Review by Jessica Weissman

Office 365 is Microsoft’s latest bright idea for how to get us to subscribe to the software we once bought. For $49 a year you get Office 2013 on a PC or Office 2011 on a Mac, plus more-robust versions of the tablet/phone versions of Office than you get for free. You also get 1TB of space in Microsoft’s cloud and the ability to sync a doc from anywhere you edit it. Sort of like a keychain USB drive, except no physical drive. Plus some Skype minutes. 1TB of space is nothing to sneeze at, and paying an annual fee for drive space is industry standard practice.

For me the installation on the PC went fine even though I had Word 2010 already. I am happy with the features added in 2013 over 2010, particularly for Excel. The iPad version is about as good as you might expect, and with Office 365 you get to edit docs from OneDrive.

So far so good. But does it make sense to go for this version? If you have lots of devices, get Office 365 Home, which supports installs on 5 devices. If you don’t trust Cloud storage and don’t need OneDrive and syncing, search out the regular Home and Office or Home and Business versions; one purchase price covers you forever, or until hardware/OS incompatibilities end that dream.

If, at the end of my subscription year I have actually used OneDrive a lot, I’ll renew using my own money. If I like the 2013 version of Office enough but don’t use the cloud storage, I’ll buy a permanent license for 2013….assuming they still sell such a thing. I hope they do. At the retail level, rental software benefits the vendor far more than the buyer.