As promised, Microsoft is now offering a cheaper option for Office 365 subscribers. Don’t want to pay $10 per month to use Office on up to 5 computers? Now for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription, you can get an Office 365 Personal account which lets you run Office on one PC or Mac and one tablet.

Office 365 Personal plans run $6.99 per month, or $69.99 per year.

Office 365 Personal

At that price, an Office 365 Personal subscription is about the same price as buying a new copy of Office Home & Student every two years… but Office 365 includes features such as Outlook, Access, and Publisher which you wouldn’t get with the Home & Student Edition.

Office isn’t the only game in town anymore. You can use free or cheap alternatives including Google Docs, LibreOffice, or Kingsoft Office to perform many of the same tasks.

But if you absolutely need the official version of Office and want to make sure you always have access to the latest version of the software, Office 365 Personal is probably the most affordable option for folks that typically pay for each new version of Office as it becomes available.

Microsoft also offers Office 365 University for students. That edition costs $80 for a 4-year subscription.

via Office Blogs and Microsoft Office

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9 replies on “Now you can get Microsoft Office for $70 per year (or $7 per month)”

  1. Microsoft has given free subscription codes for Microsoft Office to my college so all of our students and faculty can use it, free of charge. We can purchase it along with other Microsoft products through our online college store for $0 dollars. Office is the best, hands down. However, I probably would have continued using OpenOffice if I had to pay for MSOffice. But I must say, I like what Microsoft is doing these days. I use Outlook more than Gmail now. Come to think of it, I now use OneDrive more than DropBox. I might as well switch to Bing and get it over with. The edge that Google had is no longer that sharp.

  2. I have not and will never be so reliant on any software that you need to “rent” to use, cya MS!

    1. Good for you but there are many such services, and for some people it makes more sense than buying the software all the time or using a free alternative…

      Just like some people prefer renting to buying for a car or just about anything else you could possibly compare to…

      This is mainly for businesses anyway, companies have to consider factors like learning curve by keeping everyone on the same software, IT support that MS typically includes for free and you won’t get with many free alternatives, and consistency on features and capabilities… Along with benefits like being able to corroborate with multiple users at the same time on the same file, etc. that you’d only get with online cloud based services…

      You may be able to get many of the same benefits from the free alternatives but not all from the same alternative…

      Mind, also, that companies typically give such options to their employees for free as just part of the internal costs for doing business and thus it’s just as good as free to many company workers who don’t have to pay for it themselves…

      But for regular users in non-business environments then one of the free alternatives are probably better for you unless you actually prefer MS Office, some people actually do, or just need some aspect of it…

      Mind, Office.com does provide a free online version for anyone to use and MS does promote Office to regular users on tablets with W8 tablets getting a free basic copy for any device 10.8″ or smaller…

  3. My company bought in to the whole Office 365 koolaid in a big way. But I won’t touch the stuff at home. Libre Office should be sufficient for most users.

  4. Or OpenOffice for free forever. You must have really special needs to have to use MS Office despite all the alternatives. Probably you are locked in into a document compatibility deadlock with your commercial partners. Too bad.

    1. There’s always the free online MS Office as long as you don’t mind being online to use it…

      The subscription means you can install it for offline usage, and be able to use offline features that the online version doesn’t have… and you can be more sure of things like being able to corroborate with multiple other users… even conference and edit a document together…
      basically, there are business reasons for still preferring it…

      The other free alternatives are competitive in most other ways but many businesses are locked in to using MS Office for various reasons from ensuring compatibility, benefits of certain features that the alternatives don’t provide… still a few of those, simple familiarity and ensuring their employees already know how to use it and get work done, on to the few things MS Office may still be better at like Excel supports very large number of rows/columns that’s most others don’t support… Basically, being good for general consumers is not the same as being good enough for business users…

      Many companies also subsidize the cost to their employees and makes it a no brainer for them…

      All other users, though, have a harder choice as the alternatives are good enough for most people and for some many of the alternatives may even be easier to use for their particular needs…

  5. I buy every other version of Office. This is still too expensive. This whole subscription thing has encrouraged me to look into Google Docs and LibreOffice in parallel with Office 2010. So far, I haven’t had any major issues.

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