Review by Tyson

Since Microsoft Office has virtually no competition and is pretty much required for students, workers and those who partake in the 21st century, it’s not especially surprising that they are now embracing the annual fee concept. With this Professional code, you don’t actually have to pay an annual fee, but it’s also only valid for the life of your PC. Your ONE PC. This is definitely not buy it once, have it forever software. So, in other words, you’ll probably have to buy Office code for your other computer or if one crashes. With that in mind, going Home Premium is probably the cheapest bet - and at least you can use the code on up to 5 computers - but you do have to pay up each year if you want to keep your software.

But now that I’ve griped about that, let me say that I am fairly impressed with the 2013 upgrade. The SkyDrive Cloud concept is obviously the most notable change, allowing you to save directly to your online storage space rather than to the hard drive. I think this is a great way keep documents updated and accessible anywhere without having to e-mail yourself the documents or trying to remember which version is which. Very cool.

Other than that, you’ll find mostly cosmetic upgrades that will take some time getting used to and don’t serve a lot of purpose, but do look nice. There are some really cool new templates, especially in Excel, that are worth checking out. When you type in Word there is a kind of delay or typewriter effect as the letters appear which is kinda cool I guess. At first I thought it was weird, but now I like it.

OVERALL: Although Office is going a little too far to milk the customer for every penny they’re worth, I love the save-to-cloud upgrade that Office 2013 offers and am a fan of some of the new content/layouts. As everyone knows, Office is a must-have for pretty much everything we do in the world nowadays, and it is fabulous software. If you don’t care about the cloud, however, don’t feel like you have to rush out and upgrade. The new perks are hardly revolutionary, merely cool at best.