In some rare instances, annual payments may produce savings in exchange for a commitment: Office 365 Business Premium, for example, costs $12.50 per month per user when paid in an annual lump sum ($150 per user), but $15 per month per user on a month-to-month plan ($180).Īll enterprise plans - from Enterprise E1 to E5, as well as ProPlus - do not offer a monthly option but require an annual commitment. Office 365, the purchase method Microsoft pushes most aggressively, is a subscription service, so payments are made monthly or annually. One-time purchases include Office Standard 2019 and Office Professional Plus 2019 (Windows) and Office Standard 2019 for Mac (macOS), the enterprise-grade SKUs available only via volume licensing and retail packages such as Office Professional 2019 (Windows) and Office Home & Business 2019 (macOS). Pay for Office 2019 this year and use it for the next seven years? Fine. In other words, the license has no expiration date, and users may run the suite as long as they want. That purchase, actually of a license to legally run the software, gives the buyer the right to use Office 2019 in perpetuity. Microsoft defines the term as when '.you pay a single, up-front cost to get Office applications for one computer.' Up-front is the key adjective there Office 2019's entire purchase price must be laid out before receiving the software. (Labels like 'perpetual,' which have been widely used by Computerworld, technically note the type of license rather than payment methodology, but in Office's case, the kind of license is tied to whether it was bought outright or simply 'rented.') Office 2019, whether bought one copy at a time in retail or in lots of hundreds via volume licensing, has been dubbed a 'one-time purchase' by Microsoft to spell out how it's paid for. Of the differences between Office 2019 and Office 365, purchase plans are among the most striking. Microsoft Office 365 Desktop subscription version How Office is paid for Here are three ways to tell these tools apart, and a look at what's coming, based on Microsoft's new support policies for both Office 2019 and Office 365. How they differ can be confusing, especially since each includes, more or less, the same applications. The other, Office 365, is the subscription service that debuted in 2011. One, labeled Office 2019, is the stand-alone suite that traces its roots back to the last century. Rather than a single, towering smooth-black Office, there's a whole Stonehenge of options: Office on the iPhone, on iPad, Office on Android smartphones, Office on personal computers, Windows and macOS, Office with a handful of applications, Office with fist-fulls of apps.īut when you get down to it, there are really only two kinds of Office. Microsoft Office may be the de facto productivity tool for millions of workers worldwide, but it's no monolith.

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