Microsoft officially released Office 365 Home Premium and Office 2013 today. The subscription based Office 365 Home Premium version will go at $99.99 a year. In the press release announcing the new Office versions only three sentences are about Office 2013 which gives to think that Microsoft is betting on the subscription service. Office 365 Home Premium can be installed on five devices and gives you Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access.
With the $99.99 subscription of 365 Home Premium you'll also get 20 GB of Skydrive storage and 60 minutes of free Skype calls per month. University or college students $79.99 for a four year subscription and a business edition will become available at the end of February this year.
Office 2013 is an improvement of Office as you know it and can be purchased directly from the Microsoft website where you are offered to download it. Prices are $139.99 for Home and Student, $219.99 for Home and Business and $399.99 for Professional. All come with at least Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote and give access to Office webapps that should allow to access, edit and share documents on multiple internet-connected device.
Also standalone versions of Word, Exel, Powerpoint and Outlook are available at $109.99 each. All will run on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 and optional language packs are available at $24.99.
The changes in each individual application seem to be minor apart from a new look for each of them. PowerPoint now supports more video formats and has feature to make sharing easier. Word will remember where you've left off reading, supports videos, has new templates and allows editing of PDF files.
The new Outlook has more integration of weather services and social media and Excel has new math functions, opens each workbook in its own window and a new Quick Analysis tool.
Everything is available just now from the Microsoft Store. Discuss this in our Windows Forum.
