Browsing Office 365 plans?
Don’t get out your credit card just yet. There are some options you should try first.
I know, the prospect of a free Office 365 download sounds kind of farfetched. But it’s not. If there is a legal way that you don’t have to pay, you’ll find it here.
Microsoft office 365 offers few flexible plans to their customers, the basic cost of license starting from $5 per license, read the article below in order to calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) which includes: customization, data migration, training, hardware, maintenance, updgrades, and more. Microsoft 365 Personal 12-Month Subscription (E-Delivery) Product Code Delivered via Email 12-month Subscription for One Person 1TB OneDrive Cloud Storage Premium Versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook (Publisher and Access are available on PC only) Collaborate on Documents with Others Online For use on Multiple PCs/Macs, Tablets, and Phones. Azure Activity Logs, Office 365 Audit Logs and alerts from Microsoft Threat Protection are available for ingestion at no additional cost. Just to clarify, the cost here is the cost of ingestion in log analytics? Unlike the consumer branded Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Enterprise is a suite that includes Office 365, Enterprise Mobility and Security, and Windows Enterprise. M365 Enterprise gives you the enterprise security and compliance features you need, while providing cost savings through vendor consolodation and reduced management and training overhead. And Office 365 subscriptions actually cost less than $99.99/year. I’ve never paid that much. Sales at newegg.com, frys.com, and amazon bring that cost down to as low as $65/year. Just stock up when its on sale and buy 2 or 3 key cards, registering them as the subscription expires each year.
Of course, one way is to simply get the free trial of Office 365 if you don’t have it already. This is limited but will give you a chance to try it before you buy.
On to the ways to get a full free Office 365.
1. Get Office 365 through your school
Microsoft offers Office 365 Education for free through many schools and universities. If you are a student or educator, and your institution is eligible, all you need is a valid school email address.
This is a truly free version of Office 365, and you should enjoy this benefit for as long as possible. In addition to your familiar MS apps, it comes with tools to encourage collaboration in the classroom, like Access, Sway, Teams, SharePoint, Stream, and Flow.
Every so often, Office will verify you are still are still an active educator or student. Once your Office 365 Education plan expires, applications will become view-only after 30 days. After 60, you will lose access. To keep working, you will need to subscribe to Office 365, or back up your files and use Office Online.
If you used to be a student, see if your school address will work. If not, access the alumni discount they offer for Office 365 Personal.
2. Get the free trial of Office 365
This is the easiest free option for accessing premium versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and Access. But it only lasts for a month. After that, you’ll have to begin a subscription or use one of the other methods here.
Note: You will have to provide payment information to sign up for the free trial, though you won’t be charged until the trial expires. When it does, you will start getting billed automatically.
Remember to turn off recurring billing in your Account Settings unless you want to start paying.
Unlike the online version, when Office 365 is installed locally you have full document editing capabilities offline. You can share the free Office 365 trial version with up to five other people. Each person gets 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage, plus the ability to sync and share files across Windows, Apple, and Android devices.
This is a great option, but only for the short-term. You only get a single free trial per email and credit card, so unless you try to bend the terms of the license agreement, it’s a one-shot deal. Or is it?
3. Get the free trial of Office 365 ProPlus
Microsoft provides evaluation versions of its products to potential customers through its Evaluation Center. There you can test-drive the latest features and services the company offers, including Office 365 ProPlus. First, you’ll need to register an Office 365 ProPlus account and qualify for an evaluation account.
Note: Same as the trial version of Office 365, the ProPlus trial requires payment information and bills you after a month.
Once you have access to the full evaluation version of Office 365 ProPlus, you can share and manage up to 25 users. It comes with all of the premium Office tools, not just web apps, and Skype for Business. Streaming installation for up to five computers per user allows everyone to work offline with full editing capabilities.
Since it is an evaluation version, Microsoft is still working out the kinks of this software. Things may not work perfectly, so be prepared.
This is Microsoft’s way of hooking enterprise customers, and it is a sleek toolkit for any company. But if you are not looking to pay once the trial is up, you will have to back up and switch to something else.
Tip: G Suite Business isn’t free, but its pricing is competitive and the functionality works well for agile companies.
4. Convince your company to get Office 365
If your need for Office 365 is strictly personal, this may be a tough sell. But if you constantly find yourself in need of full-versions of Word or Excel, you probably have a strong case to make to your employer.
Office Online is great, considering it’s free, but the lack of function or offline capability can be extremely frustrating. If these things are getting in the way and costing you time, it’s likely costing the company more money a subscription would.
This isn’t always going to work—especially if you are your own boss, sorry freelancers—but I told you we were looking at every option to get Office 365 free of charge.
5. Free Office 365 (with purchase of a PC)
Here’s an option that is not going to be right for everyone, but if you are in the market for a new computer, this could be an answer. Some PCs come with one year of Office 365. This sometimes includes ultra-affordable laptops, and you still save $99 annually on an Office 365 subscription.
One thing to make sure of is that you are getting what you want. Some computers will only come with Office 365 Personal, and others may not even have an OS installed. Read the fine print and confirm everything is set up as you expect.
What about Office Online and Mobile?
Now you know how to get a free download of Office 365, but I should mention two easy, free-forever Office options just in case they do the trick.
Get Office Online
Office Online is entirely cloud-based and works on most browsers. As long as you have the internet, you have access to familiar MS Office tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Sway, OneNote, Outlook, Calendar, OneDrive, Forms, People, and Skype. Simply create an account and log in from anywhere to collaborate with anyone.
