A month after announcing Office 365 Personal will be available in the US spring season, Microsoft has now made the subscription available for purchase. The company had detailed pricing schemes earlier, and further elaborates on them with Tuesday's announcement.
Office 365 Personal will be available to individuals at a lesser price than Office 365 Home Premium (now called Home), which now as the company identifies, is meant for households. The company is charging $6.99 (roughly Rs. 420) per month, or $69.99 (roughly Rs. 4,200) annually, for the individual subscription.
The
Office 365 Personal subscription allows access to seven 'full-installed Office applications', namely Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access, on one PC or Mac computer, and one tablet (including iPad). They will also get online access to Office apps, namely Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
To put that in perspective, Office 365 Home Premium is a $99 annual subscription package ($9.99 monthly) that gives the same app access on up to five PC or Mac computers, or five tablets.
Both Office 365 plans
will get 60 minutes of Skype calling per month, 20GB of additional OneDrive storage, and updates for the most recent version of Office.
In late-March, CEO Nadella announced the
high-profile launch of Microsoft Office for iPad, with touch-friendly Word, Excel, PowerPoint apps.
The Office for iPad apps require a subscription to Microsoft's Office 365 to create and edit documents on the device, but viewing documents is free. At the same time, it made
editing documents free on mobile platforms, with its Office Web Apps (now Office Online).
More recently, Microsoft
updated its Office Online apps with new features. The Redmond-giant also announced that Office Online apps will be available via Chrome Web Store as well - essentially bringing the productivity apps to the Chrome OS, apart from Chrome browser users.