36. Office 2013

Microsoft has recently released the new version of its best-selling Office suite, Microsoft Office 2013. The release means that we finally know the UK prices of the various Office editions, so we can tie up a few loose ends. Let’s start with the pricing to buy Office 2013 in a box and install it from using the product code:

•Office 2013 Home & Student edition costs £110 and gives you Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. (An important change is that this edition can now be installed on only one PC; in previous versions of Office, this Home & Student edition was licenced for use on three computers.)
•Office 2013 Home & Business edition costs £220 and gives you the same four programs as the Home & Student edition plus Microsoft Outlook.
•Office 2013 Professional costs £390 and gives you the five programs in the Home & Business edition plus Publisher and Access.
(It’s worth mentioning that these are Microsoft’s own prices (rounded up by a penny, as they all end with a pointless 99p), and you should be able to find any of these editions cheaper in the shops and at online software stores.)

There’s another way to buy Office 2013, and that’s via a subscription. Microsoft has long wanted to get its Office customers onto a subscription model, so this offering was always going to be temptingly-priced. For either £80 a year or £8 a month (again ignoring the odd penny), you get your hands on ‘Office 365’ which gives you all seven of the programs included in the Professional edition for as long as you subscribe, and a licence to install them on up to five PCs.

If you want to find out more about Office 2013, visit the Office section of Microsoft’s website at http://office.microsoft.com, or http://office365.microsoft.com for details of the new Office 365 subscription product. There’s just one catch to keep in mind: if you’re using Windows Vista or XP, you’re out of luck – the new Office only works with Windows 8 or Windows 7.

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