Office 365 and OneDrive

I recently picked up a subscription to Office 365 from Microsoft. This sets me back $7.35 a month after taxes. The subscription it’s self is $6.99 a month. I started out looking for cloud storage and ended up with office as well. The choice was simple to me. I get the full office package and 1TB of cloud storage. I use OneDrive as my second line backup now, the first being a 2TB external drive. Being that I use windows 8.1, the integration of OneDrive is a simple way to do backups. All I do is toss things in the OneDrive folder and they are sent to the cloud. I am an artist and have generated a large amount of art on my computer that I don’t want to lose. This was the primary purpose behind cloud storage in the first place. I also have my music and important documents on there now. The fact that office 365 tosses it all to the cloud on save is a great choice for me.

I have been using a scaled down version of office for many years. In fact as long as I have had a PC I have been using office. I find myself using word literally 3 or 4 times a day at the least. I use it to compose emails, blog posts, newsgroup posts and so on. The ability to send the document to PDF is a great use to me as it is universal.

Other components of office 365 are Publisher (I use this at least once a week), PowerPoint, Access, Excel, OneNote and Outlook. I will describe my use of them below.

Publisher is a great tool for putting together newsletter, business cards, advertisement posters and many more things. I use it mostly to set up ads for a nonprofit group I do work for. I then send it to them and they send it off to the newspaper.

PowerPoint I don’t actually get much use out of, but it is a heck of a tool for slide shows to send in an email. Being that I can toss it in the cloud then link it to the email is great. I take a lot of photos and share them often with friends. If you want to do presentations for a product this is your tool.

Access keeps track of my music CD’s and my many DVD’s. The ability to export to work format then to a PDF is a great feature.

Excel keeps tract of my monthly expenses so I know where the money went and can plan where it is about to go. It is a must have for anyone who has limited income.

OneNote I literally don’t use, but it is a great integrated tool for a few people I know.

Outlook is perfect for planning your day and sharing those plans with others. I have a calendar event that I wish to share I can in a few clicks. It is however not my primary email client. I use Windows Live Mail for that, as it still has newsgroup integration. I moderate on several groups on a private news server so I need to keep up with it, the fact that I don’t need two tools to do this and email is perfect for me. The only wish I have for office 365 is that Outlook did newsgroups.

All in all you can’t get 1TB of storage for less than the price of Office 365 and I use all most of the tools often. The storage alone is worth the price. If you have a family the Households version is perfect, as it gives access to all the tools on 5 computers and 5 tablets, not to mention 1TB of storage for all the users. If I had friends that used office (and I don’t) we would be sharing this version as the cast split 5 ways is very low. All in all for the price of less than 2 trips to Starbucks a month you get a pile of good tools and a lot of storage. I recommend this package to anyone.

Peace – Dave Nicholson.

Comments

Most Popular In Last 30 Days

Fake News? How About Fake Ads?

Fix Windows 10 Not Shutting Down All The Way

To Hell With Your Facebook Group

CANADIAN TV SHOWS OF THE 1970'S

My 20 Hour Trip to the ER in Moose Jaw