft still thinks that Apple's platforms are still fertile ground. Even if you don't like Microsoft's products, you have to admit that the company's continued support is a net positive: It makes it easier to justify using Macs and iOS devices in enterprise and reduces friction for users who want to effortlessly produce documents that their non-Apple using colleagues can work.

To answer my initial question, Microsoft Office's role has changed. It's no longer irreplaceable - fact is, there are a lot of options people can use if they want to produce word processing docs, spreadsheets and attractive presentations. But Office is still a vital and important tool for many of us, and that won't change.

Are you looking forward to a new version of Office for the Mac? Will you migrate to new Office apps for OS X and iOS? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Which Microsoft Office Should I Buy For Mac

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