Microsoft Office remains the gold standard of productivity suites, but there are several different versions/editions of Office available for users of Apple hardware. Together with Parallels Desktop and Parallels Access, the Apple user can access just about any of these versions/editions on each of their hardware plat.
This week, Office 2016 arrives for Windows and the software is a major upgrade to the previous versions of Microsoft's productivity suite. If you're eager to use the new apps, they are available now, but first, you have to figure out how you'll purchase them.
Long gone are the days of grabbing a box of CDs at the store -- today, subscriptions are the norm, but they're not the only way to buy. Because of that, you get several different ways to buy Office 2016, and you'll be forgiven if you don't know which one to pick. Microsoft doesn't exactly make it simple to tell the difference between your choices.
To make the decision a bit easier, this guide will go over the three different ways to use Office and what you get with each pick.
Option 1: Office.com and Office Mobile apps -- Free
- Here are all the ways to access Microsoft Word and almost all of them are free. Platforms: Windows 8, 10 Price: Free For a long time, Microsoft offered a free program called Word Viewer to open any DOCX file without paying for the full version of Office.
- The bad news is there's no Microsoft Money for Mac but the good news is there is a clever workaround to install it for free. Before doing anything however, it's important to be aware that this tutorial can be time consuming and difficult to get working properly. We strongly recommend checking out our look at the best alternatives to Microsoft Money on Mac before going any further.
Office.com provides completely free, but slightly limited, online-only versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other tools. Around since 2010, the website has largely flown under the radar, overshadowed by the desktop versions of Office. All you need to use it is a free Microsoft account, which you get here. (Of course, if you already use nearly any Microsoft product -- Skype, OneDrive, Xbox Live -- you already have one.)
Using Office.com, you can edit and create new documents, spreadsheets and slideshows, using many of the same features you'd get with Office on the desktop. In many ways, it's similar to Google Docs, which is also exclusively online and free with a Google account.
With free comes a few limitations. First, the online tools are missing some advanced features you get with the full versions, like tracking changes in Word, advanced chart types in Excel and many slide transitions in PowerPoint.
The other big drawback is that you cannot open and edit files that live on your computer. In order to open a file through Office.com, you'll need to store it in either OneDrive or Dropbox first. Luckily, you can easily save a copy of a file you create or edit to your computer without any hassle. Any changes you make are also automatically saved in OneDrive.
When you're away from a computer, you can also use the free Office mobile apps for Android , iPhone and iPad . Like the browser-based version, these apps have all the basic Word, Excel and PowerPoint features, with some limitations. If you have an Office 365 (see below), you'll unlock all of the apps' tools.
Option 2: Office 365 -- Subscription
Office 365 is a monthly or yearly memberships that gets you the full desktop versions of Office, plus cloud storage with OneDrive, email with Outlook, and a bunch of extras.
With Office 2016 , the full versions include new sharing features that let you work together with others in real-time, integrations with messaging app Skype, a tool that uses Microsoft's search engine Bing to help you research while you're working and more. The most enticing reason to get a subscription is that you'll always get new versions Office when Microsoft releases them.
There are several different types of Office 365 subscription, each getting you different features. The two most popular subscription tiers are Home and Personal. Office 365 Home is meant for families, since up to five people can be on the same membership and you can install the Office apps on up to five different PCs or Macs, plus use the full versions of the Office apps on Android and iOS phones and tablets. You also get 1TB of storage for each person in OneDrive, plus 60 free minutes per month per user on Skype to make phone calls all around the world.
With Parallels Desktop, you can switch between Mac and Windows without ever needing to reboot your computer. If you have already installed Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, or Windows 7 on your Mac using Boot Camp, you can set Parallels Desktop to run Windows from the Boot Camp Partition or import Windows and your data from Boot Camp into. https://lumrodamsso1972.mystrikingly.com/blog/parallels-for-mac-desktop-4-0.
Office 365 Personal is designed for one person with one computer to install the Office apps. You can also use the full versions of the mobile apps, and the subscription includes 1TB of OneDrive storage. Plus, you get 60 Skype minutes every month.
Here's a full breakdown of what you get with Office 365 Home and Personal:
For students, Microsoft also offers Office 365 for free if you attend a qualifying school, college or university. If not, you can get a discounted rate with Office 365 University. It costs $79 (£59, AU$99) for a four-year subscription and you can install the Office apps on two different devices, either two computers or on a computer and mobile device, like a tablet or smartphone.
