Office 2016 vs Office 365 vs Office Online: what’s the difference?

Office 2016

– Allows you to independently decide when to upgrade

– Outstanding office and productivity suite

– Stand-alone installations don’t benefit from collaborative working options

Microsoft’s current version of Office, 2016, is what you’ll be using regardless of whether you get a new perpetual licence or subscribe via Office 365 at the moment. There are a number of different perpetual licence versions available, both individually and through volume licencing (VL).

Unlike an Office 365 subscription, you’ll have to choose at the time of purchase whether you want a copy for Mac OS X or Windows. Each licence only covers you for a single computer and, although a number of server and cloud integration options are available for VL customers, you don’t get any online storage, syncing or collaboration features by default.

For UK businesses buying individual licences, Office Home & Business 2016 is priced at £229.99 and Office Professional 2016 costs £389.99. Both come with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, but only the Professional version gets you Publisher and Access.

Compared to previous versions of Office, the most notable changes you’ll see in Office 2016 include searchable tools and features via the “tell me what you want to do” bar, Bing integration, powerful new web app development features in Access, and some major updates to Excel’s data importation and handling features. These include new chart styles, updated pivot tables and improved forecasting tools.
Office 2016 desktop applications look and feel much like Office 2013

Typical perpetual licence users won’t be able to advantage of the collaboration and co-working features that represent some of the biggest changes between Office 2013 and 2016. Larger enterprises that require collaboration features and don’t want to rely on externally hosted cloud services may wish to consider on-premises installations of SharePoint 2016 (currently in beta) and Office Online Server (currently available as a preview version) as alternatives to Office 365.

Microsoft Office remains the industry standard, and with good reason. Excel, in particular, is the jewel in Office’s crown: other spreadsheets seem very lightweight and lacking in features by comparison. Office 2016 hasn’t made any radical changes to the basic formula of 2013 – a good thing, as it means that upgrading won’t require you to retrain staff – but presents a range of small improvements. If you’re currently running Office 2013 perpetual licences, however, there’s no compelling reason to upgrade for most businesses.

Price Office Home & Business 2016, £163 ex VAT
Office Professional 2016, £275 ex VAT

Details https://products.office.com/en-gb/buy/compare-microsoft-office-products

System requirements: Windows 7 SP1/8/8.1/10/Server 2008 R2/Server 2012 R2/Windows 10 Server, 1GHz x86 or x64 processor, 2GB RAM, 3GB disk space, 1,280×800 resolution display. Mac OS X 10.10+, Intel-based Mac, 4GB RAM, 6GB disk space, 1,280×800 resolution display

Office Online

– Free

– Works on almost any browser or mobile device

– Not designed or licenced for business use

Office Online is a free, surprisingly comprehensive web-based office suite, comprising the same cut-down versions of most of Microsoft’s standard Office applications that you get as part of the Office 365 web interface. It’s explicitly aimed at home users and provides a free, quick and easy way to work with Microsoft’s default document formats without being tied to a particular computer.
Web users can share links for quick real-time collaboration or viewing

Office Online includes browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. There’s also a Calendar, the People contact book, Docs sharing and Sway, a relatively recent ‘digital storytelling’ app that lets you quickly assemble presentations, photo slideshows and newsletters. It’s a simple PowerPoint alternative, but the results are better geared for sharing on the web, and you can easily embed content from social media.

All your documents are automatically saved to a free 5GB OneDrive account – users who’ve had their Microsoft account for a long time may have more space available to them. You can use this to sync files to any Windows PC that you’ve connected to the same Microsoft account. Files are saved in standard Office 2016 formats (DOCX, XLSX, etc.), so you’ll be able to open them using any compatible software. By comparison, Google Apps for Work uses a proprietary format and requires you to export files if you wish to use them with other software.

Unlike Google Apps, you can’t enable any kind of offline editing mode for Office Online – if your internet connection goes down, so does your ability to work. If you want to work offline, you’ll need to subscribe to Office 365 at a level that provides desktop versions of the software. At least Chrome users get an extension that lets you quickly open and create files via a browser button.

As in Office 365’s Online apps, the free version of Office Online allows you to collaborate in real time with other users: the feature is supported in Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and Excel. Your free Office Online account can also be used to sign in to the mobile apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, giving you on-the-go access to your files.
The mobile version of Word fits plenty of features into a compact screen

The mobile versions of the apps have most of the same features as their browser equivalents, although they’re first and foremost set up for quick viewing and text entry. Tablet users get the familiar ribbon interface laid out almost identically to that of Office Online. If you’re on a phone, everything’s by necessity a bit more compact, but all the same options for formatting and reviewing your documents are available via a menu.

Price Free

Details https://www.office.com/

Verdict

Office 2016 is a worthy update to the venerable productivity suite, although, with the exception of some specialist upgrades to Excel and Access, most perpetual licence users will find little to justify an immediate upgrade from Office 2013. Mainstream support doesn’t end for Office 2013 until October 2018.

For small businesses in particular, the Office 365 Business and ProPlus subscription options have plenty to commend them, most notably the licence for users to install Office software on multiple computers and devices and the ability to collaborate with colleagues in real time.

The competing Google Apps for Work is, at £3.30 per user, per month, a cheaper and entirely realistic alternative for businesses that want to have their document editing, mail server and storage on a Software as a Service basis. Even so, Microsoft’s powerful desktop applications are a strong justification for the £7.80 monthly cost per Office 365 Business Premium licence.

Office Online isn’t designed for use in business, but if your business doesn’t regularly use Microsoft software, the free service provides a useful alternative to expensive licence or subscription fees if you just want to occasionally check the formatting of an XLSX file before sending it to a client.