Should I switch to Office 365?

I currently have one of the higher-end editions of Office 2013 that comes with everything, I forget which.

My workplace recently switched to Office 365. Apparently, the license agreement with Microsoft allows employees to use that Office 365 account at home for personal use as well, so I could switch to Office 365 and upgrade to Office 2016. But should I?

 

If your happy with the older version and it does everything you need it to do then why upgrade. But in your case it's not going to cost you anything so you have nothing to lose. I too have one of the older ones and it works just fine for me. I would not pay what they want for 365 or need all its new updates.

 

Some of the 2016 versions seem to collect some metrics. I do not know whether it is the case for the enterprise versions, I'd expect them to be different because businesses probably won't like that kind of thing. There are some small differences between 2013/2016, but nothing life changing, just small quality of life improvements.

 

Well if your not needing any new 2016 features then stick with 2013. Well as to the license with your workplace you need to talk to your IT or HR about it's home usage license. If you can get 2016 for less then Store prices then I would get Office 2016 instead. That is what I did.

 

I'm still on "2013" 365 Business. I don't see a big difference between 365 2013 and 365 2016.
The main reason I like it is because of SharePoint which I don't think you have with normal Office.
But if it did not have SharePoint, I would stick with Office 2013 vs 365.

 

Use LaTeX

Just kidding, but I've tried Office 2016, and I feel it offers no palpable benefit over even Office 2010, which I have. The latter works wonderfully (except for font weights on Word) and looks neat and professional, too. Stick to what you have, it'll serve you well for half a decade more at least.

I think you've got the Professional Plus version, and it really comes with everything.

 

Still no reason to upgrade past office 2010 pro plus edition.

 

There are two good reasons to go past Office 2010 - one is if you have a convertible with a touch-screen - Office 2013 and 2016 re-size menus and things and support touch in general if you are using your fingers rather than mouse or touchpad.
Using Office earlier than 2013 on a small screen convertible especially with FHD screen would be hard or impossible otherwise.

Another reason would be dual monitor support - if I remember correctly you can't drag one instance of i.e Excel 2010 to one screen and keep another on the main screen. When you drag one and switch between them, the other one goes as well, which defeats the purpose of having more than one screen.

As for the difference between Office 2013 and 2016, I found none, apart from the fact that Outlook is not as good in Office 2016 when used on a vertical screen (like in a tablet mode).

Price-wise though, "normal" Office will end up being cheaper than Office 365 sooner than you'll be forced to upgrade as evidenced by people above who still see no reason to update Office 2010.

Either way I've been offered an update from 2013 to 2016 on my Office 365 subscription (that I got for free) and there was no meaningful difference, so you should not bother @Peon .

 

Charts in Excel, seriously, they take half as much time to format to something half decent in 2013 compared to 2010 it's not even funny.

 

Really? I haven't noticed any performance issues with excel, but my tasks are probably far less strenuous than yours.

 

It's not a performance issue as much as the way the chart options UI works out, I have access to everything I may want to change much more quickly from the side menu than from a set of individual windows. It is also more intuitive if you ask me, I found way to do things much more quickly than in 2010. Instead of having to open multiple dialog boxes to change the color, line style, etc of a data series after the other, you can just do it from the same dialogue box and change the data series you're working on on the fly. You can swap from the data series to the chart area without closing the edit dialogue box and opening another one from a drop down menu and so on. In the end you save time because the options are just that much easier to access more quickly. This also works wonders in Word when you're changing the chart from within a document. You also have to jump through less hoops to get multiple windows open for Excel rather than have every file opened in the same window.

I personally found that the whole of Office 2013 was filled with small quality of life changes like these that sped up formatting documents. 2016 on the other hand didn't have that same feel and I have yet to feel the transition from 2013 to 2016 like I felt the one from 2010 to 2013.

 

Yeah, from what I've read, tijo is right about 2013 - worth it over 2010 if you use Excel a lot, particularly charts. While I've yet to use 2013's charts capabilities myself (have 2010 at home, and have 2013 at work but never make Excel charts at work), it does sound like a lot of small improvements have gone into it.

It is possible to get multiple Excel windows in pre-2013 versions, but IIRC it requires a registry hack. I guess Excel 2007/2010 would prefer to run on Window than Window s.

Question for y'all: Is there actually a desktop "Office 365" edition, or are the desktop versions of Office 365 simply Office 2013/Office 2016. I know 2013 has integrated support for SharePoint and OneDrive - which, at least on the SharePoint side, works quite well - so it confuses me a bit when people talk about upgrading to Office 365 as if it's a separate SKU.