Microsoft removes Office 2019 from Home Use Program benefits Office

jimbo45 said:

I suppose some people will just go back to that old ship still flying "The Skull and Crossbones" (TPB) and if they do some of these greedy corporations only have themselves to blame. Others will look for alternattive platforms -- there's some quite good reasonable "Office Clones" around now as well as a passable email client or two.

I guess I am the oddball out. I never purchased a copy of Office in the past. I used a copy of Office from my work provided MSDN account. I didn't start paying MS until Office365 came out.

However, when Office365 came out, I looked at the cost of $99 a year for Office on all of my devices, with 1TB of OneDrive space per user (x5 users is 5TB), and when I factored in the potential cost of getting cloud storage space with either DropBox or iCloud, it became obvious that Office365 was the best way to go. For $99 I got 1TB of DropBox, for $99 a year with Office365, I got 5TB of space and office everywhere. And there was 0 shady gray area either. And I extended my subscription to my dad, who used 1 of my accounts and he legally has Office and 1TB of OneDrive space.

Now, they have increased office365 to 6 users (thus 6TB) and unlimited installs, so it's even better. If you have no need for cloud storage space, this may be of 0 benefit to you. But the wife, myself and my kids have all of our phones setup to automatically backup all pics and videos to OneDrive so we never have to delete or lose anything. It just works for us.

If it wasn't for the OneDrive space, I wouldn't pay for it. I have Office at work, and my kids at school use Googledocs....so no need to have Office.

pparks1 said:

I guess I am the oddball out. I never purchased a copy of Office in the past. I used a copy of Office from my work provided MSDN account. I didn't start paying MS until Office365 came out.

However, when Office365 came out, I looked at the cost of $99 a year for Office on all of my devices, with 1TB of OneDrive space per user (x5 users is 5TB), and when I factored in the potential cost of getting cloud storage space with either DropBox or iCloud, it became obvious that Office365 was the best way to go. For $99 I got 1TB of DropBox, for $99 a year with Office365, I got 5TB of space and office everywhere. And there was 0 shady gray area either. And I extended my subscription to my dad, who used 1 of my accounts and he legally has Office and 1TB of OneDrive space.

Now, they have increased office365 to 6 users (thus 6TB) and unlimited installs, so it's even better. If you have no need for cloud storage space, this may be of 0 benefit to you. But the wife, myself and my kids have all of our phones setup to automatically backup all pics and videos to OneDrive so we never have to delete or lose anything. It just works for us.

If it wasn't for the OneDrive space, I wouldn't pay for it. I have Office at work, and my kids at school use Googledocs....so no need to have Office.

Hi there

The main reason I use Office is because I am quite a heavy user of EXCEL -- while there are other "clones" --once you get into "super user mode" there really aren't any better alternatives to EXCEL --- especially where pivot tables and dynamic stock exchange analyses are concerned -- I have a load of stuff I get in real time via excel web queries etc etc. Also the "What If" type of queries you can do in EXCEL still rates this as the best spread sheet program of all time --if you do a lot of complex stuff like this no other spreadsheet system comes even close !!!!.

As far as email clients are concerned Outlook is just fine -- Thunderbird is at times for some possibly an "acceptable" free alternative but too often it just behaves as "Blunderbird" -- not really robust enough.

I got a few discounted office 2019 licenses -- probably around 60 EUR (60 USD approx) for 5 of these --none of which has ever failed updating - and even when installing Windows 10 clean on a brand new machine -zero problem with activation when entering the license key.

Maybe I've been lucky --but there we are !!!

Cheers
jimbo