What’s the difference between Office 365 and Office 2013?

Or rephrased, should you buy or rent?

A problem I have with Microsoft is that they have great information available but half the time you don’t know it’s there, and even when you do know, you don’t understand what they’re saying until you’ve worked it out for yourself.

And that sentence is about as confusing as I find Microsoft is, but translated it means when you know what they’re talking about the information they provide is good. Before that it may as well be written in another language.

Note too that everything I say here is for the PC. There are some limitations for the Mac. I won’t go into these, as I don’t have a Mac, but be aware that you don’t get everything if you’re running things on Apple.

So, Office 365 and Office 2013?

Underneath, they’re pretty much the same product. The main differences.

Office 2013

• Buy once, use forever. A flat, one-off price
• Only use on your own PC
• Different versions have different products—for example, Office Professional version has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access, while Office Home and Student has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. There’s a full list of versions on Microsoft’s Which Office is Best For You page. This page also shows Office 365 to compare with

Office 365

• An annual fee. You pay every year. Effectively, you are renting the software
• You can use it on up to five computers
• You get the full Office suite (even if you only use Word)
• You get some online storage – think Dropbox for Microsoft
• If you’re on another computer—say an internet café—then you can still use Office (your documents have to be online for this, but it’s still a nice feature) — think GoogleDocs for Microsoft

So think of Office 2013 as your standard Microsoft Office product and Office 365 as standard Office plus the Microsoft equivalent of Google Docs and DropBox. Except that Google Docs and DropBox are free, whereas Office isn’t.

One thing that worried me when I first looked at Office 365 was whether I had to be logged on to use it?

No, and I proved this during my morning and evening train commutes, where I turn off the internet and simply use Word and the PC, and save to my c: drive. Everything worked fine.

Of course, I couldn’t access anything on my skydrive while I was offline, but I expected that.

So why isn’t everyone renting?

On the face of it, Office 365 has so many advantages why wouldn’t you choose it over a standard Office suite?

There are two big minuses.

First, you are renting the software. In 12 months time you have to pay another fee to Microsoft to use it for the next 12 months. You have no control over the price, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. Suppose you don’t have the money to upgrade. Suppose you don’t want to. Microsoft is effectively holding you to ransom here. If you are a writer who only uses Word, and you’re the only one in your household who uses it, why not simply purchase Office 2013 Home and Student. It’s less than the cost of two years’ rental of Office 365.

Also, I’m not a big fan of the cloud, which is Microsoft’s fancy name for online storage. I like to be in control of my data. I don’t like it that someone else has access to my work. Or to some of it, anyway.

Why we chose Office 365

In the end we went for Office 365. We had four PCs between us, which meant we had to buy four licenses anyway, so we factored in that even paying four years’ rental we’d still be better off.

Provided Microsoft keeps their costs down and their licensing model the same.

Plus we do want to share documents. We already do this with OneNote, synchronising across machines, and we love it. We could save something on our c: drive, and next time we joined the network OneNote would synchronise everything.

This was probably the deciding factor.

We’ll let you know how we go.

 

p.s. As an unexpected bonus, when we upgraded to Office 365 it didn’t delete Office 2007, so the machines with 2007 on them still have valid working versions. If we ever choose to revert back.

My netbook died the other day, almost four years to the day that I bought it. Writing-wise, it’s one of the best purchases I ever made, second only in usefulness to Microsoft Word.

Because I write on two PCs (the netbook and the desktop), and I co-write with another writer who also uses two PCs, we like to keep the software we use in sync. My co-writer and I decided that rather than stay with Office 2007 on my new netbook, we’d upgrade all our PCs to Office 2013.

We ended up upgrading to Office 365, and linked our accounts so that we could share files.

At the same time I’d been toying with starting a journeyman writer blog for writers like us who aren’t beginners any more but aren’t necessarily published writers. They’re consistently writing, may or may not have an agent, and are looking for things like tools and just general information about what happens next. Everything from that dreaded second book, to rewrites at the request of someone else, to the tools that we use and backups and managing files.

