#Microsoft office online vs office 365 for free#
#Microsoft office online vs office 365 install#

#Microsoft office online vs office 365 install#

In order to get either of these apps as part of a suite, you have to buy Office Professional 2013, or subscribe to Office 365-which comes with the rights to install Office Professional 2013 on multiple machines. If you need Access or Publisher, though, Office Online won’t work for you. They allow users to create, view, and edit files, though, and include the basic features most users rely on. The free Office mobile apps have limited capabilities. If you factor in as well, the free Office Online tools seem to cover the bases. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote cover the things the vast majority of people use from the Microsoft Office suite. The Office Online applications are enough for most people.

#Microsoft office online vs office 365 for free#

The Office 365 subscription also unlocks the full functionality of Office on a tablet or smartphone, and provides additional perks like Skype calling minutes, and unlimited OneDrive storage instead of the 15GB Microsoft provides for free OneDrive accounts. No matter which of these Office 365 plans you choose, each user also gets the full Office Professional 2013 suite for either a Windows or Mac PC. However, it doesn’t have some of the features available in Word 2013, such as shading, borders, or multilevel lists. Word Online has the basic paragraph formatting options, including bulleted or numbered lists, and the ability to align text left, right, or center. A few features you might miss: Word Online lacks the Format Painter feature that lets you copy formatting from one section to another, and it doesn’t have a few of the font options, like Text Effects and Typography, or Change Case. You can copy, cut, and paste, change the font characteristics, and so on. Office for Android shipped in January, joining Office for iPad as a free, native application for mobile users.įor example, if you compare the Home ribbon in Word Online with the Home ribbon in Word 2013, the two are almost identical. With both the Office Online apps and the Office apps for mobile devices, though, the versions that Microsoft provides for free have limited functionality compared with the paid equivalents. Factoring in all five, you have the equivalent of the Office Home & Business 2013 suite-for free. You can also use for email rather than paying for Outlook. Office Online offers the core four: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote-the same as you’d get with the Office Home & Student 2013 suite.