To make any changes to this account as a Microsoft account means you need to do it through your Microsoft account settings. Sign in to your account portal to check if the account is working. If you need to reset your Microsoft account password for this email account, see I forgot the username or password for the account I use with Office. You have choices when it comes to choosing Microsoft Office for Mac. You can either select Office 365 Mac, which is a cloud-based subscription service with many collaborative features, or Mac Office 2019, which is a one-time purchase geared more towards personal and small businesses use. MS Office for Mac 2019 can be used on a single Mac, with no ongoing annual fee.

1. Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac 2017
2. Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac Free
3. Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac Pro
4. Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac Computer

Not so long ago, using Microsoft Office couldn’t be simpler. In return for a wedge of cash, you got a box with an installation disc inside and a handful of applications you could use on your PC for as long as you liked, or until you wanted to update to a more recent version.

Things are a bit different today. Microsoft still updates its Office suite on a regular basis – the most recent being Office 2016, which can be bought from the Microsoft Store for around £120.

But buying a ‘copy’ of Office isn’t the only option around. Poke about the Microsoft web site and you’ll see that you can also pay £5.99 a month for Office 365— which includes Office — or use Office Online for free. Or if you own an Android or Apple tablet, you can install the free Microsoft Office app instead.

That makes figuring out which version of Office to use and how much it’s worth paying more than a little confusing. But we're here to clear things up.

Microsoft Office

A one-off price for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2016 may be the best option if you want to pay up front for an office suite.

This suite gives you the most recent versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, meant for one PC only (Mac also comes with Outlook).

Microsoft added a number of new features to Office, including the ability for multiple users to edit one document together.

Microsoft Office 365

Office 365 is essentially Microsoft’s Office subscription service.

£5.99 a month gives you one copy of the software to install on one computer(and you can switch at will, if you want), or £7.99 gives you software to share with six people including smartphones and tablets — but more on those later.

£5.99 a month — or £59.99 a year — isn’t a bad deal, Even so, you’ll still pay less if you buy Office outright and use it for two years, but you will be stuck on that version. Office 365 subscribers, on the other hand, get to use the latest version of Office as soon as it’s released.

Something else worth bearing in mind is that Office 365 is also often bundled with other products, search ‘Office 365 laptop’ on Amazonand other sites.

Office Online

If you only use Microsoft Office occasionally on your PC or Mac, or even a computer with another operating system then you might not need to pay for it at all.

Office Online provides web-based versions of most Office apps and although they’re ‘lightweight’ versions that lack some features, few people are likely to miss them. More importantly, the apps are free to use.

Since they’re web-based, Office Online apps work best with cloud storage, but non-paying users still get a 5GB of space via Microsoft OneDrive. The only catch is that you can’t upload existing documents from your computer from within the apps themselves, but dragging files to cloud storage is a simple extra step.

Microsoft Office for Mobile Devices

It sounds too good to be true, but Microsoft also offers a version of Office for Android, Apple and Windows smartphones and tablets that you can use for free. The versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote are a good deal simpler than their PC counterparts, but they look very similar and are still very capable.

The catch is that you need an Office 365 subscription to unlock the full features in the apps, but that only means you’ll then be able to save and open documents using Microsoft’s cloud storage for businesses. If that sounds like something you won’t ever need, then you’d be right, which makes Microsoft Office for Mobile Devices a brilliant freebie.

Don’t forget…

Don’t just think you’re tied to Microsoft Office, even if you need to edit Office documents. Both Google Docs (web-based) and Libre Office (download) can open and save documents in Office format, and both cost nothing to use.

A new version of Microsoft Office may be ready for the Mac soon. Is it as important as it used to be?

Rumor has it that Microsoft is on the cusp of releasing a new version of Office for Mac. It's been more than three years since the last version of Office came out. Things have changed a lot. Is Microsoft Office still important?

Since Office's last major release on the Mac, Apple made a major strategic move to trump Microsoft: It began to include productivity apps as part of the standard suite of software applications included on all new Macs and iOS devices. You used to have to buy iWork apps — Pages, Keynote and Numbers — separately, but now you get them for free.

Apr 12, 2011  To check your preferences, on the Safari menu, click Preferences, and then click General. Double-click the file that you downloaded in step 5 to place the Office 2011 SP1 Update (14.1.0) volume on your desktop, and then double-click the Office 2011 SP1 Update (14.1.0) volume to open it. Microsoft office update 14.1.0 mac.

Those three apps fill in the gaps for some users who need word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software capabilities. There are certainly some benefits, too, such as iCloud support and binary compatibility for documents, making it simple to edit files on your Mac and use them on your iPad, or vice versa.

Other options have emerged, too. Free software alternatives to Office like LibreOffice may still raise eyebrows, but Google has normalized many people to using Google Docs for their productivity software and collaboration needs, for example.

Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac 2017

iWork is good, but it's not that good. As I said back in February, 'Almost' isn't good enough. Despite the advances that Apple has made, Microsoft Office still reigns supreme in corporate environments and elsewhere. Many businesses and institutions continue to rely on Office as their standard.

Like most alternative productivity suites, iWork apps try to be good corporate citizens, offering Office file compatibility for import and export, but there's a difference between file compatibility and native file support, and many users of iWork apps and other tools have run into issues with documents just not looking right when they're translated into Office formats.

As I said at the outset, Apple has changed, but so has Microsoft. Much of their focus has been to make Office a subscription-based service rather than a monolithic software suite that gets updated once every few years.

You can still buy Office in a single user version. But Microsoft is following Adobe's Creative Cloud lead, offering an annual subscription with the promise of regular updates, along with other benefits, such as the ability to share one subscription with multiple devices, a free OneDrive cloud service account with 20 GB of storage, free Skype world minutes and more.

Of course, a new version of Office for Mac is only one tantalizing piece of the puzzle. The other is a version of Office that will run on iPads. Microsoft expert Mary Jo Foley suggested in February that an iPad version is coming sooner than people think, perhaps some time in the first half of 2014. A well-integrated Mac and iPad Microsoft Office ecosystem would certainly be fierce competition for Apple, which is still in a rebuilding year after gutting the iWork apps to get them to work more seamlessly across iOS and OS X.

Another piece of the puzzle: Microsoft may bring OneNote to the Mac in the next few weeks. Microsoft's note-taking app is a decade old, but it's not available in Mac native form, leaving the market wide open for competitors like Evernote to dominate.

Office remains one of the best selling software packages for the Mac. Lots of Mac users depend on Office to get their work done, and that's unlikely to change. Office is still front and center for many in the corporate and institutional worlds.

The combination of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac, Office for iPad and OneNote for Mac suggests that Microsoft still thinks that Apple's platforms are still fertile ground. Even if you don't like Microsoft's products, you have to admit that the company's continued support is a net positive: It makes it easier to justify using Macs and iOS devices in enterprise and reduces friction for users who want to effortlessly produce documents that their non-Apple using colleagues can work.

To answer my initial question, Microsoft Office's role has changed. It's no longer irreplaceable - fact is, there are a lot of options people can use if they want to produce word processing docs, spreadsheets and attractive presentations. But Office is still a vital and important tool for many of us, and that won't change.

Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac Free

Are you looking forward to a new version of Office for the Mac? Will you migrate to new Office apps for OS X and iOS? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac Pro

We review the subtly blingy LAUT OMBRE SPARKLE Strap for Apple Watch

Do I Need To Buy Microsoft Office For My Mac Computer

Bring a little bit of sparkle to your wrist, but not too much, with this colorful genuine leather Apple Watch band.