Microsoft's Edge Browser has a nearly identical feature called Ask Cortana, which fires up when you highlight and right-click text on a Web page.
While this is a useful feature, it's hardly an original one. Somewhat annoyingly, though, when I double-clicked on the attachment for a Word doc I received, I was first taken to the Web browser and asked if I wanted to open the document rather than going straight to the Word client or Word app. If that person is using Outlook, the document even appears as an attachment icon the person can open. In Outlook 2016, when you attach a document that's stored in your OneDrive folder and email it to someone, the recipient is automatically granted edit permissions. Who wants to email someone a link and then find out that they can't open it or can open but not edit it? That's because setting permissions can be such a hassle.
Microsoft knows that a lot of times users will download cloud-based documents and then email the files rather than send the colleagues a link to edit the documents in the cloud. Office 2016's biggest sharing innovation appears not in the major document apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) but in Outlook's attachment feature. A Share button sits on the right side of the toolbar in the major desktop apps: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Office 2016 makes it especially easy to invite others to view and edit the same documents.
Simple Sharing, Cloud Attachments in Outlook However, in order to message or call someone, you have to either be using Skype for Business within the same organization or, if you are using regular Skype, the users' email must be in your contacts list or linked to a public Skype account. With Skype minimized, my friend's video appeared as a small floating window on top of the document, so there was plenty of room for us to edit content while still seeing each other's faces. **counting multiple users on the same PC/Mac as 1 userWhen I hit the Video Call button on my friend's name, Skype for Business popped up and initiated a call for us so we were able to chat while editing a document. PowerPoint, OneNote, Publisher, Skype for business This can be particularly irritating when looking at something that would normally fit the height of your screen but is pushed off the bottom by the extra strip added at the top. Unfortunately Microsoft are very keen on you making the most of your subscription and upgrading your Office 365 as soon as possible, so they provide an annoying and unwanted bar across the top of every application which you have either to ignore or to close every time you open something if you don't want to upgrade.
An automatic upgrade is also unwelcome if you are someone providing IT support as it is often helpful to be able to keep your own installation of Office at the same version as your clients'. a mixture of Office 2013 and Office 2016. This is particularly true with users of Access where you will find that many systems do not work when shared across a pool of users with difference versions of Office - e.g. In the business world it is often not a good thing to have users upgrading to the latest version spontaneously.
You can't use Access this way, and the versions are not the full versions, but they may be sufficient for you.
Did you know about Office Online, which is the free version of Office that you can use in your web browser? You can read more about it here. The table above is simply a guide, using the best prices found from reputable suppliers.įirstly, you could consider whether you need to buy Office at all. Please see bottom of this page for a more detailed table.Ĭost of one-time purchase Office (per PC)Īll prices include VAT.
Read on to make things more complicated if you want to.īelow is a summary table using actual prices and typical version requirements. then you can base your decision on the price you can find for 365 vs one-time in whichever plan you need and factor this against the expected life of your device, perhaps, as well as cash flow. Confusingly, the combinations available are not the same for 365 and one-time purchase, and neither is the naming!īut if you are a standard, desktop user of Microsoft Office wanting to upgrade or purchase Office for a new P.C. Essentially before you think about whether you want 365 or one-time, you need to decide which applications you want to be able to use (for example some plans do not include Access), and the purpose for which you want them (e.g. Note that both 365 and one-time purchase are sold in various "plans", which contain assorted combinations of the Office applications and allow use for different purposes.