Microsoft Office 2013 vs. Office 365: Is the Subscription Model Bad for Single People?

Microsoft Office 2013 is also available as a rental in Office 365, but is the yearly package a bad deal for single people?

While Office 365 includes more programs, it's main benefit is the five licenses that come with the subscription, but that benefit is more likely to be lost on singles, who probably have fewer computers than couples or families.

Casual users who just want to write and edit Word documents and make spreadsheets in Excel can buy the traditional Office 2013 software package.

The Home & Student version includes Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for $140. As usual, you get a copy for use on one machine, and you keep it forever.

If you want Microsoft Outlook, the Home and Business version runs $220. And for Access and Publisher, you'll need to shell out $400. All version include 5 GB of cloud storage on Microsoft's SkyDrive service.

So a person who needs the entire productivity suite will have to spend $400 if they want to avoid the subscription package But at only $100 a year, it takes four years before Office 365 costs as much as the standalone package, and there will almoat certainly be another version of Office out by then.

And the number of people who want to avoid Office 365, don't need Access or Publisher, but do want Outlook is probably very low. Just use Gmail for free.

So the only person who really benefits from the standalone, bare-bones Office 2013 $140 installation is the person who just wants Word, Excel and PowerPoint and has only a single device on which to use it.

But even single people these days often have multiple computers. A desktop and a laptop isn't an unreasonable amount of hardware for one person.

Couples make out a bit better, though, since they can both share a single subscription. Families get the best deal, because both parents and up to three kids can conceivably share a single account. (Or one family computer, work laptops and a gaming rig.)

Of course, single people can have kids, too, but by definition they've got at least one fewer adult to share with.

With Office 365, for $100 a year, you get all of the above programs to use on up to 5 different computers. You also get an extra 20 GB of storage on SkyDrive and 60 minutes per month of international calling on Skype.

But after that, you're still shelling out $100 a year, and if your subscription runs out, you don't have the programs anymore. Buying the stand-alone version for $140 might be a bit more limiting, but you can still use it 10 years from now if you want to.

Of course, how many of us actually use decade-old copies of Word and Excel? If you've been buying new version of Microsoft Office every few years for the last two decades, you're already basically renting the software. And Office 365 automatically saves all your data to SkyDrive, so you can access it from other computers or on-the-go.

Microsoft has done an excellent job of making Office 365 the better option. The only people who should prefer the standalone version of Office 2013 are those who prefer to avoid the subscription model altogether and don't mind using their desktop copy of Office for years to come.

But those people probably shouldn't bother upgrading anyway. Office 2010 still works fine.