Unrelated to the Office 365/Office 2013 announcement, Microsoft released an update for Office for Mac 2011 on Tuesday. However, those Web apps aren’t as full-featured as the desktop versions SkyDrive does provide the option to open a document directly in the desktop version of each program (provided that app is on your Mac). Accessible through a SkyDrive account, those apps let you create and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations using Web-based versions of those apps, then save those documents to your SkyDrive or Mac. Mac users do have an alternative to Office on Demand: Microsoft’s Web apps, which have been available since 2010. But Office on Demand is a Windows-only feature it remains to be seen whether it will be available to Mac users when the next version of Office for Mac is released. One of the marquee new features of Office 365 is Office on Demand, a service that allows a PC without Word, Excel, or PowerPoint installed to run those programs via Internet streaming. Mac users who sign up for Office 365 will also get 20GB of SkyDrive storage (up from the 5GB that comes with a free account) and 60 minutes per month of Skype calls. You will then download and install Office for Mac 2011 through your Office 365 account-again, on up to five Macs. If you currently own Office for Mac 2011, you must uninstall that software when you sign up for Office 365. (A four-year education version that runs on two computers is available for $80.) Your subscription must be renewed monthly or annually in order to continue to use the software.

For Mac users, what you’ll download is Office for Mac 2011-it’s pretty much the same version of the suite that we’ve been using for a couple of years now, but it’s been updated to include activation for Office 365 Home Premium. Office 365, on the other hand, does impact Mac users, but it doesn’t introduce any new features rather, it’s essentially a new licensing model for Office for Mac.Ī subscription to Office 365 ($10 per month, or $100 per year) gives you the right to download Office software to up to five computers. Macworld spoke to Microsoft representatives to get some clarification.įor starters, Office 2013 doesn’t mean anything to the Mac: it’s for Windows computers only. Lost in the announcement, however, was what (if anything) those suites would mean to Mac users. Microsoft on Tuesday released its new Office 2013 and Office 365 productivity software suites.

Office 365 mac and pc