Microsoft Office 2013 vs. Office 365: Is either right for you?
Now that Microsoft has kicked off its gradual, rolling launch of Office 2013 and the accompanying refresh of the subscription-based Office 365, the time has come to ask the hard questions: Do I upgrade? And if so, which version is right for me? All but lost in all the hype and hoopla over Office 365 Home Premium during Tuesday's …
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Re: Exchange documents?
Try working in an office, anywhere
Re: Exchange documents?
Yes ... standard email exchange goes
Manager: "Can you send me some slides of your result to put in my report"
Me: "Ok, here's the current status"
Manager: "Thanks, here's the full set I'm using - any comments"
This works well if we're all using (the same version of) Office. Doesn't work well if it ends with
Manager: "I imported your slides and the formatting is all over the place so I've just spent 30 mins sorting it out"
Freetard: "Well I wrote them in <insert-free-software-office-name> because I refuse to use anything from Microsoft and I don't see why you should make me"
Office 365, a warning from a user...
... Office 365 isn't completely compatible with Office 2013. In fact in my tests it was about as compatible as Libre Office.
Re: Office 365, a warning from a user...
What a poor post. Can you elaborate or explain just what compatibility issues there are? (I haven't found any).
Re: Office 365, a warning from a user...
What? I haven't had the same experience. It is just exactly the same...
Am I missing something
The $140 is a perpetual, one device license. Multiplying that by 5, or $700, is what is required to compare it to a 365 subscription that is good for 5 devices.
NO....
The problem with subscription services is that the price is only good at the moment you pay; there is no guarantee that Microsoft will retain the $99 price point. Once they have moved everyone to subscriptions, they will have the ability to charge anything they wish. Businesses are so entrenched with MS Office that they cannot afford to migrate their Access DBs and multi-product documents (Excel embedded into a Word document and placed on a PowerPoint slide), so they will simply pay the higher cost. Take heed, users - today it is Office 365; tomorrow it will be Windows 365.
No one really wants to work on a large document on a phone or small tablet. Larger tablets offer a usable remote desktop, already allowing you to work on your documents on your work machine, so the added benefits of using Office365 on portables are questionable, at best. While we're on the topic, one should also consider the amount of data being thrown around. With today's cell carriers becoming more tight-fisted about data usage, working on a large document over and over could theoretically push you over your data limit and incur more charges on your cell bill, since the documents are stored 'in the cloud'. Inefficient users who throw uncompressed bmp images into PowerPoint will be in for a shock, as I have seen our users toss about 400-600MB files. Open those a few times to work on them, and you may exceed the carrier's 5GB limit really fast.
Microsoft would do well to offer Office365 in the form of "You may use it free of charge for X hours each month." This would ensure Word continues to dominate the market, but fairly charge the corporate users who use Office extensively - without punishing the home users.
Open Office gives me sufficient access to the MS Office formats
I have been getting a few documents from lawyers as MS Office files.
I can load them fine into Open Office.
I am pretty sure that they are a couple of MS Office versions behind the bleeding edge, maybe more if you want to count the new release.
Format compatibility is important enough in the real world that businesses are not going to rush to install the new version. With such things as court cases spanning several years of documents, lawyers need to be able to handle quite old documents. PDF is useful for that.
What I have seen, support for digital signing might be one feature that makes a difference, but looking the what the UK government says about how it can be done, we would have to purchase digital certificates. The web-of-trust approach that developed through PGP seems to have been ignored, although everyone seems willing to accept ink-squiggles without any real checking.
MS is pushing us to get rid of MS-Office
MS strategy is counter-productive for us, a SMB. It doesn't feed our needs, users are lost between versions, and it's more and more expensive. Sorry, as a company of 50, we do not have 20,000 € to throw in MS pockets every 3 years just to get a word processor and a spreadsheet application, which are our basic needs.
MS pushes us more and more to get rid of MS-Office, and look at alternative solutions. The next update regarding Office could well be a migration.
Re: MS is pushing us to get rid of MS-Office
Same here in our business of 20ish users. For us Office 2003 is great, it does everything we need, works with Exchange server and new licences can be found at quite reasonable prices on your favourite auction site.
We run a few copies of Libre Office alongside as that does some things better but overall MS Office is slicker for the majority of users.
Forgetting something?
Hate to burst the bubble here, but the business options include include Lync, SharePoint and Exchange hosting.
Not just Office - add in server side and CAL costs and it looks more reasonable.
