Microsoft today launched Office 2016 apps for its cloud-based Office 365. The entry level pack, Office 365 Personal, which a single user can use across three devices –PC, tablet and phone – has a price tag of Rs 3,299.
The Office 365 Home which can be used by five users will cost Rs 4, 199 and it can be used on five PCs, five tablets and five phones.
The Office 2016 apps are available from today in 14 languages in India. Apart from that Office 365 subscribers can choose to download the new Office 2016 apps as part of their subscription from today itself. Automatic updates will begin rolling out to consumer subscribers next month.
Microsoft claims that office 365 claims provides top-of-the-line set of productivity tools to let users create, edit, and share their work from laptop, mobile and tablet across iOS, Android and Windows platform.
The new Office has regular apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and Access but now have more collaborative features which allows more than one user to work on a document simultaneously. It has also integrates with Microsoft’s Skype conferencing service and its Bing search engine.
Apart from these feature couple of other features integrated in Office 365 are Tell Me which helps you find the right Office feature or command, and Smart Lookup that bring insights from the web into your documents.
Karan Bajwa, managing director, Microsoft India said, “We live in a world where infinite devices and data are vying for our finite time and attention. That’s why Microsoft has set a bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business process in this mobile-first, cloud-first world. Today, with the launch of Office 2016 we endeavor to provide our users with a connected set of apps and services designed for modern working and collaboration which they can access easily and across devices.”
Microsoft may find it tough to convince consumers to go for the paid version of Office 365 because it will be getting a tough competition from Google which is offering bundled software called Drive suite and open source software such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice which offers several features similar to MS Office for free.