What’s free
Office Online offers the core four: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. This is the same as you’d get with the Office Home and Student 2013 suite. You can also use Outlook.com for email rather than paying for Outlook. Factoring in all five, you have the equivalent of the Office Home and Business 2013 suite – for free.
With both the Office Online apps and the Office apps for mobile devices, though, the versions that Microsoft provides for free have limited functionality compared with the paid equivalents.
For example, if you compare the Home ribbon in Word Online with the Home ribbon in Word 2013, the two are almost identical. You can copy, cut and paste, change the font characteristics, and so on. A few features you might miss: Word Online lacks the Format Painter feature that lets you copy formatting from one section to another, and it doesn’t have a few of the font options, like Text Effects and Typography, or Change Case.
Word Online has the basic paragraph formatting options, including bulleted or numbered lists, and the ability to align text left, right, or centre. However, it doesn’t have some of the features available in Word 2013, such as shading, borders or multilevel lists.
Where the real difference comes in, though, is the ribbon options that simply don’t exist in Word Online. If you look at the tabs across the top of the ribbon, you’ll see that Word 2013 has two tabs that you don’t find in Word Online: References and Mailings. Mailing allows you to print envelopes and labels and manage mail merge printing of Word documents. References contains features you need for more advanced documents – things such as table of contents, citations and bibliography, captions, index, and table of authorities. Footnotes is also part of the References tab in Word 2013, but it’s available in Word Online under the Insert tab.
With the mobile apps, users can view, create, and edit Office documents for free, and sync those files with Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox cloud storage. However, only paying customers are able to do things like change track or accept changes, or format text into columns.
shipped in January, joining Office for iPad as a free, native app for mobile users