Option 3: Office 2016 -- One-time purchase
The last option is to buy a single copy of Office 2016 outright, starting at $149.99 (£119.99, AU$169). For that price, you get just Office 2016 for PC or Mac, with whatever features are available as of September 22, 2015. Microsoft takes a snapshot of the software on that date and makes that version available for purchase.
If Microsoft adds additional features to Office down the road, the version you get with a one-time purchase will not get them. You'll only get stability and security updates that ensure your software keeps working as it should. When a new version of Office arrives, you'll need to pay to upgrade.
Additionally, once you pay for the software, it's yours to use for as long as you want. This is different from Office 365, where if you cancel your subscription, the Office apps you downloaded with your membership will only run in a reduced functionality mode, which only lets you open and print files, not edit them or create new ones.
Here's the pricing breakdown and what you get with a one-time purchase:
I didn't include OneDrive in the chart above, but with a free Microsoft account, you automatically get 15GB of storage space. A one-time purchase of Office 2016 doesn't get you any additional space.
Which to get?
Ready to make a choice but still aren't sure? Here are our guidelines to help.
This week, Office 2016 arrives for Windows and the software is a major upgrade to the previous versions of Microsoft's productivity suite. If you're eager to use the new apps, they are available now, but first, you have to figure out how you'll purchase them.
Long gone are the days of grabbing a box of CDs at the store -- today, subscriptions are the norm, but they're not the only way to buy. Because of that, you get several different ways to buy Office 2016, and you'll be forgiven if you don't know which one to pick. Microsoft doesn't exactly make it simple to tell the difference between your choices.
To make the decision a bit easier, this guide will go over the three different ways to use Office and what you get with each pick.
Option 1: Office.com and Office Mobile apps -- Free
- Here are all the ways to access Microsoft Word and almost all of them are free. Platforms: Windows 8, 10 Price: Free For a long time, Microsoft offered a free program called Word Viewer to open any DOCX file without paying for the full version of Office.
- The bad news is there's no Microsoft Money for Mac but the good news is there is a clever workaround to install it for free. Before doing anything however, it's important to be aware that this tutorial can be time consuming and difficult to get working properly. We strongly recommend checking out our look at the best alternatives to Microsoft Money on Mac before going any further.
Office.com provides completely free, but slightly limited, online-only versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other tools. Around since 2010, the website has largely flown under the radar, overshadowed by the desktop versions of Office. All you need to use it is a free Microsoft account, which you get here. (Of course, if you already use nearly any Microsoft product -- Skype, OneDrive, Xbox Live -- you already have one.)
Using Office.com, you can edit and create new documents, spreadsheets and slideshows, using many of the same features you'd get with Office on the desktop. In many ways, it's similar to Google Docs, which is also exclusively online and free with a Google account.
With free comes a few limitations. First, the online tools are missing some advanced features you get with the full versions, like tracking changes in Word, advanced chart types in Excel and many slide transitions in PowerPoint.
The other big drawback is that you cannot open and edit files that live on your computer. In order to open a file through Office.com, you'll need to store it in either OneDrive or Dropbox first. Luckily, you can easily save a copy of a file you create or edit to your computer without any hassle. Any changes you make are also automatically saved in OneDrive.
When you're away from a computer, you can also use the free Office mobile apps for Android , iPhone and iPad . Like the browser-based version, these apps have all the basic Word, Excel and PowerPoint features, with some limitations. If you have an Office 365 (see below), you'll unlock all of the apps' tools.
Option 2: Office 365 -- Subscription
Office 365 is a monthly or yearly memberships that gets you the full desktop versions of Office, plus cloud storage with OneDrive, email with Outlook, and a bunch of extras.
With Office 2016 , the full versions include new sharing features that let you work together with others in real-time, integrations with messaging app Skype, a tool that uses Microsoft's search engine Bing to help you research while you're working and more. The most enticing reason to get a subscription is that you'll always get new versions Office when Microsoft releases them.
There are several different types of Office 365 subscription, each getting you different features. The two most popular subscription tiers are Home and Personal. Office 365 Home is meant for families, since up to five people can be on the same membership and you can install the Office apps on up to five different PCs or Macs, plus use the full versions of the Office apps on Android and iOS phones and tablets. You also get 1TB of storage for each person in OneDrive, plus 60 free minutes per month per user on Skype to make phone calls all around the world.
