Now You Can Buy Microsoft Office 365 for $6.99 a Month

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Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani

By Pete Pachal2014-04-15 10:26:23 -0400

Microsoft began selling Office 365 Personal on Tuesday, a variant of its productivity suite that delivers all the apps for only $6.99 per month. (The full Home version sells for $9.99 per month.)

The tradeoff is in the number of your devices that can be running Office. The Personal version allows you to install Office on only a single PC or Mac, plus one tablet. So if, like many households, that combo constitutes the entirety of your large-screen computing devices, Office 365 Personal makes a lot of sense.

There's also an annual rate of $69.99 a month, which translates into $13.89 in savings every year if you go that route.

Office for iPad launched in March, so the prospect of using Office on a tablet is now attractive to many more people. With that launch, Microsoft also made Office Mobile for smartphones free to use, and the web apps — which users can access from any connected device — are free as well.

Since Office 365 Personal is intended for one user, the 20GB of free OneDrive storage is limited to one account; Office 365 Home subscribers, which Microsoft markets as "Office for families," get 20GB for up to five separate users, for a total of 100GB of free storage.

Microsoft offers different packages for businesses, which includes a slightly different set of apps and features with different pricing.