Office 365 is also built as a cloud-first application although desktop versions of its apps are available with certain plans, it’s designed to be used online. With Office 365’s subscription-based model, users always have access to the latest version, as the platform is updated at Microsoft’s end, whereas as perpetual, on-premise users would have to buy a new copy of the latest edition to be able to use new features. Office 365 is a subscription-based service, meaning rather than buying a copy of the suite outright for a one-time, up-front cost, users instead pay a monthly subscription fee to access the service at a level of their choosing. How is Office 365 different from previous versions of Office? This FAQ will be focusing on Office 365 for Business unless otherwise stated.

There are also online- and mobile-only versions of Office, known as Office Online, through which users can get access to feature-limited versions of Office apps for free. There are a number of different packages available when licensing Office 365, including versions for personal use, multi-user households, students, businesses, nonprofits, and education institutions. Office 365 contains the same core applications as traditional versions of Office, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and depending on the plan purchased, may also include other apps and services such as Publisher, Planner, OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint, Access, Skype, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams. Launched in 2001, Office 365 is a cloud-based, subscription model version of Microsoft’s popular productivity suite Microsoft Office. If you’re considering taking advantage of Office in the cloud, or just want to find out a little more about the inner workings of this ubiquitous but oft-underrated set of digital tools, read on we’re going back to basics to answer the most common questions about Office 365 as part of Microsoft FAQ series.

But there’s a lot more to Office than many users realize, particularly since the release of Office 365. Millions of modern businesses rely on the suite’s tools to communicate, create documents, and balance their books. One of the most popular software suites in the world, Microsoft Office is used by 1.5bn people worldwide.Īlmost everyone who used a computer in the past thirty years will have come into contact with Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, sent an email through Outlook, or messaged someone on Skype.

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