Office 365 Personal subscription announced

Both the Home and Personal options will still include 60 minutes of Skype calling per month and 20GB of additional OneDrive storage, Microsoft said.

What am I missing, since when was Skype calling limited?
 
I have a Home 365 subscription already. Will be nice to get 60-minutes of Skype credit thrown in :D

Are you sure you don't have? I had to link my Skype account to my Microsoft account and activate the minutes.

The Office 365 subscription is awesome. It is cheap as well.... it pretty much cost the same as 2 PC games per year. Almost a no brainer.
 
Are you sure you don't have? I had to link my Skype account to my Microsoft account and activate the minutes.

The Office 365 subscription is awesome. It is cheap as well.... it pretty much cost the same as 2 PC games per year. Almost a no brainer.

Ah, I see you have to activate the minutes on your Office 365 account page. I didn't know that :)

Thanks, Johand :)

And yeah, I'm quite happy with Office 365. It's kept updated, it's an affordable subscription and I can share my subscription with five people/computers.
 
Are you sure you don't have? I had to link my Skype account to my Microsoft account and activate the minutes.

The Office 365 subscription is awesome. It is cheap as well.... it pretty much cost the same as 2 PC games per year. Almost a no brainer.

Seems like a lot of money compared to free...
 
Seems like a lot of money compared to free...

Sorry I use Excel A LOT.

I have not yet seen any open source application that comes close to Excel in terms of power ( last time I tried to use OpenOffice it had trouble doing the same column name twice in a pivot - might be fixed now). And office is fast. If I open Excel it is opens immediately. No splash screen.

The user interfaces are superpolished (I resisted the ribbon until I realised I got a lot faster with it compared to menus).

And Outlook is pretty much mandatory if you have an Exchange mailbox. Not many applications can connect to MS Exchange.

The value Office adds to my life is much greater than its current cost.

People might knock MS a lot but Office is really a superpolished set of applications. Excel is definitely in my list of top ten applications ever.


( And before somebody tells me open source is better blah blah blah... I will only value the opinion of somebody that use Spreadsheets a lot. And not for shopping lists - financial modelling or data analysis e.g the kind of person that's live got infinitely better when the row limit was increased from 65k to one million )
 
Seems like a lot of money compared to free...
You're not understanding the diffs.

Of course you can Skype another Skype user for free. But to use Skype to phone an ordinary landline or cellphone you need airtime. That's never been for free, because the phone networks charge.

With certain Office365 subs you get airtime that allows you to use Skype to phone anyone on any phone - they don't need Skype on the other end.

Great value. It's free minutes of regular Skype-to-landline or Skype-to-cellphone calls.
 
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Sorry I use Excel A LOT.

I have not yet seen any open source application that comes close to Excel in terms of power ( last time I tried to use OpenOffice it had trouble doing the same column name twice in a pivot - might be fixed now). And office is fast. If I open Excel it is opens immediately. No splash screen.

The user interfaces are superpolished (I resisted the ribbon until I realised I got a lot faster with it compared to menus).

And Outlook is pretty much mandatory if you have an Exchange mailbox. Not many applications can connect to MS Exchange.

The value Office adds to my life is much greater than its current cost.

People might knock MS a lot but Office is really a superpolished set of applications. Excel is definitely in my list of top ten applications ever.


( And before somebody tells me open source is better blah blah blah... I will only value the opinion of somebody that use Spreadsheets a lot. And not for shopping lists - financial modelling or data analysis e.g the kind of person that's live got infinitely better when the row limit was increased from 65k to one million )

Tried Kingsoft Office?

As for your Exchange comments...utter nonsense.

But yes a heavy Excel user is the only valid reason to be using Office I can agree with that.

My problem is that most people aren't even power users of office get choose to fork out loads and loads of money for it.

As with any software if you can use it to it's full potential then by all means pay for it, especially if it generates money for you.

It's like amateurs wanting Photoshop, it hardly ever makes sense.
 
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You're not understanding the diffs.

Of course you can Skype another Skype user for free. But to use Skype to phone an ordinary landline or cellphone you need airtime. That's never been for free, because the phone networks charge.

With certain Office365 subs you get airtime that allows you to use Skype to phone anyone on any phone - they don't need Skype on the other end.

Great value. It's free minutes of regular Skype-to-landline or Skype-to-cellphone calls.

Oh I perfectly understand.


For the price of office you could use a free office suite and just buy the Skype credit and still save most of the money.

You are falling into that old marketing tactic of spending money to save money.

Microsoft is only pushing this hard because they have to.
 
Oh, so we're just idiots falling for Microsoft's marketing talk? What a benighted view you have of the working world. Such condescension.

For everyday office work, free office software is worth exactly what you pay for it. You're of course free to use it. The rest of us are so gullible and credulous we love shelling out money for software. We're such fools, I know.
 
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The almost white interface of the latest Office version is a strain on my eyes. I upgraded free to Office 2013, and when I couldn't find a darker theme anywhere I went back to 2010. 365 looks the same AFAIK.
 
Oh, so we're just idiots falling for Microsoft's marketing talk? What a benighted view you have of the working world. Such condescension.

For everyday office work, free office software is worth exactly what you pay for it. You're of course free to use it. The rest of us are so gullible and credulous we love shelling out money for software. We're such fools, I know.

Oh but you've been talking about Office 365 PERSONAL EDITION.

That implies NOT EVERYDAY OFFICE work.

My statements were very specific to people paying money for office in their PERSONAL capacity, something which very few people ever need to do based on the fact that they are not a power user or simply don't generate enough income from it to justify it.

But it's your money, do with it as you please...even if pissing it away for no good reason.
 
True. You're right. My apologies.

Still, for people like me who use Office heavily at work, being able to use the same tools on personal machines is a boon. The subscription model with assured updates makes it worthwhile, though I certainly grant that for some casual or Developing World users there's little perceivable benefit, and they should ignore any threats or intimidation from the Microsoft Enforcement Agency.
 
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snip...

For everyday office work, free office software is worth exactly what you pay for it. You're of course free to use it. The rest of us are so gullible and credulous we love shelling out money for software. We're such fools, I know.

I use both Google's spreadsheet and Open Office for everyday office work - all the power of Excel (would have more if I could script in Java /javascript / python - which are all supported by one or the other or both).
If I were in financial services doing VERY high end spreadsheets, I would want Excel - for anything less, you'd be surprised how powerful the "free" options are. There's very few Excel functions they can't do.
(And don't get me started on Word - bullets / numbering in Open Office is done much better. Also, indexing / contents, also...)
 
As for your Exchange comments...utter nonsense.

.

If you can tell me an alternative to Outlook I will be happy to listen. I have not managed to get Evolution's Exchange connector working, no joy from Thunderbird either. Web/android/iPad apps is fine for the last couple of day's email but further than that is a pain. And I have PST files dating from before gmail days. Outlook is the only application that can reliably connect to just about any server, allow me to have a copy on my local machine and allow for full search accross multiple accounts, even when I am offline.

I have tried Evolution and Thunderbird and really no joy there.
 
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