Microsoft Office has changed. It's not just that Office 2013 gets the Windows 8 treatment, with a touch-friendly interface and a sparser look, as well as new features in every application. 
Office
 is also going to the cloud, with subscription pricing, on-demand 
installation and automatic syncing of settings and documents you save in
 the cloud – if you want to pay for it that way. 
As
 usual, there are multiple versions of Office 2013, but this time around
 the different editions are not just about whether you're using them at 
home or in a business or which applications are included.
Buying Office 2013
Even
 if you decide you want to buy a pay-for-it-once-and-keep-it copy of 
Office 2013 in a box, you won't find a DVD inside – just a product key 
to unlock the software you download. (Buyers in "developing countries 
with limited internet access" can still get a DVD, but that's not an 
option in the UK or US.) 
If you prefer
 to pay an annual subscription to get extra features, Office 365 
editions let you download the Office 2013 applications onto multiple PCs
 (or share them with your family).
For 
home users, there are four options. Buy the boxed software and you can 
put it on one PC. Office Home and Student 2013 with Word, Excel, 
PowerPoint and OneNote costs £109.99/$139.99; Office Home and Business 
2013 adds Outlook and costs £219.99/$219.99. Office Professional 2013 
has the full set of programs for £389.99/$399.99; Word, Excel, 
PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher. 
Then there's the new subscription version that Microsoft released this week, Office 365 Home Premium, which costs you $99.99 a year for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher.
That's
 good value if you share it with the family; up to five people in the 
same household can have their own installations of Office on their PC or
 Mac at the same time (for the Office programs that run on a Mac – and 
Mac users get the current version of Office for Mac until a new release 
comes along in the future). And when the next version of Office comes 
out, you'll get it on the same subscription.
All
 five people get an extra 20GB of storage on SkyDrive to keep documents 
on and 60 free Skype world calling minutes a month (which can be calls 
to a landline or a mobile and from your PC or from a smartphone with 
Skype installed). 
You
 can download the Office programs temporarily on another PC if you're 
away from your usual PC (even if it already has another version of 
Office installed). So if you have a document on a USB drive or on 
SkyDrive that you need to edit on another PC, and using the Office Web 
Apps from SkyDrive doesn't provide of the features you need (like seeing
 revision marks in a tracked document you're collaborating on), you can 
use Office on Demand to get the full version of Word in just a few 
minutes.
You manage all this from the 
revamped Office.com and there's a link to your account there in the 
ribbon of all the Office applications. (To activate the Skype minutes 
you have to link your account to the Microsoft account you're using for 
Office 365, which can be done on the Office.com site.) 
You also get a list of your recently edited documents, which helps when using Office on Demand to give it a fresh edit.
If you're at college or university (or you teach at one) it's possible to get Office 365 University on a four-year subscription for $79.99 that you can use on up to two PCs or Macs.
Also, as you might expect, Office 2013 and Office on Demand only run on Windows 7 and 8, not on XP or Vista.
Office for business
Although
 Office 365 Home Premium might also sound like a great deal for a small 
business, it's not licensed for commercial use (Like the Windows RT 
versions of Office 2013) unless you already have an Office business 
licence. Instead, you need one of the Office 365 business subscriptions, available from February 27.
These
 will include the new Office 2013 versions of Exchange, SharePoint and 
Lync Online, which are already available to run on your own servers. 
It's taking some time for Microsoft to upgrade Office 365 to run these 
new server versions, which explains the later availability (there are a 
number of issues in SharePoint the Office 365 team is working on). We've
 tried these out with the Office 2013 applications (and we looked at 
SharePoint Online 2013 in more detail here.
Office 365 Small Business Premium
 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher 
and Lync. The annual $149.99 subscription lets you run them on up to 
five PCs or Macs at once (again, you can use Office on Demand to 
download Office to any PC you're using temporarily, and you get regular 
updates and new features). 
You can 
host online meetings with audio and HD video conferencing in Lync and 
run a public website on SharePoint, plus you get Exchange with a 25GB 
