The verdict
So, are you really benefitting from that Office 365 Subscription? Based on the incremental rollout of new features, it depends. None of the new features are what you might call game-changers. None seriously impact everyday Office workflows or are likely to transform the way you do your job. In fact, if you use Office the way many of us do, working with established tools and templates, you might not even be aware that these new features exist.
To balance, some are genuinely useful. Word’s Editor is an improvement on the old Spelling and Grammar check when you’re giving work a read through. PowerPoint’s Designer can help non-designers produce better-looking slides. Outlook’s Focused Inbox is a better way to organise your mail. And while Excel’s enhancements are more specialist, they provide similar shortcuts for data analysis. Most of all, these tools point to Microsoft’s wider vision of an Office where intelligence and automation make it easier to get real work done.
What’s there right now might not be enough for those paying monthly or annual subscriptions and wondering why Office isn’t evolving faster, in which case the question is how much value you’re getting from the other benefits: the Outlook.com email, the OneDrive storage or SharePoint, Teams and Yammer in the Business Premium version. If you or your company use them, then it’s hard to argue with the package on value for money. If not, Microsoft still has a way to go before it convinces us that the “as a service” model is really paying off.
Plus, there are alternatives. G Suite can’t match Office feature-for-feature, but it has become a fantastic environment for collaborative working, and usability has improved dramatically over the past few years. While switching to G Suite is a big adjustment, the pricing is competitive and the apps keep getting better. For personal use, it costs you nothing. The same can be said of LibreOffice, and if you can cope with the dated look and feel, it gives you much of the power of Office without the Direct Debit.
Let’s be clear: as a bundle of services Office 365 is an excellent deal, but if you’re only paying to use the core Office apps of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, it might be time for a rethink.