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kstenerud

Really? These are "premium" features requiring a subscription??

• Change page orientation

• Insert page and section breaks

• Highlight table cells with custom color shading

• Enable columns in page layout

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What? Microsoft is asking money for a product so that they can pay their employees ? </sarcasm>

That could be done with one time purchase. But subscription?

No, thanks.

They don't want people paying mobile app prices for their office suite.

Honestly, do you think it's fair to insert INFINITE page breaks forever for just one payment? Those page breaks aren't cheap, you know!

it should be free if you already own office

Why?

Because most of the competition is free regardless of if you have Office? Or perhaps they think they somehow offer more value then every competing tool. They don't to me and my company but some one must be buying it or they wouldn't be selling it for long.

If you pay for office, you should get Office... that pretty much sums it up for me. And perhaps everyone who uses Office won't use Android as their primary content creation device... but I might be wrong.

Microsoft is obligated to its stakeholders (investors and employees) to capture all the value it can for the products it creates. They're not building software out of goodwill. You do have the choice to not buy Office if you don't like the pricing scheme.

you do, but is it the most profitable option for Microsoft is my point

It could fill it with adverts and track you, which is how Google pays for its "free" stuff. Or it could attach it to $1,500 hardware dongles, like Apple.

The Microsoft ecosystem is much more powerful, and works both online and offline, and it's cross-platform (Windows, Android, iOS), but you don't think any of this is worth paying for?

Perhaps you have much more important things to spend your money on. How much is your smartphone costing you? How much do you spend on Spotify, or Starbucks?

How much would you have to pay Google for the 50GB mailbox and 1TB of storage bundled with Office 365?

You pay a one-time fee, you typically get a license to use that software on One Computer.

The benefit of subscriptions is that they typically are more generous with allowing you to use their services on multiple devices (perhaps not simultaneously).

I would say it's similar to saying "I bought Star Wars on VHS, therefor I should get he HD version for free"

The Android version is inferior to the Microsoft PC version .... so if you pay a one-time fee for the HD version, the SD version should definitely be free

If you own a boxed copy of Office I can understand why you don't get this for free. When you buy a boxed copy of Office 201x you should understand that you're buying a perpetual license to that version of Office. Expect it to work and receive bug fixes for a reasonable time (MS do 7 - 10 years of maintenance per major release?). But basically, no freebie big ticket features or upgrades to Office 201x + 1.

If you pay for the subscription, you're paying for a non-perpetual license in return for access to whatever the latest version of Office is. So big ticket features come free.

I was about to go looking for "what stuff do I need office 365 to do" but you saved me the time!

Sounds like it's best to just keep using google drive.

While Google Docs is good, it's not a replacement for Office if you need to do anything more than basic documentation unfortunately.

Neither is Office for Android when they disable basic functionality like page breaks.

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