The office pricing is pretty attractive, especially for a family plan. $120 a year, or $10 a month, for up to 6 people. They throw in 1 Terrabyte of cloud storage/person and email, and you can get the full office app download (what I use) as well as the browser-based versions that are cloud hosted. You can save documents locally or on the cloud, it's up to you.
I got it and it works for our family, where we have both mac and PC members. One of us is working on some chapters for a technical book that is being done on windows, whereas three of us use a mac, and it was the desire to have a common office suite and share documents especially with non-technical family members that made it work out. One of my requirements was decent foreign language support and also right to left text, and I'm a heavy user of excel as well. Depending on how much you value your time, it only takes a few hours of frustration working with the opensource alternatives before it makes sense to sign up.
At the same time, I'm glad that free office alternatives exist to put competitive pressure on Microsoft and to give options for Linux users or those for whom open source is important. Prior to getting the 365 subscription, I used the openoffice flavors for many years at home and the MS office when I needed to write documents at work. Now at work I use gsuite/wikis and never touch office, but have come to really appreciate it for private use. Something about never using it at work totally changed how I look at MS Office -- like a pall was removed and I realized this is pretty good software.
I got it and it works for our family, where we have both mac and PC members. One of us is working on some chapters for a technical book that is being done on windows, whereas three of us use a mac, and it was the desire to have a common office suite and share documents especially with non-technical family members that made it work out. One of my requirements was decent foreign language support and also right to left text, and I'm a heavy user of excel as well. Depending on how much you value your time, it only takes a few hours of frustration working with the opensource alternatives before it makes sense to sign up.
At the same time, I'm glad that free office alternatives exist to put competitive pressure on Microsoft and to give options for Linux users or those for whom open source is important. Prior to getting the 365 subscription, I used the openoffice flavors for many years at home and the MS office when I needed to write documents at work. Now at work I use gsuite/wikis and never touch office, but have come to really appreciate it for private use. Something about never using it at work totally changed how I look at MS Office -- like a pall was removed and I realized this is pretty good software.