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Perpetual or Subscription version of Office
- Thread starter hajime
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I like owning software, so I always buy it. I don't like it when the software publisher makes changes without me approving.
I've had Office 365 for at least 5 years, it offers 4 or 5 family members to use it, its PC or Mac, and gives every family member their own 1 TB of Onedrive. both my kids used it in college, my wife uses it and I have it installed on 2 Macs. So for me the decision was very easy. The fact that I get regular updates is nice, but I mostly use basic functionality so that would not be a dealbreaker.
If I were a single user, quite frankly, I'd use Pages, Numbers, Keynote or I'd use something like OfficeLibre ...
If I were a single user, quite frankly, I'd use Pages, Numbers, Keynote or I'd use something like OfficeLibre ...
I gave Pages a chance many years ago. Later, when I was required to have the contents in Word format, the conversion did not go well. I had to copy and paste manually and reformatted lots of stuffs.
Have you had any experience that upgrading to newer versions ended up having issues? I guess since upgrading is automatic, we cannot wait and see before upgrading. If somethings go wrong, can we downgrade?
If I just use it on one computer, I would go for the perpetual version but I use it on both Mac and PC. It is a hassle to uninstall and then reinstall whenever I use it on different machines.
Have you had any experience that upgrading to newer versions ended up having issues? I guess since upgrading is automatic, we cannot wait and see before upgrading. If somethings go wrong, can we downgrade?
If I just use it on one computer, I would go for the perpetual version but I use it on both Mac and PC. It is a hassle to uninstall and then reinstall whenever I use it on different machines.
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While I only use any word processor occasionally...Pages has an export as Word format option. I have never seen any formatting issues with it.
You could certainly test it quite a bit before making the Office purchase. Nothing to lose but a little time.
Microsoft makes 365 a pretty obvious choice. All the Office apps, plus 1tb of cloud storage, for 6 people and it's $100/year? Sold. I hate my apps making dumb changes just to have an excuse to seek rent (looking at you, Adobe) but Office perpetual is way too hard a sell.
That said, I'm in IT and need familiarity with Excel for my job. Do most people need Microsoft's office suite? Ehhh, probably not? At which point why not use an alternative, which could even include the free online versions of the Microsoft apps.
That said, I'm in IT and need familiarity with Excel for my job. Do most people need Microsoft's office suite? Ehhh, probably not? At which point why not use an alternative, which could even include the free online versions of the Microsoft apps.
On my work Mac, they provide 2019 volume license although I can just use my work email and turn it to Office365 license. At home, I have Office365 Family. On 2019 VL, the UI is old school and I much prefer the Office365 feature set.
You can see what features can be found on each license https://macadmins.software/matrix/
You can see what features can be found on each license https://macadmins.software/matrix/
In the case of MS Office I have no reason to pay for either version. My word-processing and spreadsheeting is all personal; no need to interface with a collaboration culture wedded to the Microsoft platform. I've been using Pages and Numbers for many years. Yes, they're different than the MS products, but frankly, I was more than done with the MS UI and its infinite array of features I never needed constantly cluttering the toolbars and menus. MS's need (and it's a rational need from a business standpoint) to deliver any and every feature some small niche of its user community required does not align with my needs. Pages and Numbers have never lacked for a feature I've required.
Sure, back when I was exchanging manuscripts with book editors there was no doubt that I had to use Word. Any incompatibility in the underlying markup language could break the editorial/layout process. Since I've been free of that particular workflow for nearly 20 years, good riddance!
I went from working with other publishing houses to running, authoring, and editing for a small, closely-held press. My partner and I moved to a different workflow - authoring/editing directly in Adobe InDesign. Our layouts were very carefully wrought, so write-to-fit was the rule of the day - no allowances for verbosity unless a particular section required bulking-up (a rarity). It was much easier to work directly in the layout than to craft templates for Word that could then be poured into InDesign. For simplicity I would write new sections in Pages or whatever was handy. So long as the app had a good word count/character count feature I'd be able to meet the preliminary budget. Fine-tuning would then take place in InDesign after a quick copy/paste.
As we were a small organization, the high cost of InDesign became a factor. My partner tended to delay software upgrades until circumstances demand it. I tend to be an early adopter. I generally lost the upgrade debates in those days due to the high cost of the Adobe suite. The trouble was, there was nearly always a crisis when an upgrade was finally necessary. For example, an old Mac would finally give up the ghost, and the new one couldn't run that old version of InDesign. Not only was there the usual pain of recovering from a computer crash/moving to a new machine, but there would be all those manuscripts that required conversion. Even if the process was 99.999% perfect, we still needed to scrutinize for any imperfections.
My feeling was, pay the cost of upgrading every year. Year-to-year conversions tended to be far more trouble-free. Rather than adapt to many years of accumulated changes in a single gulp, we could adjust to a smaller list of annual changes. Further, conversions on the file side were far less likely to be problematic as well. Focusing on the cash-dollar cost of the software can blind you to the far larger cost of crisis management.