What about Addins?
How would Office365 work with Addins (e.g. in an Enterprise scenario) if nothing is permanently installed to your PC?
There are many ERP/EPM solutions that integrate Excel/Office with back-end systems (SAP/Oracle/Hyperion etc.) - if your installation is piped out of the cloud (and maintained/patched there), then presumably it won't.
(To be fair, Oracle were pretty slow getting 2010 support out there...)
I imagine this would be resolved by a split implementation of Office 365/2013 if corporates were going to take the bait. Having said that, a lot of corporates (in my experience) who have only just started rolling out Office 2010 anyway..
Steve
Re: What about Addins?
If you use 365 everything is installed locally
Where are we?
El Reg - please quit the CHECK and MOM crap. This is theregister.CO.UK - the UK bit should give it away. If you have Yanks writing the articles, please ask them to write for their target audience.
'Nuff said. Downvote here we come.
Re: Where are we?
@Jim - "quit the CHECK and MOM crap"
I'd upvote you 100 times if I could; It's just lazy journalism. The register is going downhill - rather that a port-of-call for IT related news, it's becoming more like TMZ every week.
And what is it with Yanks and their aversion to propositions. "Out on BluRay Monday" WTF is a BluRay Monday?
Re: Where are we?
"WTF is a BluRay Monday?"
Its a High Definition Monday, which seems like a waste, I'd rather have a High Definition Saturday and Sunday
Buying office for the home
Who buys office at full price for home use?
If you've got kids who need to do their school work then you can get full pro license for office for peanuts (I think the UK price is currently £30).
If your place of work has a subscription to office then you can get office on a cheap deal
If you can't get either of these then Google Docs is pretty good, the online version of office is pretty good, if you must have a program you can use offline then libre office or openoffice.org will do the job.
Re: Buying office for the home
My thoughts exactly. I got full copy of 2010 for £20. £10 for the licence, £10 for the disk. My wife got offered the same deal. Since we can install it on 3 machines each, that's 6 PC's for £30 (you only need 1 disk). We only have 2 PC's so we only paid for the one licence.
At that price you might as well not bother with the open source stuff.
Oh, and we gave the previous version to the inlaws.
Re: Buying office for the home
Exactly.
Just bought MS Office 2013 Pro Plus on a home use program for less than US $15.00
Sweet.
Constant updates
Is there an off switch or are Microsoft really oblivious of the "don't update the package while I'm mid-task just in case it breaks everything" rule?
if you are going to get in bed with the devil
wouldn't google be cheaper -would be interested in a direct independent comparison.
but not as cheap as libre office + dropbox.
Christ
"Once the subscription Office apps are loaded, they also require almost zero administration. Not only are bug fixes and security patches applied automatically, but even major new features can be streamed from Redmond's servers without user intervention.
For IT managers, this could be a godsend. No more installing new versions of Office onto hundreds of desktops every three years. No more pushing out Service Packs and patches. Instead, you install Office 365 once, and from there on out, the applications keep themselves up to date."
Great. Now what if those bug fixes break something? What IT manager desires a desktop SOE out of their control? A shite one in my opinion though I guess some wouldn't give a toss.
As for the Microsoft puff about updates coming regularly but only for 365 subscribers I'll believe it when I see it. Large corporates have a way of getting the deal they want out of MS when there's big $$$ involved. Let's not forget it's these people that are really keeping the Office boat afloat, everyone else can use Libre Office.
Re: Christ
You can specify if updates are installed. It's clear from the screenshot. So no issue here, and you can stop your rant now.
Re: Christ
Yes, form experience of other web-based services (Google docs, Facebook, etc) they can and will change things with bugger-all regard for your existing work-flow, preferences and requirements for compatibility.
Though it pains me to say it (as a penguin-lover) one of the key advantages of windows in an enterprise environment is the ease of centrally managing updates and system settings, and this looks like breaking that.
Anyone from Mozilla/LibraOffice/Ubuntu who is listening? Please look in to tools for managing large installations!
Assumption is the mother of all f*ck ups?
I like unknowns, don't you? Especially unknowns from MS, it adds lots of surprises to my day! It ASSUMES that the UPDATE process will be flawless and without any botches. Some questions :-
#1. What if 'something' crashes as the update is being silently done in the background? Is it possible the Office version will then be in an unknown, buggy or incomplete state? If yes, what then? I've got lots of T-shirts that say my Virus Checker updater just crashed, so my security is now in an unknown state! It always takes more than a few hours of manual file copying, reg editing and hacks to fix these types of problem! Anything from Symantec was the absolute worst!
