Microsoft recently released their next version of Office. Office 2013 is available now in various forms. One can purchase a retail version from a big box store. This can take the form of say Hone and Student for $139. However there is a couple of gotchas.
In the past MS had offered Home and Student retail editions in two forms. One was a 3 computer install for about $150 and the other only included a key card (about $120) and required you to download Office off the MS website and restricted you to one installation. Now the retail version of Office 2013 Home and Student is limited to one computer install only and does not come with any CD/DVD. It requires you to download and install Office 2013 via MS website. The terms of the license means that copy of Office 2013 dies with that computer. If that computer requires a hard drive replacement MS requires you to buy another copy of Office 2013. If you decide to buy a new computer you cannot legally transfer the MS Office 2013 from your old computer to the new one even if you uninstall it off the old computer! These terms only had applied to the Office key card version in the past.
MS Office 2013 is also available in the form of Office365 which is a subscription based plan that allows you to install the product on 5 computers. There are various types of Office 365 depending on whether one is a home user (Home Premium $100/yr) or a business user (Small Business $150/yr). A home user has a yearly fee for the privilege of using Office otherwise the functionality of the software is severely limited. Now for $100 a year one also gets some additional perks. These include 60 free minutes of Skype a month free along with 20GB of extra online storage in MS SkyDrive. In addition to Word, Excel and PowerPoint the home users of Office365 also get Outlook, Access, and Publisher as extras, while small business users get Access, Publisher, InfoPath, and the Lync client. You of course also get “free” upgrades to subsequent versions of Office when they are released.
Now if you really need to use MS Word, Excel etc but cannot afford the yearly subscription fee of Office365 and do not like the licensing of Office 2013 there is another alternative. MS does offer free web based versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/ which requires you to login with “Sign in with the account you use for SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Outlook.com, or other Microsoft services.”
Home users should be aware of these restrictions that MS Office 2013 places on them as the majority of the people could make due with free alternatives like OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
For a more detail explaination check out Ed Bott’s articles:
Big changes in Office 2013 and Office 365 test Microsoft customers’ loyalty