Office 365 subscribers enjoy new feature rollouts every few months, which can include things such as new transitions and animations in PowerPoint, updates to the Research tool in Word, and new data tools in Excel. While you will continue to get updates, those updates will only contain security and bug fixes, not feature updates. You’ll pay a flat fee, and have the software forever. It’s entirely possible to purchase Office 2016 as a one-time purchase for a desktop computer. At the moment, that happens to be Office 2016 with added features that are only accessible to Office 365 subscribers. When you purchase a subscription (and I’ll talk about pricing later in this article), you can instantly download the latest and most current version of Office onto your desktop, mobile device or tablet.
Akin to a rental, if you have an Office 365 subscription, you are basically renting the latest and greatest version of Office. Office 365 is a subscription to use the most current version of the Office suite of apps. What exactly is an Office 365 subscription? Does this mean you can use the Office suite of apps, like PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel and Word? Is it the same thing as Office 2016?