#2. Or what if the user hard resets the machine at the time of the update, or the laptop loses all power because the user drained every last drop from a depleted battery?
#3. This bit that I find warm and fuzzy is the feature being touted by MS that you can install a temporary copy of office at an internet cafe for one time use. Sounds super! ...In theory! In practice net cafe machines are often abominations of stability. I can see Office crashing unexpectedly. Since its a one time use install, does that mean I have to wait all over again to re-download and re-install at maybe a slow net cafe? What's the download footprint like in general? Will I be prevented from running the installer a second time on the same net cafe box?! If so I may need to wait while another spot opens after a customer leaves which would be a pain! Mmmh, I think I'd rather bring Office 2000 on a USB with the Office 2007 compatible pack for docx. Methinks its more likely to work reliably because net cafe boxes around the world are often old!
Re: Christ
"You can specify if updates are installed. It's clear from the screenshot. So no issue here, and you can stop your rant now."
Great! But are UPDATES turned on by default?
I'm thinking of novice everyday users who will probably leave updates on if they're turned on by default! Does Microsoft have a solid enough record at implementing automated unassisted updaters? It depends on your view.
Personally, after a quarter century in IT I can see this going pear shaped akin to Virus Checker updates when the UPDATER is interrupted by: A the user hard resetting the computer unaware of an active updater in the background, or B. the laptop loses power unexpectedly.... Both of these can leave system protection in an unknown state!
The question is, can Office recover from these types of update problems?
Getting away from Office
Does anybody have any stories they'd like to share that cover changing from MS Office to an alternative. Not just individuals but whole companies? I'd be interested to see just how painful it is but also how much can be saved.
I think about where I work and the various Excel add-ins that run their financial systems and can't see them ever changing.
Also the lack of real advertising for alternatives hurts the sector. I bet if I went to each department head and said 'Libre Office' or 'OpenOffice' they'd say "WTF?"
Re: Getting away from Office
Yep. I assisted a few companies in changing from MS Office to LibreOffice. First thing is to put a stop to custom business-solutions in Excel sheets. You won't believe how much stuff is done in Excel.
If you have covered the most important business processes in business software (either individual developed solutions or standard packages) the switch itself is painless.
You want save that much in shortterm: You can dump your license costs, but you have to do more support...
A bonus for some users is the old interface of LibreOffice via the new Office interface..
But you have to listen very carefully to your users. Some are heavily invested in Office, mostly powerusers, and you can't convience them to change...
For the normal office drone it is more or less the same and it works after a few weeks of more frequent support calls...
You have to convience management, because they believe, they have support from microsoft if the buy Office, but if you read the EULA, there is practically no support at all and no guarantees...
Re: Getting away from Office
"Yep. I assisted a few companies in changing from MS Office to LibreOffice. First thing is to put a stop to custom business-solutions in Excel sheets"
Nice try PUTTING A STOP to banks, insurance companies etc.. you'd alienate the majority of the financial services industry...
Re: Getting away from Office
Yup - about 12 users, mainly using spreadsheets and text documents. No third party add-ins.
For files which are just on the server locally we now use LibreOffice, having also tried Star Office and OpenOffice before that. Dumped various versions of MS Office from 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007 to go to a standard platform.
Conversion between formats is always the problem, once a document is standardised in the new format it works fine. This happened previously between versions of XLS files as well, many requiring a round trip through ODF to get them working again!
For files which are better shared continuously we have moved those into Google Docs. This totals about a dozen files for 10 users and after 18 months have not regretted it for a second.
Some of these files are linked to each other so needed to change all in one go, but it wasn't difficult.
Savings? No more money wasted on office software every time we got a new computer. No more time wasted every time a spreadsheet crashed.
You may call it cheap, we call it Yorkshire Thrift.
Re: Getting away from Office
I assisted a few companies in changing from MS Office to LibreOffice. First thing is to put a stop to custom business-solutions in Excel sheets. You won't believe how much stuff is done in Excel.
Excel is a great little grid control -- printable, too -- and it's easier to embed your application in Excel than it is to embed Excel in your application!
That's Microsoft's fault, of course. You might almost think they'd planned it that way ...
