Office 365: Here We Go!

Decided to pull the trigger on Office 365 today. I knew I would eventually fold to the pressure of upgrading Office, and my copy of Publisher 2003 was really getting old.

While I wasn’t instructed to do so, the first thing I did was uninstall my copies of; Publisher 2003, Office Home & Student 2010 and Access 2010. I have had some really messy experiences when not uninstalling Office products before upgrading. A reboot was needed to complete the uninstall process. Purchasing and installing Office 365 went smooth as silk. Actually, the hardest part was finding it online. If you Bing Office 365, you will be directed to a bunch of enterprise/business pages. Not was I was looking for. Searching Office 2013 brings you to the right link.

After paying the $99.00 annual subscription, I got to do some personalizing before the download started. It took about 20 minutes for the download and install (another 5 to purchase). Not sure how big the download was, but the folder labeled Microsoft Office 15 in Program Files is 1.77GB.

Everything appears to be working just fine. I do a lot of Access development and have Access 2010 Runtime deployed on all the PCs in our office. So a concern was whether I could open a runtime file created in Access 2010 with Access 2013. No problem there. Tomorrow I will need to see if I can open a file compiled in Access 2013 with the free Access 2010 Runtime application, before I upgrade the Office PC.

Office 365 is not for everyone. But, if you use Office regularly on three or more PCs, or make use of optional Office apps like Publisher and Access (I answer yes to all three) then this works out to be a pretty good deal.  Oh, and I just checked my Skydrive account. I now have 43.3 GB available (Office 365 gets you an additional 20GB). Thanks for that Microsoft. Have not activated my Skype Global minutes (60 minutes per month) yet. Plus I get to use Outlook in the office again (goodbye Windows Live Mail). And let’s not forget that Office Anywhere thing.

Notebook is next. Then my nephew’s desktop, my office desktop and probably my nephew’s Macbook. Good deal.