Microsoft Office 365 software

Microsoft Office 365

— office 365 is the general name used by Microsoft for the subscription version of the Office suite. In other words, if it was enough to pay for a classic Office 2013 license once, then you need to pay a regular fee for using Office 365. On the other hand, periodically depositing small amounts is more convenient than paying for a rather expensive perpetual license.

However, distribution is not the only and not the main feature of Office 365. The key difference between this family of office suites is the focus on cloud storage; this allows the user to access the web versions of the Office applications from any computer. It also provided some features not available in traditional Office suites, such as SharePoint-based web hosting.

Office 365 was originally released in 2010 as a standalone product aimed primarily at small businesses and corporations; in subsequent updates, Microsoft offered more and more features for private users. Major updates to Office 365 were introduced at the same time as the release of Office 2013 and 2016 (see the relevant paragraphs); because of this, the corresponding generations of Office 365 are often considered as part of one or another version of the standard Office.

To date, this office suite offers several tariff plans that take into account almost all categories of users — for home, students, small businesses (regular and extended edition), professional, for medium businesses, for large corporations. Office 365 is available for both Windows and Mac.