Once again, Microsoft is offering a one-off, standalone version of their popular productivity suite in the form of Office 2024. For anyone who doesn't want to pay a monthly subscription for Microsoft 365, Office 2024 is perfect. However, I was quite glad when Office became available as a subscription, and I still think there's no reason I would want to go back to the old model. Here's why.

5 I actually need the cloud storage

OneDrive has saved my bacon plenty of times

Not everyone likes OneDrive, particularly if you don't subscribe to it and have to put up with its mild nagging on Windows. However, I've come to rely on the 1TB of cloud storage that comes with my Microsoft 365 subscription. Don't forget that if you have a family plan, everyone gets their own terabyte of storage. OneDrive is my safety net for documents that I create with MS Office, among other things. It's also crucial for accessing my documents when things go wrong. There have been more than a few conferences where I've needed to present, but I forgot my documents or lacked my laptop, and very much needed to be able to get to my files. OneDrive had them available for me, and I could carry on with my presentation.

4 I cover my whole family

Five Office copies would be too expensive

I use the Microsoft 365 family plan version, which lets me cover myself, my wife, and my parents for a pretty low fee. While buying one copy of MS Office at $149.99 isn't a big deal. Four or five copies is a big chunk of change. Microsoft 365's family plan covers six users, at a cost of only $99.99 a year, at the time of writing. Six copies of the standalone version can buy about nine years of subscription time for a family. Office 2024 just doesn't make sense to consider unless you are a single user.

3 I use the mobile apps

Sometimes an iPad is all you have

The one-off version of Office only includes Windows and Mac apps, but I regularly use the mobile versions of these apps to edit documents. If you aren't a 365 subscriber, you can still use these apps to read Office documents, but if you want to use them to edit or create docs, that's not included in Office 2024. While the mobile versions of Word and PowerPoint, for example, aren't as full-featured as their desktop counterparts, they can get the job done. It's one of the reasons I can leave my laptop at home and travel light with just my iPad. I've started work on many documents over the years with nothing but my iPad with me, and then simply continued seamlessly on my desktop system when I got home.

2 I'd like the latest features now, please

Why upgrade years apart?

In the old days when I had to buy Office with a year tacked to the end of it, I constantly ran into issues where things didn't work like they were shown in tutorials. Or newer versions of Office would have genuinely useful new features, but not to the point where I would want to buy the updated version every year.

One of the best things about simply paying a few dollars a month to subscribe is that, for better or worse, I get the latest features immediately. It's a productivity service rather than a discrete product. If the static version of Office does everything you need, that's fine, but I want to improve my workflow at any given opportunity. Now in particular, with AI features being added to Microsoft's productivity tools on an ongoing basis, I would hate to miss out on anything.

1 I need to work with other people

Sharing is caring

I don't look fondly on the bad old days when we had to email a Word document round-robin style until everyone added their two cents, after which some poor intern (me) had to collate it all into a single document. Like Google Drive's various apps, one of the very best things about Microsoft 365 is the ability for a team of people to work on a single live version of a document in real time.

Even before I was a full-time remote worker, this was a crucial feature, and I can't think of many office jobs these days when it wouldn't be a boon. If I were a novelist in the woods somewhere plodding away at a story without any internet to distract me, Office 2024 would be the perfect fit, but sadly I'm not, so I'll keep sending money to Bill Gates each month.

Why not try an alternative instead?

If you're the sort of person who's interested in what Office 2024 brings, you should at the very least check out some alternatives. If you're a Mac user, then you're already getting the Apple productivity suite as part of your computer's price, and it's pretty great. You could also save yourself $150 and just download LibreOffice. It's one of the best open-source Office alternatives, and if you don't like it, you could always buy Office later!