With Parallels Desktop, you can switch between Mac and Windows without ever needing to reboot your computer. If you have already installed Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, or Windows 7 on your Mac using Boot Camp, you can set Parallels Desktop to run Windows from the Boot Camp Partition or import Windows and your data from Boot Camp into. https://lumrodamsso1972.mystrikingly.com/blog/parallels-for-mac-desktop-4-0.
Office 365 Personal is designed for one person with one computer to install the Office apps. You can also use the full versions of the mobile apps, and the subscription includes 1TB of OneDrive storage. Plus, you get 60 Skype minutes every month.
Here's a full breakdown of what you get with Office 365 Home and Personal:
For students, Microsoft also offers Office 365 for free if you attend a qualifying school, college or university. If not, you can get a discounted rate with Office 365 University. It costs $79 (£59, AU$99) for a four-year subscription and you can install the Office apps on two different devices, either two computers or on a computer and mobile device, like a tablet or smartphone.
Option 3: Office 2016 -- One-time purchase
The last option is to buy a single copy of Office 2016 outright, starting at $149.99 (£119.99, AU$169). For that price, you get just Office 2016 for PC or Mac, with whatever features are available as of September 22, 2015. Microsoft takes a snapshot of the software on that date and makes that version available for purchase.
If Microsoft adds additional features to Office down the road, the version you get with a one-time purchase will not get them. You'll only get stability and security updates that ensure your software keeps working as it should. When a new version of Office arrives, you'll need to pay to upgrade.
Additionally, once you pay for the software, it's yours to use for as long as you want. This is different from Office 365, where if you cancel your subscription, the Office apps you downloaded with your membership will only run in a reduced functionality mode, which only lets you open and print files, not edit them or create new ones.
Here's the pricing breakdown and what you get with a one-time purchase:
I didn't include OneDrive in the chart above, but with a free Microsoft account, you automatically get 15GB of storage space. A one-time purchase of Office 2016 doesn't get you any additional space.
Which to get?
Ready to make a choice but still aren't sure? Here are our guidelines to help.
If you haven't used Office in a while and are reluctant to spend any money, start with Office.com first. Get a feel for the tools offered there and see if they do enough for what you need.
Then, if you need extra features consider purchasing Office 2016 as a one-time purchase. Though it has a bigger up-front cost, it can be cheaper in the long run. If you plan to use Office for more than two years and do not want extra storage space in OneDrive, a one-time purchase will ultimately be cheaper than a subscription. Once you pass the two-year mark, you'll pay more money per year to keep using Office 365 than the cost of the one-time purchase for Office 2016 Home & Student.
If, however, you want or need the extra features that Office 365 offers, such as extra online storage, always-updated Office applications, and apps for every device, then the subscription is the only way to go. It has the most comprehensive features and it's well worth paying for, if you're willing to spend a little extra overall.
Microsoft Office remainsthe gold standard of productivity suites, but there are several different versions/editions of Office available for users of Apple hardware. Together with Parallels Desktop and Parallels Access, the Apple user can access just about any of these versions/editions on each of their hardware platforms.
While Microsoft produces all of these suites and the suites have a very high degree of similar functionality and visual fidelity, they are not identical, and no single suite has all the features of the entire group.
This blog post will enumerate most of the differences between the following suites and their apps:
- Office 2016 for Windows ('WinOffice 2016')
- Office 2016 for Mac ('MacOffice 2016')
- Office 2013 for Windows ('WinOffice 2013')
- Office 2011 for Mac ('MacOffice 2011')
- Office for iPad ('iPad Office')
The vast bulk of the content in this post is in the following five tables, which list the differences I found. Note that because the tables lists differences, no row of the table will be all checkmarks (since this would mean that all the suites had this feature, and thus this wasn't a difference) nor will any row be all 'X's (since this would mean that no suite had this feature, and thus it isn't a difference either). I am listing the differences because listing the similarities would take much too much room—the suites are that identical.
Hopefully, this will assist you in choosing the best version/edition for your use. In addition, I will describe my personal Office setup.