Just got me to retry OpenOffice/Libreoffice
This article has just prompted me to try Libreoffice 3.6. For OpenOffice, even to 3.2, the spreadsheet side (Calc) is horrible eg for creating charts among other things - too many clicks and presses and pop-up windows and it felt too much like you could see the programmer. But LO seems to have removed a good number of the OOo annoyances and it has more of the shortcuts and keyboard tricks like Excel.
So in comparison to the last time I tried it, this version of Calc now feels productive, as if you could actually use it for serious work (though it's still a pity you can't set colours or fonts on the charting without diving into a "Format Selection" window). Time for some more in depth testing methinks.
The Rent is Too Damn High!
For companies with up to 100 employees, Microsoft is out of it's freaking mind. This is not a boom, bubble, or economic recovery, hell the US economy contracted last quarter, this is not good. They ask too much.
Seriously, I can grab the latest copy of Word Perfect Office for about $29... WP has always been good.
:|
I have bitten...
I have bought the subscription yesterday and I think it is great value.
I have used Open/Libre-Office a lot over the years, even installed it on many PCs of friends and family, but it is just not as good as Office. Yes, I can do all the work in Writer, but I prefer to do it in Word. Excel 2013 just looks so much better than Calc.
And I like the price. It is 10€/month here and for that I can use it on our 2PCs, 1 Win Laptop and 1 Macbook without any additional costs...
I have tried it extensively over the last few months and I am hooked. It looks better than any version of Office before and it works - at least for me - better than any previous version...
Banging on about Libre/OpenOffice wont cut it...
The majority of offices us MS Office. They send documents to other people and those people need to be able to see them correctly. LO and OO don't do that. For a simple "home user" test on a document or spreadsheet, they can handle it. But an accounting spreadsheet with macros, or a long complex document? Forget it.
MS have created a monopoly. Is it the best software? No. Does it do the job? Yes. Their format won. And so the first thing LO and OO should do to have any chance of widespread corporate acceptance is to match the MS format exactly, in every case.
Everyone always gives MS shit about not following the XML or HTML format when the majority of people use them as written. And that is absolutely fine. MS are the minority there, they should follow the spec.
But in the corporate world, the MS document specs are the de facto standard. And so LO and OO should follow them. Because everytime I see a document formatting issue crop up, it's someone opening an MS document wondering why LO or OO has a problem with it.
Get the formatting right first, then add proper useful features. That will make LO/OO viable. Until then, they aren't going to be accepted in the business world in the numbers you want.
Re: Banging on about Libre/OpenOffice wont cut it...
Just because one format is the defacto standard, it shouldn't mean others have to adopt it or fully support it unless they want to. And I've seen enough strange formatting in Word docs due to use of existing features to wonder if a simpler formatting of all documents should be enforced.
But what about Group Policy control of settings and security of these open source offerings.
Are such things supported?
Re: Banging on about Libre/OpenOffice wont cut it... You've totally hit the nail on the head!
Formatting incompatibles were already highlighted. But I'm puzzled why in 2013 there's no real Office alternative with FUNCTIONALITY that's competes with Office head on? Business customisations in Excel have been around for 20+ years, and VBA in its current form for at least 15 years. So what's taken the competitors so long to do little next to nothing in these two key areas? Its like they deliberately chose not to compete with MS head-on, even Google!!! The Reg had an article on Lotus again this week. Its such a shame there's no longstanding competitors to Office around anymore.
Why are even discussing alternatives like Open-Office / Libre - Office if they don't fully support business customisations and VBA etc?
The entire financial industry in built on these bloody things! We will never get away from MS as long as this is the case?
Re: Banging on about Libre/OpenOffice wont cut it...
The majority of offices us MS Office. They send documents to other people and those people need to be able to see them correctly.
If your business sends out documents whose layout is so important that it has to be preserved at all costs then you're probably doing graphic design, or something like that, and have better tools than MS Office (and better formats than those supported by MS Office) to work in.
in 9999.999 cases out of about a dozen what's important is the content of the document, not its layout. It really shouldn't matter that the format may not be preserved 100% correctly when you send a document to someone else and they open it in different software (maybe a different version of the same software you used).
If you care that much about the format of your Office documents -- whatever software you're using to produce them -- you're probably wasting too much time formatting them and not spending enough time thinking about the contents. My advice would be to stop that and get on with some real work!
Re: Banging on about Libre/OpenOffice wont cut it...
You completely forgot about Excel!
