[Macworld]

Post your comments for Office 365: What it means to Mac users here

[Tunabakka]

To me, this 365-stuff is a big ripoff (if you have one machine). Basically it's like buying office every year, without an upgrade that would justify this. I recently upgraded from office 2000. 2011 doesn't really add that many features..and that after how many years?

[luckywabbit]

I'm glad Microsoft made this perfectly clear on their Office 365 pages.

[monstasaurous]

Tunabakka, on 29 January 2013 - 01:39 PM, said:

To me, this 365-stuff is a big ripoff (if you have one machine). Basically it's like buying office every year, without an upgrade that would justify this. I recently upgraded from office 2000. 2011 doesn't really add that many features..and that after how many years?

11. 11 years.

[johnrf2]

Let me get this straight. In order to be able to use Office 365 fpr Mac, and I already have a copy of Office 2011 for Mac that I paid for, I have to uninstall it and then sign up to pay Microsoft $10 a month to be able to use the cloud based version that adds absolutely no additional features from what I just uninstalled. Where do I sign up?

[AndrewRodney]

>>In order to be able to use Office 365 fpr Mac, and I already have a copy of Office 2011 for Mac that I paid for, I have to uninstall it and then sign up to pay Microsoft $10 a month to be able to use the cloud based version that adds absolutely no additional features from what I just uninstalled.

I sure hope not! I too paid for Office 2011, I fully expect to run it until it can run no more on my Mac (I'm done upgrading MS software, not a good bargain at all).

MacWorld, can you please clarify what this means for existing owners of MS office 2011?

[thinkman]

Quote

Tunabakka said
To me, this 365-stuff is a big ripoff (if you have one machine). Basically it's like buying office every year, without an upgrade that would justify this. I recently upgraded from office 2000. 2011 doesn't really add that many features..and that after how many years? 11. 11 years.

Funny! but shouldn't your name be "Monstrasaurous" (note "r")?

[thinkman]

Quote

>>In order to be able to use Office 365 fpr Mac, and I already have a copy of Office 2011 for Mac that I paid for, I have to uninstall it and then sign up to pay Microsoft $10 a month to be able to use the cloud based version that adds absolutely no additional features from what I just uninstalled. I sure hope not! I too paid for Office 2011, I fully expect to run it until it can run no more on my Mac (I'm done upgrading MS software, not a good bargain at all). MacWorld, can you please clarify what this means for existing owners of MS office 2011?

I think I can answer that. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Microsoft makes a bundle already off their Mac Office suite, and it is not up to par with the PC version, and it will NEVER include their database program! I haven't used Office in years.

[KevinHubbard]

This should help Apple improve its sales of Pages and Numbers. For $120 per year I can "lease" software that gets updated every blue moon, or for $40 I can buy a license to software that stays updated relatively frequently and at no additional cost, reads Microsoft Office documents, and outputs to Microsoft Office in a clean fashion in my experience.

I'm relatively certain I'm not alone, but I do realize that not all of us are in the same boat here. Apple couldn't have come up with a better sales strategy than the upcoming Microsoft Office Implosion!

[ingus]

Quote

Let me get this straight. In order to be able to use Office 365 fpr Mac, and I already have a copy of Office 2011 for Mac that I paid for, I have to uninstall it and then sign up to pay Microsoft $10 a month to be able to use the cloud based version that adds absolutely no additional features from what I just uninstalled. Where do I sign up?

Only if you want a 365 subscription, with all the cloud stuff. Otherwise you don't have to do anything, and they have nothing else to really offer you.

[bettercitizens]

I bought Office 2011 for home for $9.95 through a licensing program that was available at my work. I like $9.95 in perpetuity, however $10/month no thanks for my use case.

[RodericT]

I purchased Office 2011 for Mac late 2012 and discovered I was eligible for a free upgrade to 2013. This turned out to be a free 1 year Office 365 Premium. I support a couple of small organisations that use Office so in my case this is good news as I can now put Publisher, used by one organisation, on my Win 7 Mac. I have a XP virtual guest on my MacBook and also my iMac, but cannot use this as Office 365 requires Win 7, so I plan to build Win 7 virtual machine. From my experience Windows XP works great on my 8GB iMac. So I will probably end up with 3 windows, two being virtual and two mac systems, making total of 5. After 12 months I will decide whether to keep it or not. You do have the option to return to normal Office 2011 for Mac, or so they say.

[raymccrae]

Quote

I bought Office 2011 for home for $9.95 through a licensing program that was available at my work. I like $9.95 in perpetuity, however $10/month no thanks for my use case.

I also got my home copy of office using the Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP). However I think you're confused as to what you paid for. HUP allows you to share you're companies Microsoft enterprise license. You have not got a personal license for office. If you ever quit your job or your company ends its enterprise license, legally you must uninstall your copy of office and stop using it. So it's not perpetuity.

[Sportymonk]

I gave up on MS Office long ago. People sent me DOCS files and I had to use my wife's PC to translate them to DOC to use on my Mac MS Office (2003). Then When my 2003 Powerbook died in 2011 I got Open Office (FREE!!) and it works and even reads DOCX files. Why bother with MS when Open Office does the same job (Word, Exel, etc)?