Here are the five tables (click on each thumbnail for an enlarged view):
Table 1: Suite-wide differences
Table 2: Word differences
Table 2
Table 3: Excel differences
Table 4: PowerPoint differences
How To Get Microsoft Word For Free Student
Parallels for mac best buy. Table 4
Table 5: Outlook differences
What differences surprised me the most? These two:
Right-to-left language support in iPad Office:
WinOffice has had support for right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew for many years. While Mac users have been asking for such support, no version of MacOffice, even the latest MacOffice 2016, has had such support. Therefore, I was quite pleasantly surprised when iPad Office added support for Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai.(See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: Arabic text in iPad Word on iPad Pro
No multiple selection support in iPad PowerPoint:
All Office programs provide some way to select content in a document (text, cells, or shapes, for example). This is needed so that the user can apply some operation on just that content (change the color, for example). The Windows or Mac Office applications also provide for 'advanced' types of selections. In Word, this is non-contiguous text selections; in Excel this is non-contiguous cell selections; and in PowerPoint this is the simultaneous selection of multiple objects. In Word and Excel, these really are advanced types of selections that are rarely needed by even sophisticated users of Word or Excel. (See Figures 2 and 3.)
Figure 2: Non-contiguous cell selection in MacExcel 2011.
Figure 3: Non-contiguous text selection in MacWord 2011.
But in PowerPoint, the ability to select multiple objects is a pretty basic capability. (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4: Multiple selections in MacPowerPoint 2011.
I wasn't surprised to learn that non-contiguous selections were not supported in iPad Word or iPad Excel, but I was astonished and very disappointed to learn that multiple selections were not supported in iPad PowerPoint.
Best Way To Get Microsoft Word On Mac Parallels For Free
My Use of Office
So, which do I use? The short answer is that I use all of them.
I worked on the MacOffice team at Microsoft for several years, and at that time I also worked closely with colleagues on the WinOffice teams. Because of this background, I am often able to pick just the right Office app that will make a given task the easiest to do. One task might be particularly well suited to MacWord 2011 because Publishing Layout View—a feature only in that one Word version—will make this task easy. Another task might be suited to WinPPT because of the Animation Painter, which is not in any MacPPT version. Yet another task might be best suited to WinPPT 2013 because it needs an Office extension not available in other Office suites.
Having all the versions of Office at your fingertips used to be rather hard to setup, not to mention very expensive. Luckily, that is no longer the case.
With a single Office 365 Home subscription, you get five installs of the Office suite and you can pick which versions make up this set of five. Since I have Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition on my Mac, I can run any version of Windows without rebooting. Because I have different versions of Windows running on my Mac, I can also run different versions of WinOffice on my Mac and have everything I need on one computer. (You can download a free trial of Parallels Desktop for Mac here.) Here's my setup:
- MacOffice 2011 is my main productivity suite and is installed on my El Capitan MacBook Pro. MacOutlook 2016 came out long before the entire MacOffice 2016 suite, and because of the vastly improved performance of MacOutlook 2016, I use it as my main email client, instead of MacOutlook 2011.
- WinOffice 2013 is installed in a Windows 7 virtual machine (VM) (under Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition) on my MacBook Pro.
- iPad Office is installed on my iPad. As you saw in the tables above, iPad Office is lacking many of the features of WinOffice and MacOffice, so I also haveParallels Accesson my iPad which lets me access and run the full featured versions of any Office suite (or any other application) on my computers and use them with natural iPad gestures. (You can download a free trial of Parallels Access for iOS and Android to access your Mac and/or PC atwww.parallels.com/access).
- MacOffice 2016 is installed in an El Capitan VM (under Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition) on my MacBook Pro.
- WinOffice 2016 is installed in a Windows 10 VM (under Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition) on my MacBook Pro.
So, why don't I use MacOffice 2016 as my main productivity suite? Four reasons:
- Only MacWord 2011 has Publishing Layout View, a feature I depend on heavily and consider essential.
- To me, MacOffice 2016 has a kind of cartoon-like look to the user interface that just doesn't appeal to me.
- There was no compelling feature pulling me to MacOffice 2016, and
- Inertia was keeping me in MacOffice 2011.
Those are my five installs, and with this setup, I have easy and immediate access to the best Office app for any particular task. I tend to store all my documents on Dropbox so that I have easy access to them from any of my Office suites or Apple platforms.
Parallels is, hands down, the easiest/fastest/best (pick any four) way to run Windows on a Mac. Vmware fusion vs parallels for mac. Avoid if you value your time above ~$0.30/hour; you'll save money-for-time this year. It's easy to run into corner cases with Linux, though, especially if you're not using a Debian- or Red Hat-based distro.
Which Office suite(s) do you use, and what's your setup?
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