You also get Publisher and Access but you can only use these on a PC. The first is to buy a subscription to Office 365 which lets you use the latest full versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook on your PC as well as on any tablets or smartphones you own. There are a few different ways you can use Microsoft 365. We earn a commission for products purchased through some links in this article.

Here's what you need to know to work out whether it's worth paying for productivity tools or whether free versions will do. The free, online version of Microsoft 365 offers access to familiar productivity apps including Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Google has its own similar set of free-to-access online apps, too. Over 30 years after Microsoft Office originally launched, there are now free alternatives worth considering. If you're an Office user, before you next splash out on a new subscription, it might be worth thinking about whether you really need the paid-for version at all. But with packages starting at £60 a year, it doesn’t come cheap. It’s so popular that in 2022, Microsoft Office 365 had an astounding 345 million paying users. Pretty much all of us will have used it at some point to create Word documents, Powerpoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets. Anyone who has worked in an office or who uses a laptop or desktop computer at home is probably familiar with Microsoft Office.

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