Exact replication of layout and content including VBA macros and business customisations is nothing short of crucial. The entire Global banking system runs on Excel, and much of the financial industry at large including the insurance sector heavily relies on it too.
As for this online "offering"
I don't care what the added benefits are, they lost me at "updates are automatically applied" because you just know that either:
a) Users will happily ignore any prompts to restart or shutdown the application or machine when required, so critical patches won't get applied
or
b) A patch will go in and mess up a beancounters lovingly crafted macros, causing much whining from the Legume-reckoning pit. Cue an outcry, someone pops up with an LO/OO suggestion, a switchover is suggested, more teeth-gnashing, this time from everyone in general when they find old documents are no longer correctly formatted, and then a switch back to MS Office, costing everyone time, money, the will to live and yardage on their hairline.
Had I not seen it happen myself, I would chalk it up to a fevered BOFH dream.
Cloud; not now we thave Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act
I see that the US government has just killed Office 365 and with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act allowing them to snoop into everyone’s online data.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21263321
Your . . . calculations . . . are . . . wrong . . . Office is free...!
We bought Office 2003 ten years ago and have absolutely no intention of ***grading to a later version which offers nothing new. Buggering about with the user interface doesn't constitute a new feature.
As Paul Allen said years ago, the biggest competitor to Office is previous versions of Office.
Anyone who accepts this MS BS deserves every minute of their impending rogering.
***grading: which one is it? It's surely not an UPgrade, that implies some benefit on my part. Maybe it's a DOWNgrade (that poxy ribbon qualifies). Maybe it's a SIDEgrade, but that's just inventing a new word, a bit like Microsoft inventing a new benefit for them, licensing & delivery, and calling it a benefit for the punter. Maybe it's an MEHgrade.
Meh.
Wretched choice
I'm a power user of Word - the 2013 version offers no real functional benefits over 2010, though I'm happily using my free upgrade - it just looks slicker, and is without any doubt the most sophisticated word processor on the market.
I've used LibreOffice a lot ... it does some things better than Word, but there's still quite a lot of catching up to do. The UI looks like a dog's dinner (though it works quite well). Compatibility with Word docs isn't perfect, particularly around headers etc, but it's workable. Unfortunately if you want to work on an Android device there's no option but to use doc or docx.
But as LO continues to improve, and Microsoft continues to make Office financially less and less attractive there will come a point (quite soon) where I'd be mad to stay with Office. It's not completely about the money - it's the hoops you have to jump through to get the damn thing on your computer, activated, reactivated if you reload the OS and so on. With the 365 offer Microsoft is pushing a vision of complete flexibility as you work between different machines - but if that's what you need it's far easier to achieve with multiple copies of LibreOffice and a free cloud service like Sugar Sync, Dropbox or Google Drive ... Microsoft is going to have to come up with a lot more added value (or much lower prices) if it really wants to get users outside the enterprise to sign up to a sub ... I understand that arguments within an enterprise might be different, though at this rate Microsoft will be killing its presence in the SMB sector too ... It's like they are losing touch with the real world ... and need to remind themselves of Clay Christansen's arguments about why incumbents lose out to disruptive technologies ...
thankfully I was a student once
Still rockin' on the 2007 ultimate version I picked up as a student for £40. I suspect it will last quite a while.
Re: thankfully I was a student once
Long may it last- Kudos! Got two questions though :-
How many machines do you get to run that on?
What happens when you upgrade to new hardware or it breaks or is lost?
Re: thankfully I was a student once
Install such software in a VM - no 'hardware' to change, and you can have it fire-walled from the internet, LAN, etc, as required for security.
Best of all, you can then run it on any host be it Windows/Linux/MacOS/etc that supports your choice of VM.
Office 2010 H&S Allows installation on 3 PCs
That does rather change the economics for home users...
Kingsoft Office...
...is another alternative for a home user that doesn't need to be cutting edge.
I used various versions of Open Office/Libre Office for years, but just got fed up with relearning the user interface and the fact that the Office compatibility never quite worked; you could never quite guarantee that document formatting was going to be correct.
I eventually stumbled across Kingsoft Office, a Chinese Office clone. Free for the basic version, and £50 for the pro suite, if you want a few extra features. It only writes .doc and .xls, not the newer MS formats, but can read .xlsx and .docx, the interface is pretty much old school MS Office, and it is very robust and in my experience, no compatibility problems with MS Office, so it suits me perfectly as a late adopting, non power user!
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