While Office Online doesn’t take up any space, the downside is that you need the internet in order to use the programs and your documents. If you can rely on wifi wherever you need it, this limitation isn’t so bad. Plus, you can always sync your computer with OneDrive so that files are automatically stored for offline access.
The features are greatly limited compared to Office 365, but for personal use, it’s probably okay as long as you plan ahead. The extra logistics required to coordinate larger teams using Office Online, however, probably don’t end up saving much money.
Get the Office mobile app
The Office mobile app works on Android and iOS on your phone or tablet. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are combined into a single app that syncs with all of your devices that use Office.
You can download additional apps, which take up some space, but all of your documents are stored in the cloud. You’ll be able to create and sign PDFs, and edit documents, tables, and slides—but be aware that the editing features are limited without the Office 365 subscription.
Similar to Office Online, the mobile app is okay for personal needs but quickly reveals itself wanting at the enterprise level.
Office 365 Cost Per User
Note: Editing in the Office mobile app is limited to screens up to 10.1 inches. If you have a larger screen, you will have to upgrade to Office 365 or be stuck in read-only.
Dubious methods and hacking
Finally, I want to point out that similar to giving Microsoft multiple credit cards or emails in an attempt to prolong your free trial of Office 365, there are other dubious methods out there. These are not always safe for you and may be illegal.
I mention them because your search has no doubt included these options, and many are disguised as genuine with a price that is too good to be true.
For example, you will find people offering Office 365 for $1 on eBay and other sites. This will get you a product key that maybe works, and definitely isn’t legal. Typically, you can use these accounts for one year, or until Microsoft detects that your key is not legitimate.
There are also videos and blogs that show you how to hack Office 365 by emulating a successful KMS activation. These authors claim that the KMS license key is legal, which may be true, depending on how the code is written. But installing the key to access licenses you never bought is certainly not legal.
Plus, whatever patch you copy into your system may have other functions you don’t want. A hacker wrote it after all. For us, we don’t consider it worth the risk.
This goes, too, for any free Office 365 you discover on torrents and other sites that get shut down periodically. With an illegal free version of Office 365 you may get more than you pay for in the worst way.
Final note: If you have to pay… it’s really not that bad!
In the end, Office 365 is an extremely valuable set of programs. Getting it for $99/year is pretty amazing.
I understand why it’s annoying, especially in the eleventh hour when your documents are out of reach. Trust me, I get it. But I also understand that the software of this century requires ongoing maintenance for security and integration. The game has changed and it’s not necessarily evil for companies to move to a subscription model.
Of course there are people who will disagree with me.
LibreOffice is a free fully-loaded office suite. Over 200 million people use the open-source program, which supports more than 200 file types. It’s got Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and a number of other applications that are recognizable to any user of Word, etc.
There are Google’s free offerings as well, which solve most personal needs for document creation, sharing, and storage. For enterprise needs, though, G Suite for Business is reasonably priced and has a higher user satisfaction score than Office 365.
Use the trials to figure out where you stand. If Office 365 is what you need, budget it in and write it off next year. Here’s a guide to help you make sense of the Office 365 pricing.
-->Calls to other Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams users are free, but if you want your users to be able to call regular phones, and you don't already have a service provider to make voice calls, you need to buy a Calling Plan. For more information, see Phone System and Calling Plans.
Here are the Calling Plans options:
Domestic Calling Plan: Licensed users can call out to numbers located in the country/region where they are assigned in Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
Domestic and International Calling Plan: Licensed users can call out to numbers located in the country/region where their Microsoft 365 or Office 365 license is assigned to the user based on the user's location, and to international numbers in 196 countries/regions.
All users in the same country/region (this is the user country location defined in the licensing area of the Microsoft 365 admin center) with the same Calling Plan share a pool of minutes. For example, if you have 100 users located in the same country/region with a 120 minutes Domestic Calling Plan assigned, they share a pool of 12,000 minutes. All calls exceeding these minutes are billed per minute.
Visit Country and region availability to find out about monthly minutes available for each organization in each country/region.
Important
The country/region is based on the location of the user's license in the Microsoft 365 admin center > Active users and NOT the billing address listed under the Organization Profile in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
For detailed information about usage limits and terms of use, see Audio Conferencing complimentary dial-out period.
How to buy a Calling Plan
You must first purchase a **Phone System add-on license. To do that, sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center and choose **Billing > Purchase services > Add-on subscriptions > Buy now.
Note
Depending on your plan, you may need to buy more add-ons before you can buy Phone System licenses. To learn more, see Microsoft Teams add-on licensing.
After you buy Phone System licenses, you can buy the Calling Plan by signing in to the Microsoft 365 admin center, choose Billing > Purchase services > Add-on subscriptions, and then clicking Buy now. You'll see the Calling Plans there.
You can buy and assign different Calling Plans to different users, depending on the needs of your organization. After you select the Calling Plan you need, proceed to checkout. You assign a plan to each user in the Microsoft 365 admin center. To learn how, see Assign Microsoft Teams add-on licenses.
Do you have a service provider that provides on-premises PSTN connectivity for hybrid users?
If so, you don't need to buy a Calling Plan. Office 365 Enterprise E5 includes the Phone System add-on, so you can proceed to checkout.
Then, assign the Enterprise E5 or Phone System add-on licenses to users in the Microsoft 365 admin center. To learn how, see Assign Microsoft Teams add-on licenses.
Office 365 Cost
Pricing information
For more information
Here are more articles that explain how to set up your Calling Plans:
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