The wait is over for Office 2013 and Office 365. Starting Tuesday, the latest version of cheap office 2013 professional venerable productivity suite goes on sale to buyers and academics, both on Microsoft's Office.com site and at retail outlets. You can buy the traditional stand-alone desktop application or, for the primary time, buyers and students can buy Office as a membership service that will make multiple installations cheaper.
Along with assorted new features and a design overhaul, Office 365 subscription services introduce the much-touted "Office on Demand" feature that allows subscribers to access full versions of Office applications on Web-connected PCs.
Windows users can still buy stand-alone variations of Office 2013 the old way (for prices ranging from $140 to $400). But in case you need even the least-expensive version on a lot more than two or three computers in your household, you might wind up spending a lot more than you would under the $100-a-year Office 365 Home Premium membership plan (see our previous story on Office pricing), which covers up to five desktop installations (Laptop or Mac) versus a single installation for the stand-alone license.
For students, faculty members, and anyone else who qualifies for the microsoft office 2013 professional plus University license, the deal is even sweeter: Microsoft is charging a mere $80 for a four-year membership that covers two desktop installations.
Note also that the subscription licenses give you all the major Office apps, like Outlook, Publisher, and Access. The $140 Home & Student desktop application does not include those three apps; the $220 Home & Business version adds Outlook although not the other two. To get Outlook, Publisher, and Access as well as the core Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote programs as desktop application, you must pay $400 for Office 2013 Pro.
Office 2013 has been available to IT pros, enterprises, and developers (read our review) since late very last year, and the desktop application hasn't changed while in the meantime. (Microsoft has, however, posted system requirements.) But the Office 365 membership services introduce new features such as Office on Demand for Web-connected PCs. We've heard no word from Microsoft on when Office on Demand for Android or iOS users might be available.
Office on Demand has some system requirements: buy quickbooks pro 2010 or 8 and a supported browser, namely Internet Explorer 9 or later, Mozilla Firefox 12 or later, Apple Safari 5 or later, or Google Chrome 18 or later. In case you can't run Office on Demand, you probably can still edit documents in Microsoft's Web apps, which aren't as full-featured but can certainly handle basic chores.