Obviously they’ve had to price Office 365 at substantially cheaper than buying Office outright, and the other benefits are that you can sign in and access it from anywhere online, and that updates are applied automatically. There are two main packages available in Office 365- what Microsoft calls Personal for a single User or Home for up to six Users. You can still purchase it outright (which is not how Microsoft want to play things these days), or you can buy Office 365, which is an annual subscription service.

Setting up a Personal Microsoft Account is free, and gives you access to the online version of Outlook for your email, but if you want to use the other Office applications like Word and Excel etc then you also need an Office Account. The above article lists two ways to determine that the account you’re currently in is a Personal Account: if the login screen of your Windows 10 computer shows your email address, and if your email address is in the form of whoever Personal Account, Office 365 (Personal) and Onedrive The above article suggests thinking about your Personal and Work Accounts as if they were from two separate companies, because that’s how they’re treated by Microsoft. For example we sell Personal Office 365 Licenses (called Personal for a single User or Home for up to six Users), but we also provide a business version of Office 365 which we manage for our clients remotely through the portal. The first important point that the article makes is that the Work and Personal Accounts are separate, even if you use the same email address and/or password to log into them. If you need to use the standard Microsoft Office Applications (Word, Excel etc) both at home and at work, which many people do, then you will probably require access to both a Work and a Personal Microsoft Account and they look very similar. It’s a confusing topic, exacerbated by a failure to clearly label and differentiate between these different account types. Our Senior Technician, Simon, has sent me this article: Understanding Microsoft Work and Personal Accounts.

Are microsoft accounts free