When you compare the cost of upgrading one seat of Adobe to, say, that of maintaining/operating a delivery truck... I'd much rather be in a truck-free business. But partnerships are partnerships, and I always lost the annual upgrade debate. Until Adobe unveiled their subscription pricing. The math (run very quickly in Numbers) was clear. The cost of subscribing to CS was equal to or lower than what we'd been paying to periodically jump from one "perpetual" version to the next, even allowing for the gaps between purchases. Even my partner was convinced.
Office is cheaper than Adobe CS/Creative Cloud, but from my standpoint the principle stands. Subscribe and stay up-to-date at all times - it's easier and cheaper to adapt gradually on an annual basis than to face the occasional earthquake that a multi-year software jump can trigger.
Of course, there are software vendors out there that abuse the subscription model, forcing a higher cost onto subscribers than they'd have encountered in "perpetual" purchases. Of course these companies no longer offer a one-time price at all (offering both pricing schemes tends to keep pricing honest). Do the numbers, and if they stink try to find an alternative to their product. If there is no alternative you've discovered why they're gouging in the first place.
Sure, back when I was exchanging manuscripts with book editors there was no doubt that I had to use Word. Any incompatibility in the underlying markup language could break the editorial/layout process. Since I've been free of that particular workflow for nearly 20 years, good riddance!
I went from working with other publishing houses to running, authoring, and editing for a small, closely-held press. My partner and I moved to a different workflow - authoring/editing directly in Adobe InDesign. Our layouts were very carefully wrought, so write-to-fit was the rule of the day - no allowances for verbosity unless a particular section required bulking-up (a rarity). It was much easier to work directly in the layout than to craft templates for Word that could then be poured into InDesign. For simplicity I would write new sections in Pages or whatever was handy. So long as the app had a good word count/character count feature I'd be able to meet the preliminary budget. Fine-tuning would then take place in InDesign after a quick copy/paste.
As we were a small organization, the high cost of InDesign became a factor. My partner tended to delay software upgrades until circumstances demand it. I tend to be an early adopter. I generally lost the upgrade debates in those days due to the high cost of the Adobe suite. The trouble was, there was nearly always a crisis when an upgrade was finally necessary. For example, an old Mac would finally give up the ghost, and the new one couldn't run that old version of InDesign. Not only was there the usual pain of recovering from a computer crash/moving to a new machine, but there would be all those manuscripts that required conversion. Even if the process was 99.999% perfect, we still needed to scrutinize for any imperfections.
My feeling was, pay the cost of upgrading every year. Year-to-year conversions tended to be far more trouble-free. Rather than adapt to many years of accumulated changes in a single gulp, we could adjust to a smaller list of annual changes. Further, conversions on the file side were far less likely to be problematic as well. Focusing on the cash-dollar cost of the software can blind you to the far larger cost of crisis management.
When you compare the cost of upgrading one seat of Adobe to, say, that of maintaining/operating a delivery truck... I'd much rather be in a truck-free business. But partnerships are partnerships, and I always lost the annual upgrade debate. Until Adobe unveiled their subscription pricing. The math (run very quickly in Numbers) was clear. The cost of subscribing to CS was equal to or lower than what we'd been paying to periodically jump from one "perpetual" version to the next, even allowing for the gaps between purchases. Even my partner was convinced.
Office is cheaper than Adobe CS/Creative Cloud, but from my standpoint the principle stands. Subscribe and stay up-to-date at all times - it's easier and cheaper to adapt gradually on an annual basis than to face the occasional earthquake that a multi-year software jump can trigger.
Of course, there are software vendors out there that abuse the subscription model, forcing a higher cost onto subscribers than they'd have encountered in "perpetual" purchases. Of course these companies no longer offer a one-time price at all (offering both pricing schemes tends to keep pricing honest). Do the numbers, and if they stink try to find an alternative to their product. If there is no alternative you've discovered why they're gouging in the first place.
I agree with the collaboration/sharing feature, majority of the home users will not take advantage of it. Can't say on a M1 Mac, but the Office suite usually takes a while just to open in my case. Personally Pages and Keynote are superior than Microsoft offering, but something about Excel that I want to stick with. Don't get me started with the new Outlook that mimics the web UI. The 1TB OneDrive storage is quite nice as I also have an Android phone to upload photos to.
I agree. Kept using my old version of Office (2008?) until Sierra. It still worked but was crash-prone with large documents. Switched to 365 at that point and have had no problems. Yeah, I don't like subscriptions either but this one is a surprisingly good deal for a Microsoft product.
I've used LibreOffice because it's the only way to open/convert my old AppleWorks/ClarisWorks documents (Apple's own software can't do that). But it seemed rather slow and not very polished (although it may have improved, has been awhile).
I use the small business subscription that also gives me exhange e-mail for my own custom domain and sharepoint site for my 1tb online storage that gives me version control for my entire offline storage.
I don’t like subscription/recurring payments. I use the perpetual version of Office.
I still use my long-ago purchased perpetual copy of Office 2016 for Mac (on i5 10th gen 13" MBP) for the rare occasions I need to fire up Excel, Powerpoint or Word at home. Still runs like a champ and no recurring $$$ every year.
Office 365 on Windoze @work drives me batty (especially the lame/fugly online editing garbage!).
Office 365 on Windoze @work drives me batty (especially the lame/fugly online editing garbage!).