Microsoft Office 365 is better than Microsoft Office 2013?

The new Microsoft Office 2013 Edition is here. With Microsoft Office 2013 you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more as a locally installed suite of applications or as Office 365, a cloud-based subscription. However, choosing between Office 2013 desktop software and the new Office 365 is a dramatically a different decision.

Office 2013 describes only the desktop applications. Office 365 is a web-based platform that pairs the Office applications with cloud storage. In the past, the Office 365 versions of the software had limited features and capabilities compared to the full desktop versions, and if you didn't have an internet connection you didn't have Office.

Office 2013 is more expensive than Office 365, and the licence is only good for one machine. If you only need the core applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) you can get Office 2013 Home & Student, add Outlook, and you get Office 2013 Home & Business, Office 2013 Pro adds Access and Publisher.

Office 365 comes in two Programs: Office 365 Home Premium and Office 365 Small Business Premium. Up to five people can use Office 365 Home Premium on up to five devices, with each user getting an Office experience customized to their own Microsoft ID. Office 365 Small Business Premium also comes with five licences, but billed per user per year.

The Best thing of  Office 365 is that you get more than just Office 2013 for your money - it also comes with benefits that Office 2013 lacks. It comes with an additional 20GB of SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes per month of international Skype calls. The new feature on Office 365 is called Office On Demand that enables you to stream virtualized versions of the full desktop software to any Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC. And as long as you store your files in SkyDrive you can access them seamlessly from virtually any web-connected device.

 Office 365 has very clear advantages, and it makes more sense financially in almost every scenario.