I have also noticed that many writers use Apple. The ones who blog about it seem to, anyway. Yet there are a lot of us out there who use Microsoft. Some by choice—I’m one of those—some for whom it’s all they’ve got. But there’s not much out there for Office users, even though I think that most writers probably still write in Word.

Journeyman Writer will be a while off yet, we’re both too busy, but given that we ended up going for Microsoft Office 365, it’s too good an opportunity to pass up to share what we learned from our upgrade. Other writers are no doubt going through the same experiences we are. If even one other writer finds it useful it will be worth it.

We’re keeping it separate from our regular blog, and our regular fortnightly blog takes precedence, but we’ll try and make it semi-regular. Hopefully in the off-weeks of the main blog.

Things I’d like to cover.

• Office 2013 or Office 365
• I feel a migraine coming on
• Cool and uncool
• Where’s my ribbon?
• When Word keeps crashing
• More than just a glorified text editor
• Word has lost my shortcut keys. Again!
• Sharing files
• OneNote, an underused resource
• The SkyDrive
• Backups

A few years back I started blogging about SharePoint*. I soon realised that I couldn’t manage that blog, plus this blog, plus writing novels along with a heavy full-time workload. Something had to give, and what gave was SharePoint.

I left the blog open for months after that, because even though it was technically dead there was one post that got a lot of traffic. It was called ‘But what does SharePoint do?’. A lot of people commented on it. Even when I finally deleted the site it was still attracting three or four comments a month.

When I pulled the plug there were over 200 comments. Most of them of stayed on topic, but in between there were a noticeable number of anti-Microsoft rants of the “Big Brother Microsoft is capital-B Bad and don’t touch them” kind, and “It’s a useless product, you don’t need it, open-source products are better”.

Putting aside the fact that most people who use SharePoint don’t get any choice**, Microsoft didn’t get to be a big company by continually producing bad products. And despite all its detractors, if you have a use for it, SharePoint is an impressive product.

Microsoft isn’t the only company that gets bad press. Modern behemoths like Amazon and Google are starting to get a similar response. Even Apple is catching some flak nowadays.

Some people choose not to buy books from Amazon because they don’t like Amazon’s business ethics. Others choose not to buy from the iTunes store because they feel likewise about Apple. And some people choose not to use Microsoft Word because they don’t like Microsoft’s business ethics.

What has this to do with writing, you ask?

It’s about Microsoft Word.

You don’t need Word to write novels. All you need in this day and age is a computer and a text editor. (Note that I didn’t say pen and paper. If you want to sell novels, you have to get that those handwritten notes onto a PC.)

There are lots of word processors out there. You can use anything from Word to Open Office to Google Docs to Pages or dozens more. Many authors, particularly Mac users, love Scrivener, for example.

People come up with lots of excuses for not choosing Word.

• The WYSIWYG editor gets in the way
• It has too much functionality that you don’t need
• It’s too complex
• It doesn’t separate the writing from the presentation layer

Plus a stack of other reasons that often come across as excuses.

If you are a writer shopping for a word processor to write novels on, there are only three reasons you should not consider Microsoft Word.

• Your operating system doesn’t support it
• You can’t afford it
• You really do hate Microsoft and absolutely refuse to buy anything from them (in which case I imagine you will take equally strong stances against buying things from Apple and Amazon).

Note that I say ‘consider’. That doesn’t mean I think you should automatically go out and buy it, just that it’s one of those programs you should be investigating seriously.

You might find it a better tool than you think.

Because you know what, when you have finally finished agonizing over your manuscript, what are you going to do? You’re going to convert it into a Word document to send on to your agent or your editor.

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* SharePoint is a Microsoft program. In their sales brochure Apps4Rent describe how people use SharePoint, which was probably always a better question than what it does.

** In most companies, implementing a program like SharePoint is a decision made by a small group of people and then implemented across the company. Many of those wanting to know about SharePoint are those forced to use it.

For what it’s worth, I like SharePoint. Hence the original blog.