Office 365: The Ultimate Productivity Suite

Microsoft’s Office 365 is a productivity suite that altruistically offers interfaces like office on demand; the great collaboration features, updatable characteristics posit business users automatically upgrade their documentation.

Office 365 currently leads productivity suite on the cloud market, in terms of accessibility; users are sure of access to their documents on any PC, which is commendable.

The subscription-based service which offers access to various services and software built around the Microsoft Office platform replaces Microsoft's Business Online Productivity Suite and with Office 2013 launch Office 365 expanded to include new plans aimed at different types of businesses, along with a new plan aimed at home users.

After a beta testing process in October 2010, Office 365 was officially unveiled on June 28, 2011. Upon signing into the Office 365 – users are presented with a number of options – including the ability to take a tour and see all the latest features.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek’s review is  basically on the Office 365 Home Premium. In the package are the usual Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access are included as well as SharePoint and Lync for collaboration services and of course the ability to access Exchange online.

Office 365 Home Premium
The new Office is designed for users’ easier storage of documents in the cloud; your documents go with you, as though they are on your disk. Invariably, with Office 365 one can edit his documents anywhere, that is on any Windows enabled desktop or tablet, on a Windows phone, in a web browser, and even on Mac, because upon subscribing to Office 365 subscription the user automatically, would have the opportunity to install Office on five devices at any one time.

The package with vast amount of features comes in a clear and simple manner. Moving documents into the cloud in Office 365 way is without compromise in features and flexibility compared to desktop-only applications.

It does not really interfere with the way people do their work with normal Microsoft software, but to an extent reduce the clutter on the desktop and Start menu.

Before now, Microsoft experimented in cloud-based application services using equivalent Office 365 service name, however, the new version shows the Company has shifted Office's focus from the desktop to the cloud, just as Windows 8 shifts Microsoft's focus from the desktop to the tablet.

It is operational on Windows 7 desktop, Windows 8 desktop, Windows 7 laptop, and an Intel-based Windows 8 tablet.

Still on the functionality, it operates in different ways depending on the device one is using. A user who runs it on a desktop or an Intel-based tablet like Microsoft's Surface a complete set of full-featured, no compromise Office apps will understand that that Word, Excel, Outlook, and others are all exactly the same as the versions from the traditional one-machine-only versions of Office 2013.

Upon subscribing to Office 365 subscription, a 25-character product key is only what you need to enter once. Secondly, you will require a Microsoft account, which accommodates your existing email address or a new one as you may prefer, but will be in office.com.

After entering the product key, the next step moves to the setup page where you follow instructions to install Office. 

I personally appreciate Microsoft’s ingenuity in providing the user with choices to make during installation, because unlike the conventional versions of Office, the user chooses either to use some features or not, meanwhile, the whole suite gets installed, whether or not you plan to use, for example, Access or Publisher.

Now, while trying to visit Office.com from a different platform (system), what the user has to sign in with the Microsoft account, Office can be installed on this second system – “and the site will tell you how many of your five installs you have remaining.

If you run out of installs, you can deactivate Office on one machine and install it on another. When your subscription runs out, if you decide not to renew, then the Office 365 apps switch into read-only mode, but you can still edit your documents with an older version of Office or via the free and feature-limited Office Web Apps available through a web browser”.

Word
For heavy document users, they will find the new word very interesting as Word has incorporated Corel's WordPerfect by adding the ability to import PDF documents; it imports a PDF and converting it into a Word document you can edit, albeit with the inevitable changes in pagination and formatting.

But you can’t eat your cake and have it, because the same document cannot be saved as PDF with the same name, otherwise Word tells you that the original PDF is a read-only file, “so you have to save your edited file as a PDF with a different name, then delete the original PDF, then rename the newly saved PDF so that it has the same name as the original file. WordPerfect, in contrast, simply lets you import a PDF file, edit the imported file, and save it back to PDF under its original name”.

Excel With Excel
Excel, with a new "Quick Analysis Lens" grants instant access to the most useful options for any block of data.

On selection of a block of data, a tiny lightning rod icon appears at the lower right; on clicking the user will be exposed to array of options for formatting, charts, totals, and tables appears, as well as one for adding "sparklines," which is Microsoft's name for a miniature chart that occupies a single cell and gives a graphic image of adjacent data.

It ubiquitously added a feature called "Flash Fill" that fills in a new column of data with data taken from other columns, but without making you figure out how to write a formula. The new excel is something worth trying.

While using the package, I am deeply impressed by the intellectual prowess and absolute care that Microsoft team put while crafting Office 2013 and its Office 365 implementation.

One other advantage is working and socializing at the same time through interjections like skype, etc. the price is not really on the high side comparing the features, flexibility and seamless operations it offer.