mailbox for each user and SkyDrive Plus storage on SharePoint. 
That
 gives you 10GB of secure cloud storage with an extra 500MB for each 
user, but you can choose how the storage is allocated between users and 
you can control how they use it – like forcing them to encrypt 
confidential documents. 
Office 365 ProPlus
 (short for Professional Plus), is aimed at midsize businesses (10-250 
employees) and includes the same desktop Office software as Small 
Business Premium. But it also has tools for business intelligence, 
consistency checking to Excel and automated deployment, as well as more 
options for the SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services.
Office
 365 Enterprise has the full Office 2013 set of features in the desktop 
software and SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services, like 
archiving, legal hold, Data Loss Prevention and rights management to 
protect confidential information.
If 
you're looking for five or more copies of Office 2013 and you don't want
 the Office 365 services at all, you can buy Office Standard 2013 (with 
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook with Business Contact Manager,
 Publisher, the Office Web Apps and limited Lync, SharePoint and rights 
management services) or Office Professional Plus 2013 (with the full 
range of desktop Office programs and server features) through volume 
licensing. 
We've already looked at the
 final (RTM) version of the Office 2013 applications. Now we've been 
able to try out the Office 365 Home Premium service with the new 
Office.com site, where you can download some of the new Office apps 
(although the apps for Outlook won't work until you have Exchange 2013).
Installing Office 2013
With
 any of the Office 365 subscription version of Office 2013, you don't 
have to worry about downloading and saving a large installer for Office 
(or even about uninstalling previous versions of Office, apart from 
Outlook). Whether you start the download from the Office 365 site or you
 try to open an Office document on a PC that doesn't have Office, the 
programs stream from the cloud. 
This 
is a much improved version of the click-to-run virtualisation that 
Microsoft has used for the Office trial versions for a few years, which 
enables you to start using the applications just a few minutes after you
 download them. You don't have to wait for the full download; you can 
use the first features as soon as they download and if you click on a 
tool that hasn't yet downloaded, the installer will get that next.
The
 streaming happens quickly enough that the slideshow of new features you
 can watch while the other applications install is actually running in 
PowerPoint (and you don't have to watch it unless you want to).
You
 do have to pick a few options like the language to use for Office, the 
design you want to see in the ribbon and whether you want to send 
Microsoft anonymous telemetry about how you use Office. You can also 
fill in your Microsoft account details, which Office uses to sync 
settings like recent documents from SkyDrive, email accounts, custom 
AutoCorrect entries, the list of your Office Apps and the buttons you 
add to the Quick Access Toolbars. 
It
 might seem odd to sign in with your Microsoft account on the Office.com
 site and then get asked for it during installation, but this is how you
 share the subscription; use the account that's paying for the licence 
to log in to Office.com, start the download, then sign in with the 
account of the person who will be using Office on each PC.
It's
 all very simple and very well thought out. This is your personal 
version of Office, on any PC, a lot faster. If you've downloaded the 
Customer Preview of Office 2013 you've tried this already. (The 
traditional Office desktop installer uses similar technology so the 
installation is faster there as well.)
Office
 365 Home Premium adds several more designs that you can use to decorate
 the Office ribbon, including doodled circles, lunchbox sandwiches, pens
 and pencils, cartoon fish and spring leaves. It's a little odd, but 
there's something for most tastes (including a blank ribbon). 
Once
 the programs are installed you can also choose from three Office themes
 (click your account picture at the top of the screen and choose Account
 Settings or open File > Account. The default white gives you the 
clean look you might have seen in the Customer Preview or in Office RT; 
pale Ggrey adds a light tint to the ribbon and other panes and dark grey
 is a high contrast colour scheme that puts a mid grey on the ribbon and
 panes and replaces most of the accent colours in each application with a
 very dark grey. 
If you're not a fan of the new Windows 8 look, experiment with the themes to see if an alternative changes your mind . . . .

 








 
 
 
