The Differences Between Office 2013 and Office 365

The short answer is that “Office 365” is now the name given to Microsoft’s subscription services.What that means to you, is that rather than buying a product license out right you are paying money every month (or year) to use their products.The products included will vary depending on the Office 365 package.

The subscription aspect is nothing new, as Office 365 has always been a subscription service. The confusing part lies in how the various Office 365 packages have changed. As of January 28, Microsoft now offers an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, which looks more like an Office 2013 subscription than it does what we’ve come to know as “Office 365.” In other words, it does NOT come with email, shared calendars, instant messaging, web conferencing or a public website or internal team sites (aka SharePoint, Exchange or Lync) like the FAQ answer states. No, the Office 365 Home Premium package is this:

• Access
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• Publisher
• OneNote
• Outlook
• Word
• 20GB SkyDrive storage
• 60 minutes of Skype calls per month

You pay $99.99 a year and can install on up to five devices.

In short, the only thing that Office 365 Home Premium has in common with the established Office 365 brand is that it is a subscription. Cancel the subscription, and your copy of Office turns into a pseudo “Read-Only” version that will still allow you to read and print any file. In other words, you will not be able to make changes, save or create new documents through your desktop apps; however, you could always use the free Office Web Apps (aka SkyDrive) to edit (but only those features that are available with the free Office Web Apps—and that’s another blog for another time).

As a Microsoft MVP and consumer, I find all this confusion very sad because I really do feel that this is the best version of Office to date. The changes to PowerPoint’s Presenter View and the Excel apps alone make it worth the upgrade.