Microsoft 12-Month Family Subscription, 1TB OneDrive

Great product, overall.

Pros:
*Office Suite has more features and functions for power users than “free” software options like OpenOffice.
*Value! This is a great value given that this comes with six user accounts and 1TB of storage for each account. Seriously. It’s an unbelievable value.
*Microsoft has done a great job of weaving document sharing into a fairly seamless experience, once you realize how it’s set up (see the cons for that caveat).
*If you work in business, odds are you’re already going to be familiar with the Office Suite layout and a number of handy functions in tools like Excel and Word. It’s not hard to see how those tools are just as handy at home.
*Use it as training. Along with the above Pro, if you’re in college and intend to work in a business, I can’t emphasize enough how worthwhile this expense is. Start using it for your term papers, your notes, etc. I promise this will likely be just as valuable as any of the classes you’re spending thousands of dollars on. When you enter the working world, you will already have a huge leg up on your peers. I struggle with every intern that comes through the door and I have to coach through even the very basics of how to use Office Suite. It’s PAINFUL and I WITHOUT A QUESTION hire candidates who know Office Suite over similar candidates who do not.
*OneNote is laid out very intuitively. I’m never more than a keyword search away from the info I need in life. What was the kids’ math teacher’s name again? What was the neighbor’s address? What was the name of that bourbon I really liked, the movie I wanted to see, or that restaurant I wanted to try? Store it all! Even a photo of the label! Enter the info with a full keyboard on your laptop, then access and update it from your phone. And all stored in a file on your laptop and instantly backed up to the cloud. Beautiful.
*Outlook is lovely to look at and to use, whether a program on your laptop, accessed from outlook.com, or from your mobile.
*Use your cloud calendar. Enter events from your phone, tablet, or laptop. Share them with your family members to stay organized.
*The cloud storage is fairly intuitive and unbelievably handy. With the OneDrive app, I can throw special photos of the kids immediately into the appropriate folder in my Docments folder on my PC. Just a few minutes ago, I took an excel spreadsheet that a family member emailed me with all of our extended family’s contact info and (again through OneDrive) put it the folder on my PC with my other contact info spreadsheet. Took 5 seconds to do and now I won’t forget to check my email at home and download it and it will be right on my PC or phone when I need to pull someone’s number that I don’t use often enough to have in my phone contacts. I honestly can’t believe I’ve gone this long with this many devices and not had an intuitive solution to file sharing and access. Again, though, see the cons about lack of training and sharing. How could I have known?

Cons:
*Lack of training!!
*Given how powerful this and valuable this package bundle is, Microsoft doesn’t do a very good job of laying out how this could be used. Functionality is shared by multiple apps and applications in the system so it’s not always intuitive how they are interconnected by the cloud. Microsoft could and should be doing a MUCH better job of showing us how we could be using this system to organize our life. Use little “Did You Know?” video clips and have them woven into the experience.
*Sharing is still a little mysterious to me. How do I organize files shared with me so I can find them? Is there versioning if someone makes changes to a shared file? Again, poor training.
*I don’t have a warm fuzzy about data privacy with Microsoft. I don’t like Apple and how they force you to use their system or sacrifice functionality. But I DO trust Apple with my data. I have a hunch Microsoft is better than—say—Google as far as collecting your data, but I would like more reassurance that they guard our data for us. This is huge for me and maybe it’s not technically a Con, but it’s not a Pro, which limits what I’m willing to use this system for.
*Manual photo backup is easy, but manual large-scale photo backup fo the cloud is clunky and I haven’t figured it out. Again, see my gripe about lack of training.

Summary:
All in all, I’m a big fan of the Office 365 system and I intend to keep using it to organize my busy, chaotic life. But I had to take a star off because it feels like I either have to stumble along until I figure things out or I have to work too hard to learn how to use all this. I almost took off two stars, but as a whole feature set, it’s just so damn handy I can’t stay mad!

Update (one day after original purchase for $59.99):
First, I see two reviews that said that it did not extend their current subscription with Microsoft but instead created a new separate subscription (which would be terrible). For me, it did extend my current subscription. I logged into Microsoft, went to the “redeem.microsoft.com” address, made sure my login still showed on that page, and then entered the code. The bad thing about this situation is that not knowng what will happen would make anyone reluctant to buy this subscription on Amazon regardless of price. At the $99.99 price, I would definitely not buy this on Amazon.

Second, I see that the price has returned to $99.99. The interesting thing to me (and it’s why I thought that the $59.99 price might have been “permanent”) is that the renewal disclaimer just below the purchase price said yesterday that the renewal next year would be at the $59.99 price and that’s what it says still on my subscription page.
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Original “review”
Note that this is not a review of MS Office 365 but an FYI on this Amazon item and how it seems to work. I was already a subscriber to Microsoft 365 Family and was being charged $99.99 per year by Microsoft. So, when I saw this today for $59.99 on Amazon, it was an easy decision to buy.

It appears from everything I can see, that you are actually dealing with two different subscriptions; one with Amazon and one with Microsoft. I am NOT saying that you will have two separate subscriptions for Microsoft Office and there is an easy way to fix this when you want to.

In my case, my renewal date for MS Office is November 18 with Microsoft. Buying this item on Amazon on June 25, I entered the code from Amazon on the Microsoft “redeem.microsoft.com” site and it extended the subscription for one year to November 18 of next year. However, on June 25 of next year I will be charged by Amazon at the same $59.99 rate. Simply put, if I do nothing, there is now a 5 month offset in these two subscriptions.

For me, I’m going to keep watching this listing and if it looks like this is a “permanent” price, i will likely cancel my Amazon subscription and buy it again next November so that the timing matches. Either way, if you use Microsoft Office 365 or intend to, this is a great price compared to buying directly from Microsoft.

There is nothing intentionally decptive in this listing, but it is a little confusing as you are buying an Amazon subscription that you redeem with Microsoft via code for a subscription for Office.

If you are a new subscriber for MS Office 365, none of these caveats apply; at $59.99 its a great deal.