Most evenings after dinner, my kids find me on the couch, surrounded by my beloved gadgets: my tablet, my laptop, and my cell phone. On one, I am editing a book, while on the other, I look up synonyms on Visual Thesaurus (love!), and on the third, I upload onto Facebook pictures of my cat humorously getting in the way of the other two.
I love me some good tech. Also, humorous cat photos.
So when Microsoft came calling last year, I felt right at home representing Office 2010, especially considering they let me put on a pretty dress and sit on a couch with Anderson Cooper. Today, I get to represent the brand spanking new Office 365 Home Premium at Microsoft’s launch kick-off event in New York City, where I will be interviewed by the talented techie mom, Beth Blecherman of TechMamas, for BlogHer.
I have been using the beta version of this latest and greatest Office for months, tapping into the newest version of Word to write and edit books and magazine articles, creating snazzy PowerPoint presentations, and relying on OneNote to keep research, links, and interview notes in handy, dandy virtual notebooks.
And I tie it all together with my favorite tech goody of them all, SkyDrive, a cloud-based storage site that lets me access whatever I am working on from wherever I am. That means that if I have 30 minutes in the waiting area at my son’s clarinet lesson, I can pick up the article I was writing at home right where I left off, and then save it back to SkyDrive, where I can access it again after dinner or the next morning.
This month, I have had the privilege of downloading the newly released Office 365 Home Premium, including the intuitive Outlook, which makes my life easier by warning me when I forget to attach an attachment. Which is often. I also love how it threads together email conversations, so I can see who said what and when right in one easy-to-follow spot.
Office 365 make it possible for me to work the way I often do — in chunks of time, in my home office, on the couch and on the go. Plus, it’s a subscription service that can be loaded on up to five machines (see above: Mom’s gadgets, plus my kids’ laptops.) for $99.99 per year or $8.34 per month, about what we pay to watch reruns of “The Office” and “The Twilight Zone” on Netflix.
With the subscription, you get an additional 20 GB of storage to the 7 GB that come with Sky Drive, so I can not only save my work, but my photos from my HTC Windows 8 Phone*, too. What’s more, I can access Office 365 and SkyDrive from my phone, allowing me to make quick edits and review contracts on the fly when I don’t have all my gadgets with me.
So you see, it was easy for me to sign on as a brand ambassador for Office 365 Home Office, because it has been making my life easier, despite my working conditions. Ahem…this one from while I was writing this very blog post…
Why I appreciate things that make it easier to work around here.
NOTE: Microsoft has hired me as a paid brand ambassador, but the opinions and the love are all mine. So is the cat.
*A shout out to HTC for the free Windows 8 Phone, which I adore. It is exactly what I have been looking for in a smart phone. Thank you HTC!
Thanks, Jen for the update!
While I do love Office 365, the “Small Business Premium” option isn’t really suitable for people who do freelancing on their own, or people who want to use share their 5 licenses among their family. Office “Home & Business” solves this issue but doesn’t come with the 5 licenses or cloud options. There really needs to be a “Home & Business” Office 365 plan for people in that situation, or at least loosen up the rules for “Home Premium”… most people primarily use Office for work purposes (even at home), so if we pay for their services, it really shouldn’t matter how we use the software as long as we’re doing so in a legal manner. That’s my 2 cents. But thank you again, I look forward to seeing how Office 365 gets improved in the near future.
James: I’ve done some research, and it seems that if you don’t have a license to use it for work, you should ask your employer for one.
There’s also Office 365 Small Business Premium, launching on February 27th.
Jen
James,
I have a query into my contacts at Microsoft so I can best answer your question. I’ll share it when I hear back. Thanks for your great question.
Jen
Hi there – Great article! I was really looking forward to signing up for Office 365 Home Premium, but now I’m concerned because it says “Non-Commercial”. I currently use Office 2010 at home on my PC and laptop, where I do both personal stuff and stuff that’s work-related (for my full-time job) and even some stuff related to freelancing on the side. With Office 365 Home Premium, looking at the licensing terms it seems this is no longer allowed? I really hope this is not the case because most customers do work from home. Can you please confirm?
– James
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