Office 365 Home Premium review: Is Office better by subscription?

Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium is the new subscription-based version of Office 2013, in which Microsoft gave its office suite a thorough and well-done makeover. You can think of Home Premium as a "wrapper" of sorts around Office 2013, with extra Web-based features.

Office 365 Home Premium (which is the basic version of the suite) includes the core applications that are included in all versions of Office 2013 -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote -- as well as Outlook, Publisher and Access. For $100 (there's a one-month free trial period), users can install it on up to five devices (including Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs and tablets, and Apple OS X computers).

(Note: Other upcoming versions include Office 365 Small Business Premium, which is designed for businesses with up to 10 employees; Office 365 ProPlus, which will include 25 user accounts and 5 installations per user; and Office 365 Enterprise. These will also offer a variety of additional features; there is no information yet on when they will ship.)

A cleaner look

In line with Windows 8, the applications in Office 2013 -- and, by extension, Office 365 Home Premium -- have a cleaner look, with less clutter and a flatter, less-noticeable Ribbon. In addition to the new interface, there's also SkyDrive integration, touch-based navigation and features, and underlying changes to many of the Office applications.

For example, Word can now edit PDFs and has improved commenting features. PowerPoint offers new tools including those for embedding photos and pictures from Flickr and Facebook. Excel includes new analytics tools. Outlook has been tweaked with improved searching and a streamlined navigation pane.

For a full review of these changes to Office with Office 2013, see my review Office 2013 beta review: Microsoft (almost) nails it. That review was based on the preview version, but aside from bug fixes and similar small changes, Office 2013 is essentially unchanged from then.

The Office.com command center

With Office 365 Home Premium, the Office.com website becomes your command center -- the place from which you install and manage Office on your devices. In fact, when you buy Office 365 Home Premium, even in a retail store, you don't get a DVD. Instead, you get an installation key, which you use to install Office on your device from the Web.

The Web-based installation offers both good and bad news. The good news is that you don't have to worry about losing the disc if you need to re-install the package. The bad news is that if you don't have a lightning-fast connection, expect to wait a while for Office to install. For example, on my occasionally slow home Wi-Fi network, it took more than two hours to download and install Office on one computer, and more than three hours on another. Of course, your experience will vary depending on your connection speed.

On the My Account section of Office.com, you're able to see the machines on which you've installed Office, and handle payments and renewals. From there you can also deactivate Office on any machine (in case you want to use that install on a different computer). If you need to re-activate Office on a machine, just run any Office app and you'll be prompted to enter your Office 365 Home Premium user name and password.

Office.com also functions as way to manage your documents. Office 365 Home Premium automatically syncs files between your local machines and Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud-based storage service, and lists them on Office.com. You can click any file you see there and view it in the Web-based version of Office.

If you want to tweak the file, you select Edit Document and choose to either edit it using either the Web-based version of Office or the client version on your machine. (The client has more features than does the Web version, so most people will probably choose that method.)

You can create new Office documents on Windows 7 or Windows 8 machines that don't have Office installed by using a nifty feature called Office on Demand. Go to the My Office section of Office.com, and in the "Office on Demand" section, click on the application you want to use. A version of that app installs temporarily (and quickly) on the PC you're using. Once you exit the application, it will automatically uninstall.

I found this feature worked fine, although when I tried using it on a machine that already had Office 2013 installed, it wouldn't install (which makes a certain amount of sense).

Office.com also has a store where you can buy or download free apps designed for Office and its individual applications -- for example, there's a Bing Finance app for managing your investments and another app that provides a Merriam-Webster dictionary. As of this writing, I wasn't particularly impressed with the selection of apps available, but that might change over time.