MS Office 365?

GRM > google, so tell me about microsoft office 365. pros, cons, etc. pretty sure i won't get any on my hootus.

Once Micro$oft has hold of your hootus, they tend to not let go.

Basically, from what I understand, it's their foray into the trend among makers expensive and ubiquitous software to force people into upgrading regularly (for a fee, of course). Now, the Office suite is not priced particularly brutally. But Adobe, Autodesk, and others are tired of people buying an expensive version of, say, Creative Suite or AutoCAD, then milking it for 6 or 8 years. They'd much rather force you to buy an expensive version of the software every year.

There's also a web-based component ala Google Docs.

Is this the monthly based subscription version of MS Office that by default saves your files to the cloud and access the applications via the cloud? Yea no thank you. Adobe is going the same route. The last thing I want is to pay MS or Adobe a monthly subscription to not only access the software but also my files.

You have to think, it saves things to the cloud by default, if Joe Schmoe doesn't change the settings he could potentially save some crucial info on some random cloud server. It might be more secure than that users endpoint device but at the same time if someone gets into that server that could have hit the jackpot to some critical info.

And then's there is that part about paying them every month again.

I've been peripherally involved with several customers that have done hosted Exchange throughout the years and Microsoft is working hard to run out all the other players. It's almost like they've found some way to negotiate very aggressive discounts on exchange licensing.

Assuming you're talking about the email hosting -- which is what I see a lot of -- they seem to be pretty good at it. Most of what I've heard from customers is that they wanted nothing more than to get out of the Exchange administration business and focus on where they actually make money.

You can pay, what $65? for Office 365...then have to pay to renew it in a year. Or you can buy Office Home & Student(Which includes Outlook, Power Point & Excel, but not Sharepoint or some of the other crap only corporate power-users need ) for $149.

Seems like an obvious choice. Especially since Office '03 still works fine for me!

Or if you don't really use anything but word, excel and PowerPoint, download the open office version for free

Open Office is fine for the price (free) but I really have a harder time using it for my college papers and lab reports (it does not play well with the software I have to use to upload it to my universities servers and so I end up losing 5-10%) and it is not as user friendly as Microsoft Office 2003. I hate all new Microsoft OFfice software, I find the layout terrible. And banners and the bane of my existence. How is that eaiser than File, Edit, Window, View. etc?!!

Maybe this belongs in the rant thread...

But really, what do you expect to be using the MS Office for? What sort of things do you need to do, because Open Office might suit your needs.

What fritzsch said.

Open Office. is the way to go. F-Microsoft..

Open office can occasionally cause some weird formatting issues going back and forth between it and the Microsoft version, but trying open office and confirming it wont work the way you need it to should be the first step before thinking about buying Microsoft office.