Office 365 Home

There seems to be a lot of scammers about at the moment selling Office Product keys at very cheap prices which often turn out to be Volume License keys and either won't activate at the time of purchase or worse, after reinstalling your computer! If it seems too good to be true - it definitely is! Thankfully this product is sold via Amazon's digital media services and is 100% genuine. I needed another copy of Microsoft Office so this time I decided to buy Microsoft Office 365 Home edition which entitles up to 6 users to use Office and have access to their own personal 1 TB OneDrive cloud storage. Whilst this is now a subscription based service and will need to be renewed each year it still offers incredible value, especially when divided up between other users and devices. I was actually paying for Dropbox but that actually costs more for a year's subscription and that's only for 1 user and no Microsoft Office software, so I have since cancelled that subscription in favour of Microsoft OneDrive. The entire purchasing process was really simple and the product and key is then listed under 'Your Games and Software Library' in your Amazon account which provides a link direct to Microsoft to download and install the software. Office was really easy to install and I had no issues at all. You essentially link the Office 365 subscription to your account and then when you log into the Office applications with your Microsoft/Hotmail/Outlook account the products are then activated and fully functional. The software is installed locally on the PC and can be used offline after it's been activated. From your Microsoft Account you are able to 'invite' 5 other users via their email so they can benefit from your subscription. Highly recommended! Pros: - Great value - Microsoft Office 365 and a 1 TB OneDrive cloud storage for 6 users per year - Very easy to download and install - Works out much cheaper than a single Dropbox subscription - Office and OneDrive applications are also available on other platforms too such as Android devices Cons: - Subscription based means it requires renewal each year and prices may change in a year's time

Office 365 is a great product if you want the following - Latest version of Office Multiple installations of Office A massive cloud based storage drive Free Skype minutes The ability to sync to multiple devices. I use Office 365 for work (I manage our tennant account) so have quite an in depth knowledge of its inner workings, the home offering shares several features and they are pretty easy to implement. I have a PC, an iPhone, an iPad and a Surface - Office 365 allows me to sync between all of these devices, so if I open a Word document on my PC, save it to OneDrive (formely SkyDrive) its very shortly available on my other devices - the time taken for this to happen is dependant on your internet connection (upload as well as download) and the size of the file. I also have shared the installation of Office 365 with others in my house, from your Office 365 account page you invite the person via email, if this email is live enabled its a quick process, if not the person will need to live enable their account (instructions are provided) adding a fee minutes to their sign-up time. Once they accept the invite they can download the latest version of Office on upto 5 of their devices. Something to note, which can cause a nightmare if you don't realise - the download for Office 365 suite (Word, Excel, Outlook etc) is around 4GB, once you click install it'll download some files in the background then start the installer and continue to download in the background - this is where you could hit an issue, on a 4Mb/s ADSL link this will take a couple of hours if left alone but it looks like its not doing a huge amount - it is, don't get impatient and shutdown/kill the installation, give it time! Onedrive - this is also important, the initial upload may take some time depending on how many files you have, for example a standard ADSL connection is normally upto 24Mb/s download, but can be only 1Mb/s upload - fibre is quicker but depends on your provider and your package. When I first installed Office 365 a couple of years ago I was on a 4Mb/s ADSL connection with a 768Kbps upload (0.7Mb/s), the initial sync of 11GB of data took me a weekend. But its worth it, why? Well I (being a IT type) upgraded my PC (I also had fibre at this point too) so once Office 365 was installed on my new PC (don't forget to remove it from your old/redundant device in your online Office 365 account so it doesn't hog your 5 available installs) Onedrive downloaded all my sync'd files and I was up and running very quickly. Don't get me wrong, its not perfect, like other pieces of software it has bugs but Microsoft do address these, they release monthly updates to their software which you can update automatically or manually so this helps fix those various bugs and issues and then (like recently) they release major updates (the update from 2013 to 2016 was seemless on my devices and the 3 devices my shared users have). After having many years of being stuck on ever older versions of Office, its nice to have the update version and features. Personally I'd like additonal features such as full email domain management (some people like me run their own domain and email but need a decent provider for these services but not at business prices for only a couple of users).